Australian Shorts Episode 10 Melanie Cheng

Episode 10 of Australian Shorts features Melanie Cheng. Melanie is a writer and general practitioner based in Naarm, Melbourne. Her debut short story collection, Australia Day, won the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction and her novel, Room for a Stranger, was longlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. Her latest novel, The Burrow, has been translated and published internationally in North America, Hungary, Spain and Turkey. It was shortlisted for several Australian awards including the 2025 Stella Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Meanjin, The Griffith Review, The Big Issue and World Literature Today among many others.

In this episode Melanie reads Stone Baby, published in World Literature Today in 2025 (https://worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/january/stone-baby-melanie-cheng). Melanie discusses the genesis of this story and how it took two decades to write. She talks about how her work as a doctor influences her writing and vice versa and gives us some tips on what makes a short story stand out in competitions.

This episode was recorded on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people of Meanjin, Brisbane, and on the traditional lands of the Kulin Nation in Naarm, Melbourne. 

Thanks for listening to Australian Shorts Podcast. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Australian Shorts, a podcast about short stories written by Australian authors, is produced by Karen Hollands

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Welcome to Australian Shorts, a podcast about short stories written by Australian authors. My name is Karen Hollands, and each month I feature a short story read by its author, followed by a conversation about their story and about the wonderfulness of the short story form. Episode 10 features Melanie Cheng. Melanie is a writer and general practitioner based in NAM, Melbourne. Her debut story collection, Australia Day, won the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction. And her novel, Room for a Stranger, was long listed for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. Her latest novel, The Borough, has been translated and published internationally in North America, Hungary, Spain, and Turkey. It was shortlisted for several Australian awards, including the 2025 Stellar Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Miangin, the Griffith Review, The Big Issue, and World Literature Today, among many others. Hi Melanie. Hi, Karen. Thanks so much for coming on Australian Shorts. It's wonderful to have you on here.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

No, it's my pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 1:27

So you're going to read a story to us now that was published in World Literature Today in 2025. So I think we'll just get straight into the story and then we'll have a chat about it afterwards. Okay, sure. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

The story is called Stone Baby. Clara's first and last acting role was that of Medusa, the Greek monster. She was ten when Mrs. McCarthy picked her for the part. It was only later, some decades later, that Clara wondered about her teacher's decision. Had she detected a hardness in Clara's gaze, or worse, a quiet wickedness about her being? But then maybe Clara was overthinking it. Perhaps Mrs. McCarthy had simply deemed Clara to be the pupil least likely to stuff up the operation of the elaborate Medusa headdress, a paper mache crown with a porcupine-like array of unconvincing glow stick snakes. There was nothing particularly challenging about the role of Medusa. The Gorgon featured for only five minutes of the excruciating two-hour long production, a pipe cleaner and tea towel festooned flight through centuries of classical antiquity. Every rehearsal, Mrs. McCarthy instructed Clara to slink along the central aisle of the assembly hall, hissing at imagined audience members as she went, before finally scaling the stairs and arriving on stage to be greeted, if one can call a cardboard and tinfall sword to the throat a greeting, by a golden haired Perseus. Perseus was played by Tom Smythe, who would have been lovely if not for the button like warts all over his fingers. Clara had no issue with any of these stage directions. It was the death scene she struggled with. At rehearsal, the poor girl found she simply could not do what she was being asked to do, which was to produce a primal scream that in Mrs. McCarthy's words would flood the ears of every man, woman and child in the assembly hall, even Billy, the road crossing supervisor who had recently been fitted with hearing aids. In retrospect, Mrs. McCarthy may have had some troubles of her own. When the week of opening a night arrived and Clara was yet to unleash a single scream, her teacher threatened to give the role to Lexi Bowles, a girl from grade six who supposedly had a hitch cocky instead of lungs on her. Then and only then did Clara find her voice. Oh how she shrieked. Mrs. McCarthy's painted eyebrows momentarily disappeared behind her thick black fringe. It had been two decades since Clara had visited Dr. Alderman's rooms. In that time they had been refurbished. Now, instead of cards and photos pinned to an oversized corkboard, there were large screens with photo montages of all the babies Dr. Alderman had delivered over the years. Clara did not read or look at her phone while she waited, preferring to surreptitiously observe the other women in the waiting area and try to pick out the pregnant ones, some from their obvious bumps and others from the uneasy but definite smugness in their faces. How cruel Clara thought, to lump everybody together in one space. She stood up and went to the water cooler, prompted not by thirst, but by a hope that the pump of blood through her muscles would refresh her thoughts. Clara's mouth was still full of cold water when she heard Dr. Alderman call her name. She swallowed hard, so hard she felt a pain and worried she had pulled a muscle, but she smiled through her discomfort, conscious of how many precious seconds the doctor had already wasted watching her throw away her paper cup and fumble with her handbag. She followed him into the consulting room, her eyes fixed on his back.

