A Day in the Life of a Writer with Melanie Cheng Sometime around 6:30am my kids burst into my room declaring that the sun is up! They say this with such enthusiasm, one would think the sun had never risen before. But they are not referring to the real sun, they are referring to […]

It was at university that I first encountered the term empathy. I had been practising it—as much as any adolescent practises empathy— I just hadn’t known what it was called before then. My lecturers described empathy as the act of imagining what it was like to be in another person’s situation. They said it was […]

When I was seven, my family moved from Sydney to Hong Kong. I remember my first day at school. I remember the teacher asked a girl called Randee to look after me. I remember that Randee had brown eyes and black hair and that she was half Filipino and half English. I don’t remember that […]

In 2010 The Guardian published an article called Ten Rules For Writing Fiction. It was a compilation of famous authors’ top ten tips. Richard Ford’s advice stood out to me. His first rule was: Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea. This advice sounded like inherently sensible advice […]

I recently discovered my high school yearbook. In it, I found my eighteen-year-old self’s life goals: to become a paediatrician, to marry a Spaniard (I was madly in love with Antonio Banderas at the time) and to pen a novel. They were tongue-in-cheek aspirations. Some were more so than others. At the time, I was […]

Melanie_Cheng is a mother, writer, doctor and champion multi-tasker. Her story, ‘White Sparrow’, will be published in the upcoming Margaret River Press anthology, Shibboleth and other stories. We spoke to her about what she reads, watches and listens to while writing up a storm… What are you reading? For Christmas my very thoughtful sister-in-law bought […]