Meg Dunley, Writer

Writer and overthinker

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A little bit about me

Meg Dunley

I live in Naarm (Melbourne) and write fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. I love hanging out with other writers, reading stories of all kinds, drawing and taking time out in nature. I am blessed to have three young men for sons and a beautiful old dog called Bella.

I am working on a realistic comedic manuscript while I find a home for my most recently completed manuscript with a working title The Needleworker’s Daughter.

The idea for The Needleworker’s Daughter came to me while I was reading a book about my ancestor. It was a book problematically titled ‘Founders of Australia’ and I followed the trail of Post-It notes that gave me the scant facts of my ancestor, a female convict. At the time, my mother had recently died, and with her loss at the forefront of my mind, I began to speculate about my ancestor’s relationship with her only surviving child, a daughter, whom she left as a ten-year-old at the first Australian orphanage. Questions began forming in my head: How is it possible for daughters to know the younger personas of their mothers or ever understand the decisions they were forced to make? This story plagued me and would not leave me until I began to write to find the answers to my questions.

My new manuscript has the feel of The Office meets a school library. I took up improvised comedy at The Improv Conspiracy during the second year of COVID (2021) and it has played a large part in injecting comedy into my world. I’ve always loved a bit of absurd comedy and this plus drawing on my time working in a school library is feeding into the new manuscript.

Other manuscripts of mine looking for publication are a story for young adults set in a city in extreme drought (working title The Dry Lands) and a picture book that explores sharing and another about being responsible (working title Juliet’s Blanket).

My writing is published in The Victorian Writer, the Hunters Writer Centre Grieve Anthologies, Shaping the Fractured Self: poetry of chronic illness and pain (published by UWA Publishing) and other anthologies. Read more

I currently work as the Communications Marketing and Resource Centre Manager in a Melbourne inner city secondary school, write for my local paper and provide freelance editing, content, copywriting and website design services.

Read more about me here, see my awards and publications, or read the blog series I wrote while my mother was dying here. My blog posts are usually about writing, reading and musings from the heart, and sometimes about other things.

Find me on social media platforms LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Goodreads.

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This girl can sing! Congrats @yvonne.morton on your gig tonight. You rock
It was great to celebrate @kylie.ladd and her latest novel ‘I’ll leave you with this’ tonight.
My next newsletter on Substack is out. The link is in my bio
Super excited to finally have this book in my hands!
A great night last night celebrating Graeme Simsion’s latest book ‘Creative Differences and other stories’ and @anneebuist’s latest psychological thriller ‘Locked Ward’.
Back from a week away camping with friends seeing in the new year. We had all the weather options and took the most of nature around us with river swims and drive as close as we could to Mt Feathertop where we saw the most remarkable wildflowers. And I set my goals for the year ahead. One of them is to write letters. If you’d like exchange handwritten letters send me a DM

Recent Posts

  • Did I unravel my year by not setting goals?
  • The week that felt like a month
  • Leaning into the windy day
  • Not doing the thing
  • The shipping work

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