Meg Dunley's Writing

From the moment I could hold a crayon and make a mark, I have scribbled everywhere. When I learned it was wrong to melt crayon down the heater, I became more covert in my mark making and pulled my bed from the wall and drew on the wall behind the bed. My first book was written during primary school riffing off the Mr Men series.

In the early 2000s, I joined the blogging craze with four blogs (sewing, living a green and thrifty life, writing and a trip around Australia). What I loved about it was story. After returning from our ten-month long trip around Australia in 2010, I had four journals bursting with story and I decided to pursue writing more seriously. From the RMIT Professional Writing and Editing program I learnt how to wrangle words into something worth reading.

Places you can find my writing:

my Substack newsletter
a blog series on my mother’s last seven weeks
School News
The Flemington Kensington News
and more.

Publications and awards

My writing is published in T he Outback Anthology of Short Stories Volume 8, The Victorian Writer, the Hunters Writer Centre Grieve Anthologies 3 and 4 and Shaping the Fractured Self: poetry of chronic illness and pain (published by UWA Publishing). Find out more

Unpublished manuscripts

Adult audience

Un|Common Thread (working title)

Un|Common Thread (working title) is inspired by my First Fleet convict ancestor Ann Sandlin, her daughter Elizabeth Boulton and my cousin who chose to become a solo mother. The story examines the complex mother-daughter relationship, and choice and agency in rearing a child alone.

The story came to me from a book problematically titled Founders of Australia after my mother died. I followed the trail of Post-It notes with the scant facts of my ancestor, a female convict. With the loss of my mother at the forefront of my mind, I considered my ancestor’s relationship with her surviving child, a daughter, who she left at the first Australian orphanage at ten years old. I was curious about daughters trying to understand decisions their mothers made; how to imagine a mother as a younger woman; what life was like for a single mother in those years and what the commonalities and differences were to now; what it is to be a woman, mother, with no agency; and what it is to chose to embark on solo parenting.

Title to come

This contemporary romantic comedy story asks the question: what is it to be normal? The story 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 when I worked in a school library has informed the new manuscript.

Young adult audience

The Dry Lands (working title)

This speculative fiction is aimed for the young adult reader is set in the near future and asks the question: what happens to society when the rain stops?