unknown 5:33

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Alderman had grown wide in the decades between Clara's appointments. She imagined him like a tree, acquiring a new layer of truncal adiposity with the passage of each year. The room was the same but somehow appeared larger. Clara had expected it to feel smaller, the way a family home can seem smaller to a returning child. But then why would it? Unlike doctor Elderman, Clara was not growing. If anything, since the perimenopause she felt as if she were fading, shrinking, imploding like a distant star. Indeed, it struck Clara that the doctor's office, with its tall windows and expansive views of the city, would be perfect for stargazing. She wondered if the gynecologist and his family, extensive now, with a couple of pink faced grandchildren added to the photo frames on his desk, gathered here to watch the fireworks on New Year's Eve. He did not look at her but at the computer, and this was a relief. Clara studied the way the screen's white light played with the fissures on his face. He was an old man now. Retirement could not be far away. It was good of your family doctor to organise the CT scan, he said. Oh yes, she's helpful that way. This was how Clara was with doctors, vapid and sycophantic.

unknown 6:56

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Alderman didn't speak for several minutes. Clara could tell he was reading the report of the CT scan and that he was reading it for the first time. When he eventually swivelled around on his fancy leather chair to face her, he wore a look Clara recognised, the look of a man weary at the prospect of breaking bad news when his stomach was grumbling for lunch. Sometimes after the divorce, Clara would drive to Greg's house. He never noticed her, an upsetting detail to Clara in the beginning, but which she now found freeing as if she were a spirit observing her widowed husband pursuing his second life. There was a shady spot beneath a paper bike tree across the street from his townhouse, where Clara would park her car. His children were grown now, almost adults, but they still lived at home. Occasionally Clara would spot them. The daughter took after her mother with dark hair and a long, flat chested torso, but the son was all Greg, short and squat and muscular. Clara remembered the way Greg's face had burst into a grin when doctor Alderman had read out the results of his semen analysis. It reminded her of a child being told he had passed a test at school with flying colours. She couldn't help but wonder if Greg had imagined this suburban life back then, his second chance with a younger, more fertile woman. It had never come up in their arguments. Greg was not that cruel. Instead, like most couples, they had thought about wet towels and empty toilet rolls, and whose turn it was to stack the dishwasher. But Clara was convinced their marriage had ended the day they'd given up on IVF, each ensuing battle haunted by the ghosts of the children they would never have. As it turned out, Clara didn't have cancer. The mass her GP had felt in her lower abdomen was not an enormous tumour as they had feared, but something exceedingly rare and mercifully completely benign. A medical curiosity, doctor Alderman had called it. So curious, in fact, he planned with Clara's permission, which she was given promptly and effusively, to write a case study about it. Not cancer, but a lithopedion, derived from the Greek lithos meaning stone and pedian meaning child.

unknown 9:27

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Alderman had explained the phenomenon in that hurried, matter of fact, jargon heavy way he had, as an ectopic abdominal pregnancy that had died and become calcified. It was only once Clara got home and searched the internet that she understood exactly what had occurred. Clara tried to work out the date of conception. After she and Greg had finished with the fertility treatments, they'd only had sex a handful of times. This act, too, had become blighted by failed dreams. But Clara liked to imagine it had happened the very last time they'd fucked, soon after the divorce papers had been signed, when they'd got titsy together on a bottle of Penfold's grain Shiraz, a wedding gift they'd saved for a special occasion. Back when she and Greg were dating, Clara had declared, somewhat defiantly, that she didn't want children. When she was growing up, she'd preferred chasing boys and climbing trees to playing with dolls. After university, as her friends had started marrying and getting pregnant, Clara had worried she lacked a necessary and natural maternal instinct. She feared she would make a testy parent, a little like her own mother, constantly on the lookout for escape. But Greg had wanted children, and for a long time Clara had wanted Greg, as much as Clara was capable of wanting anything, because, as she was now coming to realise, she only ever really wanted something the moment it was about to be taken away. When Greg's car pulled up in front of the house, Clara's heart fluttered. She felt a new tenderness towards him, knowing they shared this secret twenty year long pregnancy. She wondered how he would react if he knew. Greg, we had a child together. His brain doing the calculations, a grown man, a uni student, a new mate to share a beer with at the pub. But the child died. Grief and relief entwined. Only it was not really a child at all. It was an impossible conversation, and yet Clara wanted to try. She could smell dinner cooking as she crossed the quiet street and approached the house. A curry, Indian, possibly a corner. Her stomach murmured. She'd skipped lunch. She imagined the children setting the table, Greg pouring the water into glasses. They would be startled by the doorbell, and they would ask, with irritated voices, who it could possibly be. Greg would say that only con men and scared neighbors rang doorbells anymore, and he would joke about how even the Mormons had moved on. Clara skirted the edge of the small property, not daring to lift the latch on the gate or step inside the fence, and so she was hidden by the shrubbery when a woman emerged from the townhouse to drag a wheelie bang along the driveway. She gasped when she saw Clara. Can I help you? Greg's wife looked different up close, older, but somehow more beautiful, with eyes that in the final low beams of the sun glinted copper. Clara had spent countless nights resenting this person who now stood like a gift before her. Her replacement. A woman blessed with a uterus that was not hostile, doctor Alderman's preferred adjective for describing Clara's. Clara had expected to detect an arrogance, at the very least, an annoying contentment in the face of her nemesis, but instead she discovered only sorrow. This surprised her. It was like looking in a mirror. The night before the operation, Clara spent hours examining photos of stone babies on the internet. Like any collection of beings, they were an eclectic bunch. Some resembled thousand-year-old fossils, lumps of rock with a few hints of human, the arc of a rib, the blade of a shoulder, the eggshell smooth dome of a skull. Others resembled props from early alien movies, yellow otherworldly creatures with giant holes for eyes. Clara wondered which category her stone baby fell into, a fossil or an alien.

