Creative Momentum with Meg

Season 2: The Home Season
The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work.
Episode 12: Susan Green, Author
Susan Green is a children's and adult fiction writer with a career spanning nearly four decades. Best known for the Verity Sparks series, which began with The Truth About Verity Sparks (a CBCA Awards runner-up in 2011), she has also written picture storybooks, non-fiction, one adult novel, and five teenage romances under the name Susan Lennox. After nearly a decade away from completing projects, the writing bug has returned, and Susan is now deep in a 1950s espionage novel and preparing a submission for a Varuna residency.
In this episode, we talk about:
- How a walk through Melbourne’s grand Victorian architecture sparked the first Verity Sparks novel
- Why having a contract focused her writing life, and what happened to her routine without one
- Her pantser approach: starting with a character, worrying at a first sentence, and trusting the story to find itself
- The breakthrough she had in her 20s for dealing with the voice that says this is crap
- What a great editor taught her about killing your darlings
- The Little Bo Peep theory of creative problems, and why she no longer worries too much
- Why she stopped thinking about publishers and markets, and what that freedom has meant for the book she is writing now
- The grief that comes when your characters stop speaking to you
Whether you are a writer finding your way back after a long break, stuck in the middle of a draft, or wondering what the point is without a contract or a deadline, this episode is for you. Susan is funny, generous and disarmingly honest about the messiness of creative life, and her story is a good reminder that beingness, including creative beingness, is enough, and that the characters always come back wagging their tails.
Connect with Susan
* Susan’s website
* How Bright Are All Things Here
Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes and interviews: https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley
A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp (https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/) and Instagram.(https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/)
Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe


Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe

Season 2: The Home Season
The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work.
Episode 11: Debut Author Kerry Jewell
Kerry Jewell is a nuclear medicine physician and writer based in Melbourne whose debut novel, A Little Unwell, is a darkly funny look at life inside the Australian hospital system. Kerry began the book in 2015 during a night shift, venting a bureaucratic frustration into a Word document she almost never opened again, and finished the first complete draft seven years later. Her first three chapters were shortlisted for the Richell Prize in 2020, and the book is published by Hachette. She is also, it turns out, a genuinely funny person to talk to at an early hour of the morning.
In our chat, we discuss
- Why so many doctors end up as writers, and what medicine and creative work have in common
- Dark humour in medicine: why healthcare workers rely on it, and why Kerry was surprised to learn hers was dark
- Kerry’s deliberately routineless approach to writing and why attempting a routine makes things worse
- The car as creative space and how a one-hour commute does more for plot and character than sitting at a desk
- How the book moved from vignettes and loose notes to a complete manuscript across seven years
- Why Kerry chose fiction over non-fiction to tell these stories, and what fiction allows that non-fiction does not
- The connection between creative practice and showing up well at work and for patients
Whether you are a writer who has been sitting on a half-finished manuscript for years, a creative person trying to balance a demanding day job with the work that feeds your soul, or someone who simply needs permission to stop trying to have a routine, this conversation is for you.
Kerry is warm, funny, and bracingly honest about the messiness of the creative process, and her story is a good reminder that the gap between venting into a Word document at 2am and holding a published novel is mostly just time, stubbornness and a willingness to let the work find its shape.
Connect with Kerry
A Little Unwell https://www.hachette.com.au/kerry-jewell/a-little-unwell
Website https://www.kerryjewell.com/
Substack https://substack.com/@drkerryjewell/notes
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drkerryjewell/
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/drkerryjewell.bsky.social
Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes and interviews: https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley
A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp (https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/) and Instagram.(https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/)
Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe


Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe

Season 2: The Home Season
The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work.
Episode 10: Co-Authors Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist
Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist have been creative collaborators for their entire relationship. They have now written five books together, including the Menzies Mental Health series, which follows trainee psychiatrist Hannah through the sometimes brutal world of public hospital medicine. The third book in that series, The General Hospital, is out now.
In this conversation, they talk about what it actually looks like to write a book together, from brainstorming scenes on cards thrown into an ice cream container, to sitting side by side for eight hours a day during first draft, to the rule that Anne does not give Graeme her first draft because it is too sloppy and he will feel disrespected. They talk about why Graeme believes pantsing is a choice not an identity, why screenwriting training produces better novelists than prose courses, and the mash-up method he uses to find original ideas.
Graeme’s advice for anyone starting out is blunt: know why you are writing, follow a process and understand that there are two kinds of people who say they sit in front of a blank screen and wait for drops of blood to form. One group are geniuses. The other are liars.
Connect with Graeme & Anne
Anne on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/anneebuist/ )& Website https://annebuist.com/
Graeme on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/gcsimsion/ ) & Website http://www.graemesimsion.com
Buy The General Hospital, the third book in the Menzies Mental Health Series: https://www.hachette.com.au/anne-buist-graeme-simsion/the-general-hospital-a-menzies-mental-health-novel
The Novel Project by Graeme Simsion (https://www.amazon.com.au/Novel-Project-Step-Step-Biography/dp/1922458384/)
Find all Creative Momentum with Meg show notes and interviews: https://megdunley.substack.com/s/creative-momentum-with-meg-dunley
A special thanks to Yvonne Morton for the music accompanying this episode. You can find Yvonne on Bandcamp (https://yvonnemorton.bandcamp.com/) and Instagram.(https://www.instagram.com/yvonne.morton/)
Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe


Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe

Season 2: The Home Season
The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work.
Episode 9: Emma Hardy, Author
Emma Hardy is a writer who works across fiction and non-fiction. Her debut book Periodic B***h is a literary memoir of menstruation, madness, and monsters. It is a hybrid non-fiction work that weaves her own experience of PMDD during Melbourne’s lockdowns with archival research and a sweeping look at how women’s illnesses have been treated throughout history. It is also, as the title suggests, not shy about being angry.
In this conversation, Emma and I cover a lot of ground. We talk about improv and how it helps or hinders writing, what it means to craft a curated version of yourself in memoir, and Jane Alison’s book on story structure that made everything click. We talk about body doubling, dead cow narrators, and why workshop can sometimes edit out the good bits. And we talk about Melbourne as home for Emma and her writing.
Connect with Emma Hardy
Instagram
Website
Buy Periodic B***h book
Emma’s Substack ‘Hot Mess’
See Emma at Melbourne Writers Festival
Join Emma at her book launch at Readings on 14 May 2026
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.


Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe

Season 2: The Home Season
The second season of Creative Momentum with Meg, The Home Season, features interviews with Australian writers and artists where I explore how and why people do their creative work.
Episode 8: Toni Jordan
Toni Jordan is the author of several much-loved novels including Addition, Tenderfoot, and The Fragments, and was my first writing teacher at RMIT. In this conversation, Toni is as funny, sharp and generous as you would hope.
Toni is a devoted pantser who runs her writing life with military precision. Word counts on whiteboards. Breakfasts and lunches made on Sunday night. A strict desk-by-11 rule. And a story about sitting at her desk until 4 in the morning to prove to her unconscious mind that she meant business, which she only had to do once.
She talks about matching what she reads to the tense and point of view of what she is writing, why writer’s block is often just losing the rhythm of a sentence, and the two books she recommends every writer keep on their desk. One you think is a masterpiece. One you think is terrible. And somewhere in between those two is you.
Her advice for anyone at an early stage or a wobbly moment is simple and beautiful: fall in love with the process. The rest takes care of itself.
Connect with Toni Jordan
Instagram
Website
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.


Get full access to Musings with Meg at megdunley.substack.com/subscribe