Season 2: The Home Season
Welcome to the second season of Creative Momentum with Meg. This season is features interviews with Australian writers and artists where Meg Dunley talks to them about their processes, routines, inspiration and more to explore how and why people do their creative work.
Episode 5: Melissa Manning, Author
Melissa Manning has been writing for close to 18 years, and her practice looks nothing like it did when she started. These days she is up before dawn, moving her body before she sits down at the desk, keeping her brain free of noise until she opens the laptop and sees what comes.
Her debut short story collection Smokehouse won the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Her novel Frogsong, published by UQP, launches in April. And she still has a folder on her laptop called S**t Poetry.
In this conversation, Melissa talks about writing from a spark rather than an idea, why she never plans her work, and what happens to the words on the page when she tries. She talks about the studio she has filled with twigs and leaves and art and a wearable minotaur’s head her daughter made for a university theatre production. She talks about the questions her fiction keeps returning to: who are we, how do we become the people we become, and is any of that fixed?
She also shares something that will resonate with anyone who has been waiting for the right idea before they start. She waited until she was 40. And then she realised it was never about the idea.
Connect with Melissa Manning
- Books: Frogsong(2026),Smokehouse(2022)
Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes and interviews
A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp and Instagram.Episode 5: Melissa Manning, Author