unknown 13:59

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Alderman had walked her through the CT scan, moving up and down and zooming in and out, pointing and naming bones. Here a femur, there a pelvis. He spoke rapidly and with authority, but to Clara the white shapes were as formless and intangible as clouds drifting across a grey sky. Clara had not spoken to Greg. She chickened out upon seeing his wife's copper coloured eyes. Instead, she'd mumbled something about having once lived in the townhouse a long time ago before running like a mad woman to her car. Once inside the safety of its cabin, Clara examined the fragment of her face in the rearview mirror. She'd applied makeup for the occasion, and now lines of mascara fell like black tears from the corners of her eyes. What had she been thinking, dolling herself up like that? Perhaps she hadn't been thinking. Perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps that had always been the problem. The problem with her a paucity of thought. The hospital was an absurd place. In their powder blue scrubs and booties, the doctors resembled smurfs. Clara couldn't take them seriously. The nurses jerked curtains closed and pretended they were as good as walls, that they silenced the wails of the teenager in recovery and the loud complaints from the woman in the adjacent cubicle. I bled for months afterward. Months. I worried my entire womb had fallen out of me. Was that how Clara would feel by the end of the day, as if her entire uterus had fallen out of her? Dr. Alderman had said the lithopedian might be contributing to Clara's constipation and urinary frequency. He said she was going to feel great after the operation, like a completely different person. But what if she didn't feel great? What if the lithopedian was like a building block and a tower of building blocks, and its removal would cause everything above it to crumble. Clara sat in the padded chair beside the bed, awaiting further instruction. She changed into a white robe and was holding a paper bag containing her clothes to her chest, the way a small child might clutch a soft toy. As she waited she wondered what would happen to the stone baby once it had been removed from her body. It was an important question, maybe the most important question, and yet she hadn't thought to ask it. It would probably be sent to a laboratory for testing like any other tumour. Perhaps one day it would be placed in a jar of formaldehyde and exhibited in an anatomy museum for the viewing pleasure of medical students. As Clara waited, a memory seized her. It was a memory of a pebble beach somewhere in Europe. She would have been young, perhaps only five years old. The sun had been merciless, the water had been warm. Her mother had been asleep on a deck chair and Clara, painfully bored, had resorted to making friends with the stones. She remembered examining them closely and being surprised to find they were all different from each other. Some had rounded foreheads, while others were pleasingly flat. A few had chips in them, glittering like desert skies at night. Clara had smuggled her favourite, a pale disc that fit perfectly into the hollow of her palm, past the interrogating eyes of the uniformed men at Melbourne Airport, her heart pounding like a rabid animal beneath her ribs. Just then a nurse pushed a trolley into the cubicle. She checked the name on Clara's wristband and wrapped a plastic cuff around Clara's arm. Rather than look at each other, the two women fixed their gaze on the rectangular screen in front of them. They watched the fall of the numbers one hundred sixty seven, one hundred fifty three, one hundred forty, one hundred twenty eight, followed by a flashing black heart. You don't happen to know what they do with it, do you? Clara muttered. Once it's all over. It? The nurse mumbled, without looking up from her clipboard. The baby. This got the nurse's attention. The baby she flipped through the papers attached to the clipboard as if the baby could be found there. The stone, the lithoped in, the mass that they're removing from me. At this the nurse stopped flicking through her papers and looked directly at Clara. It was the first time she'd done so in the half dozen times she had entered the cubicle. Clara couldn't return her gaze, couldn't endure the pity in her eyes. That's a question best put to your surgeon, she said. He should be round in a few minutes. The nurse's voice was matter of fact, but the hand she placed on Clara's shoulder as she departed was warm, almost unbearably maternal. Alone again, Clara moved from the chair to the bed. She lay on her back and stared up at the white strip lights on the ceiling. She felt the pull of gravity on her flesh, felt it dragging her tissues into soft pools around her bones. What if she needed the lithopedion, like a deep sea diver needs a weight around his belt? What if, without it, she would float uncontrollably to the surface? What if she, like the diver, would be seized by a pain more severe than childbirth, a pain without end, a pain without remedy, an unplaceable pain that caused her body to bend in two. The next time the curtains parted, Clara screamed. Oh how she shrieked. If Mrs. McCarthy had been alive and around to witness it, she would have been pleased.

SPEAKER_02 19:56

Lovely. Thank you very much. That was a wonderful reading. My pleasure. And in your story, Clara's baby turns to stone inside her. And we also have a lack of eye contact from the gynecologist and from the hospital nurse. And when Clara meets her ex-husband's wife, she looks at Clara with sorrow. And Clara notes it's like looking in the mirror. And the second wife's also very beautiful with tall, tall and long dark hair and glinting copper eyes, maybe like a goddess. And Clara has, you know, mascara around her eyes, maybe looking a bit like a monster, or I think you even describe her as a mad woman. So I just wondered, and maybe I'm overstretching it, but at what point did the link with Medusa come into your story? Like, was it there from the beginning? Um, or did it come to you as you were working on it?

SPEAKER_00 21:15

Well, this story has uh, to use the um fertility uh you know jargon, has a hugely long gestation of almost 20 years like the the stone baby in the story itself. So about 20 years or so ago, I wrote a story called Stone Baby and submitted it to a Writers Victoria competition, and it did quite well at K runner up in that competition. Um, but I was never completely satisfied with that story. It was one of my earliest stories that got any success, so um, I was quite attached to it. Um, but I was also very Attached to the idea, and I never felt that I had really nailed it with that version, that early version. I think many of us writers go back and cringe when we read our earlier work and we see the flaws in it as we've evolved and you know honed our craft as it were. So when I was approached to write something for world literature today, I um it occurred to me that it might be a good opportunity to actually revisit that story because this stone baby, this lithoped, which is a real medical phenomenon, um, was something I stumbled across in the medical literature. And like so many things in medicine, I saw this great symbolism in something that actually exists in real life, and um I saw the potential there for the story. So that original version with Writers Victoria was also about a woman who was struggling with fertility, but she didn't have a literal stone baby inside her. She actually became, she she had like I did, kind of stumbled across this uh real case in you know a magazine and it captured her attention and she actually um was explored um pottery and sculpture and cohen was making her own stone baby that she couldn't conceive naturally, so it was a completely different story. Um so on this occasion I thought, well, how about I do actually now I'm actually more at the stage of life that um this character is. Why don't I um imagine what it might be like to discover as you know, in reality, these women with stone babies often discover very late in life that this is being this being has been inside them for that for for that long. Um the Medusa thing um is interesting because it that story about the girl um being chosen to play Medusa in a play is my story. So, as you know, Karen, so much of fiction does come from from real life and autofiction. So that aspect of the story is is taken directly from my childhood. I was, for whatever reason, chosen by a teacher to play the role of Medusa, which was a non-speaking role. The only thing I had to do was scream, and I, exactly like the character, found it very difficult to do that final scene, and it was really only when she threatened to take the role away from me that I finally found my voice. Um and uh yeah, I I don't know what made me recall that childhood um episode and marry it to the story, but um obviously those connections about stones and you know it it felt right and I wondered if I could could weave that in. And as you've pointed out, and you've found even more symbolism than perhaps I intended, which is what I love about when a when a story meets a reader, is that it can find these additional resonances that the author didn't even foresee. Um but yeah, I thought, oh, you know, there is this wonderful, magical, possible connection that we can make here so that it kind of is prime for readers to take it where they want to take it. And of course, it's it's so wonderful the story of Medusa because um you know it is a gendered story, um and you know, a woman in middle age who um hasn't born a child, but wanted to, you know, the even the language around it in the past people might call have called her barren, has this kind of stony, you know, resonances as well. So um, yeah, so like there was it was so ripe and rich for I think symbolism that uh yeah, I wanted to use it.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

That's perfect. So the Medusa um parts weren't in the original story 20 years ago. Um and had you uh revisited the story at all over those 20 years or only recently?

SPEAKER_00 26:54

No, I had revisited it. So I I mean I thought when you asked me about reading a story, I thought this would be great to discuss um as well for uh other perhaps emerging writers to see how long a story it can be in the making, you know.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

Yes, yes, exactly, and not to give up on it or um you know not to get rid of it, just to just to let it just kind of sit there and brew and it's time, you know, may well come. Um yeah, and I I did a little bit of reading about Medusa um this week, and there is a and you you probably are aware of this, but there is a feminist take on it too, a fairly recent feminist take on that myth, which uh which says that um Medusa was actually beautiful but full of rage um at injustices, and that kind of fit it nicely too. So I thought that was a great myth to to bookend the story with, and yeah, that's yes.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

As a peri as a perimenopausal woman myself, um feeling much of the rage, I I do I do like that take.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Yeah, but isn't it interesting too how you know, like I obviously maybe saw some other um symbolism in there that you weren't consciously thinking of, but uh writing that there's such an element of intuition in writing too, isn't there? I mean maybe at some level all those little things were kind of swimming around, but yeah, you don't always know it until you've produced the piece of work, do you?

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Yeah, so I am in most aspects of my life uh a very religious planner, but when it comes to writing, and perhaps that's why I like and enjoy it so much, is that I don't plan at all. I am flying by the seats seat of my pants, and for me that's where the magic is, um, in that kind of subconscious associations. And now, in the lit little amount of teaching that I do, I love um getting students to just write, you know, in that kind of free and rapid way, at least for the first draft, because that's when you your subconscious comes forth, and that's where a lot of the juice and the meat really is, and the interesting stuff, and it doesn't have to make sense initially, but if it if it's gonna work, you you'll see these connections being formed in the process of creating the work, and for me that's really that's really what writing is about.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Yeah, yeah. Um, I had some other thoughts about Clara, and I'm interested to know what you think um and about her character. So I read Stone Baby several times, and the first probably the first two times I read it, I thought that it was not having a child that had undone her. Um but then when I read it a third time, I actually started to think that it was losing Greg that had undone her. Because, you know, she hadn't wanted children. Um she hadn't wanted children, but she'd agreed to IVF because she wanted Greg. And then after he married, she was kind of stalking him, really. Um but and she'd never been able to let him go, even though she was invisible to him. Um and incidentally, you know, Perseus was invisible to Medusa. Um, just to stretch that a bit more.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

No, I love it, I love it.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

Um, but after she learned of the ectopic pregnancy, it was really Greg that she mourned for, you know, she was trying to reconnect with him again. Um I just wondered if if that's what you intended to, or were you really just thinking about her grief for not being able to have a child?

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Well, I think there's a there's a kind of line, I think quite like about two-thirds of the way in where she talks about um her not really ever knowing what she wants until that the threat of it being taken away, which goes all the way back to her childhood incident when you know she was a bit, you know, kind of on the fence about playing this role of Medusa, but it was only when it was threatened to be taken away from her that she actually stepped up and could do it. Um, and so I was interested in this person who really doesn't have a great sense of herself, I think, or her identity. Um, and who perhaps for most of their life has just been swept along doing things because it's what you're supposed to do, or because she didn't want someone else to have that, you know, or yeah, that very thing about, you know, didn't want it taken from her, so just did it anyway, without really having a strong sense of her own identity or or worth. Um, so that's really the pattern. So, yes, um, it was Greg who wanted children, and so she wanted children for Greg, but who knows if she even really wanted Greg, and I think that's the that's the other thing. She, you know, perhaps she wanted a partner because that was what everyone was doing. Um, but then she has that moment, of course, with Greg's new partner, and then she has this kind of almost revelation that perhaps that partner's going through maybe a similar thing, or she's not as content and happy as Clara imagines her to be. And that I think is as well so true to life, and especially now in our modern era where everyone curates their life and and the and so much of uh you know FOMO and um worry that w our lives are deficient is because of what we view um as other people living their best lives or most successful lives. And so that's that was really what I wanted to to explore with there. So again, she didn't know she had this stone baby, and then once she finds out, and at the last moment it's about to be taken from her again, she thinks, oh no, you know, I want it again, and it's it's a it's that kind of recurring pattern of behaviour for her. Is that what I wanted to explore?

SPEAKER_02 33:34

Yes, and hence that final scream that she suddenly wants it, yes. And I really loved that touch with um with the second wife, how you know she had built up that false narrative in her mind for years. Um and then realizing, yeah, that maybe it wasn't like she'd thought in her head, because you're right, we we all do that, and that's that's kind of put in front of us all the time, isn't it? That we think everyone else's what lives are better than ours, or you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

Yeah, and I think I guess sometimes as a GP I have the privilege of seeing behind the curtain, as it were, and seeing how many of these people, successful people, um behind the scenes are struggling, are feeling insecure, and so that is the universal experience, in fact. Um, and yet we're so afraid to show that aspect to others. Um, so it's a very strong person who's able to have this um sense of self and identity and to not be um swayed by other people's um you know curated lives.

SPEAKER_02 34:48

Yeah, you really captured uh Clara's complexity as a human being really beautifully, I thought. Um so just to move on to something else which um I'm wondering if you're also if it was also a deliberate uh a deliberate act on your part in the story. I feel there are a couple of motifs in the story. Um there's this recurring mention of of a child, um, you know, and it begins with the memory of Clara as a child, and then when Clara goes back to the uh gynecologist, she feels like a returning child to a room. Um and then Greg, when he finds out his sperm count is normal, he's grinning like a child. And then of course there's the stone baby, the child that never was. Um and then you have these other this other motif that's kind of more ethereal. There's several mentions of you know Clara feeling like a fading star and thinking of herself as a spirit haunting her widowed husband, and both of them feeling haunted by the ghosts of the children they never had, and there was something about stargazing from the doctor's window. So I just wondered how deliberate these motifs were and and what kind of um, if they were deliberate, what kind of role you think motifs play in a story?

SPEAKER_00 36:11

Well, I love these analyses because they always make me seem smarter than I am or more intentional than I am. But you can just tell me that intentional. No, I think um I think the subconscious is very interesting because I think you know we all as writers have these preoccupations and it's it's it's really clever, the subconscious, I think. If we if we think of our own dreams and and the type of there often are recurring motifs in there. Um but I so some of it would be not intentional because in that process of doing the free writing and not planning, these things occur, and then when they do, you think, oh, that's great, and that's the the magic. Um, but of course, it's more in the editing process that you start to see these recurring motifs as you mentioned, and that's when you do start to make it a little bit more explicit, or um, you might add in a few extra motifs. I think the child motif, I think in recent times, my you know, with my book The Burrow, I was writing about the loss of a child, and so and I'm a parent to two children, so children are at the forefront of my mind. Um, and even I've only written two short stories really um in the past year, and they both mention children and have that recurring motif. So I seem to be going through that phase where in my writing it it is emerging all the time. Um and then it was obvious, you know, uh the premise of this story itself, Stone Baby, uh, that would that that would um occur. Um, but in terms of the um kind of the supernatural or the transcendental, like um that uh I think was something that emerged in the process of writing, but which is a constant preoccupation of of mine as well, and is another theme that emerged in my recent novel, The Burrow. So um I'm I think it probably comes down to again my work in a scientific field, um, but then a field that deals with the life cycle and births and deaths and significant life events, which feel to me extremely spiritual. Um, and I think on a personal level I'm often struggling with this idea of you know life as cause and effect and life as um something meaningful, not random. And so that is a personal preoccupation for me, and so I guess naturally it comes out in the writing.

SPEAKER_02 39:23

Um thank goodness there is writing for you. It sounds like you're into it. I think it's important. Which kind of links nicely with uh uh two questions, two related questions I wanted to ask you. You know, because you in your writing you have so much empathy for your characters and you write very authentically from the perspective of both a medical professional and a patient, you know, this a a number of your stories have kind of a healthcare issue in your you know, and it might be for a patient or a medical person, a nurse or a doctor. I just wondered, has being a doctor influenced your writing and has writing made you a better doctor, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 40:12

Well, I'll answer the second question probably the first. I think definitely writing has made me a better doctor. Um I think uh especially general practice, um, in general practice and in writing, in some ways, you are imagining yourself in someone else's life or position. Um at least that's what I think a good GP should be doing to some extent. Um and so that having that more creative side does allow me, I think, to see the whole person that's sitting in front of me in a consultation rather than just you know reducing them to a list of symptoms or signs. And it's been really wonderful to be involved in the narrative medicine course at Melbourne University as a guest lecturer there because um now I get to try and um encourage young junior doctors and medical students to explore that early on in their careers. Um because I think it's not only beneficial to the patient, and there's some emerging evidence that this is the case, because you know, having a doctor that sees you as a whole person and is not just worried about getting to the diagnosis is going to be beneficial to the patient, but it's also beneficial to the doctor because it prevents burnout, you know. Um just finding perhaps the meaning in the consultation and the some universality about the human condition can I think be really protective for the doctor's own mental health. So that's been hugely rewarding for me. Um medicine inevitably has informed and influenced my writing. I um I always wanted to be a writer, but I think perhaps deep down I knew that I lived a rather boring life and um I I always was I you know struggled with choosing between a scientific career or or a career in the arts because I had interest in both. But um being able to marry the two has been wonderful because while I wouldn't write about specific patients, the the lives that I'm exposed to and the experiences I'm exposed to have been, you know, really informative for the writing process. Mostly I discover that we're all more alike than we are different, and there's so much commonality to our experiences. Um but uh yeah, it's just expanded my world, I guess, in a way. In a way that maybe, you know, if you're a journalist and you're seeing interviewing lots of different people in a similar way to that, it's just it means that you're not necessarily limited to your lived experience anymore. You have insights into into so many different worlds.

SPEAKER_02 43:42

Yes, and you don't need to uh identify specific patients because of you know the point you made, uh how a lot of these things are universal. You know, the way they these things affect us and the way we respond. Um I also think uh it's a bit of a shame how we um H how we divide up science and art and it starts, you know, in early education. Um and we feel like they're really separate things, but they they're clearly not. There's so much overlap, isn't there, between the two.

SPEAKER_00 44:14

Oh, completely. I mean and it I think it's much better now than it used to be. You know, when I went through medical school, I was doing the very old traditional Oxford-based medical degree, and it was very dry and um yeah, so much focus on rote learning. Whereas, you know, now the medical students do get to do uh an elective and narrative medicine if they want and meet people like Tony Birch and Maxine Beneba Clark. I mean, I would have just so loved to have had that opportunity when I was doing medical school, but there wasn't even breadth subjects back then when I was going through. So you really felt like you were making this huge leap and decision. It was really a fork in the road, and it was you didn't feel like you could make your way back. Um, it would have to be something that was very much recreational in your own time, you know. Um, which is, as you say, very artificial. And I when I was being medicine, for instance, like this stone baby idea in Lithopedia, and there's so much poetry in pathology and health, you know. Um and you know, that it's so much it's so ripe for creative writing, actually. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:35

Just for anyone who might listen and not know about that narrative medicine course, that's the one that's led by um doctors Mariam Tocki and Fiona Riley.

SPEAKER_00 45:45

Correct, yes, two amazing doctor writers who have kind of modeled this um elective on the original from Columbia University in New York. So they basically started it from scratch and um made this pilot program at Melbourne Uni, which is now ongoing. Um, yeah, and I think a lot of other unis around Australia are looking at it and um wanting to maybe incorporate it. So basically, we we it's a small group of self-selected medical students who um undergo, I think it's a four-week elective where um they're encouraged to write creatively about doctor-patient encounters, and um yeah, it's it's really uh they I think the feedback generally from the students has been really positive because it's quite a contrast to the way that they've been encouraged to study and and and work um in a in in the scientific field. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:50

Yeah, fantastic. Um just to come back to your own uh story writing, when you begin a new story, how much of it is developed in your mind before you even write the first word?

SPEAKER_00 47:06

Well, I think I really generally come with a premise. So in this case it would be this idea of the Lithopedian, and usually I'd have an idea of the main character or two. Um, but as I said, other than that, I don't plan too much, so I wouldn't know a lot beyond that, and I will sit down and just write freely and see where it goes. So there can be a lot of false starts from that point of view, but um I think you know when it's got legs because it starts to to flow and kind of take on a life of its own. Having said that, I find first drafts excruciating. It's it's not something that um I necessarily enjoy doing, um, but yeah, I'd uh yeah, I think I've I've tried to plan in the past and have an outline, and it always feels dead to me because you know I like coming to the blank page and not knowing what's going to evolve on the page.

SPEAKER_02 48:20

Yeah. Do you show your work to anyone else before it gets published?

SPEAKER_00 48:25

So that's kind of changed over time. Um, when I was for the 10 or so years that I was a unpublished or emerging writer, I did share my work a lot with um other writers, and I continue to encourage emerging writers to do that, but um only not not in during that first draft phase. I would never discuss an idea with anyone. I would never reveal a premise, not because I'm worried they're gonna steal it, but more because I'm worried a raised eyebrow would completely derail the project, and because I don't actually know where the project's going, I think um yeah, that that can be a dangerous thing to do. So I would share my work after you know the first draft is done, and by the first draft for me, that's really a draft that I've I've been over several times myself and edited, and and it's at a phase where it's raw, but I know what I'm doing, and um I feel comfortable about sharing it. So that that fresh pairs of advice was really important um in my early career. Uh in more recent years, it I've shown my work for the first time mainly with my agent or publisher. So they they've they've started to become the first readers for me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:01

I think that's good advice about not sharing it too early because if it's still in that kind of ideas phase where you're sorting out what the story is, it it and you are very vulnerable, aren't you? You need to kind of have a bit of a shape to it at least before before sharing it and risking that raised eyebrow.

SPEAKER_00 50:23

Yeah, and I mean I know um publishers love synopsis, but I think I hate synopsis because um and the elevator pitch is the same thing. Um trying to reduce something that you've worked on for you know decades, like the story is actually decades in the making, and to try and you know reduce it to a sound bite. Um if if if your work has depth and complexity, that should really be an impossible thing to do. Um the same goes with telling someone an idea, it's it's just the germ of the thing, it's the seed of the thing, and it won't be able to convey all the things that you want this piece of work to do.

SPEAKER_02 51:08

Do you have readers in mind when you're writing?

SPEAKER_00 51:12

Uh no, I I don't think you can do well, at least uh for me again that's something that is going to cause me to second guess what I'm doing, and I don't think that's good, especially in that initial phase. Um, so really I'm writing for myself with the first draft. Um, so you know, Australia Day was my first book, and that was collection of short stories, which I wrote, you know, assuming no one would ever read it. Um but Room for a Stranger, my novel, was uh part of a two-book deal, and so I was had an advance for that book before I'd written it. Um, so that was a a different experience for me because I had a book out, and I have to say, that was when I did start to think about the reader as I was writing, and I think that was probably the most difficult writing experience I've had of the three books because I was conscious of market, I was conscious of readers. Um, with your first book, you don't dare to imagine you have such a thing as readers, yeah. Um but then once your first book is published, you are aware, even if it's a small group of readers, that there are people there that might be um anticipating your next work, and so and that I can be that can be a little bit stifling, and I think it it caused a bit of kind of hesitancy in writer's block for me with Room for a Stranger. Although, really, only once I kind of tried to to block that out that I could get flow again with um Room for a Stranger.

SPEAKER_02 53:01

Did it get easier like when you wrote The Borough, your your latest novel?

SPEAKER_00 53:05

So The Borough, um, even though it's got such a kind of heavy subject matter in some respects, was probably the most enjoyable writing experience I've I've had, and I didn't have a book deal for that one. Nobody knew I was writing it. Um, I think maybe my agent had some idea that I was working on something, but nobody knew what I was writing, or and so I had that freedom again. It was it was a little bit like the first book in that sense. So I really didn't show it to anyone until I was really quite happy with it. I knew what it was, I knew what I wanted it to be. Um, and so I think I've learned from that, and I think that that's probably how I would like to write in future. Um, but it's easy to say write without a book deal. I mean, if you get a book deal, you're gonna take a book deal because you know, like especially when you're starting out, but uh yeah, it it it requires a little bit of discipline to to not think too much about the readers in the market.

SPEAKER_02 54:12

Um so you've you you do some teaching, I think maybe you mentor some writers and you certainly judge some competitions. What are your top tips for short story writing?

SPEAKER_00 54:25

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 54:27

What are you looking for when you're judging them?

SPEAKER_00 54:29

Yeah, it's been a really informative uh process to sit on judging committees. Um for so long, you know, I was submitting work to short story competitions and really feeling like I had no idea what they were looking for. Um, and once you uh are on the other side, it's it's very clarifying. So the truth is you want to stand out if you're in a in a competition. So um I hate to be completely practical, I've just said that you should write for yourself, but um, when it comes to um competitions, I think there are a few things that do stand out for judges, and I think originality is a big one. Um there are so many same same stories out there, and I think the truth is that um a lot of those same same stories the right the authors are emulating something else. Often that, you know, creative writing, you know, workshop style, you know, or trying to be a Raymond Carver or something, you know. So so they're not often being true to themselves, and I think it shows because the writing lacks a kind of yeah, energy. Um so I think when we say originality, it's not that you know you have to, you know, just try and be as edgy as possible, or it it has to come from something that you're really passionate about, but yeah, don't try to emulate some other style that you think is going to be um is going to win competitions. And and the pacing, I think, is something where emerging writers and myself included really fall down. Um, so many stories I find start really strong, they start really well, and the pacing is great, and it's almost like halfway through there the writer loses steam or feels trapped and they don't know how to end it, and then you as a reader you feel completely cheated because it's either like suddenly an abrupt ending or something that happens that wasn't foreshadowed, and so you think, well, that kind of came out of nowhere. I think that seems to be a very common thing that I I see as a judge. So um I don't know how to combat that except to say to read a lot of great short stories and study them. Um and and yeah, to to realise that a short story takes a long time to write as well. Yes. I have a sense 20 years. I have a sense sometimes, and I would would have been guilty of this, is that you see a comp coming up, you see a deadline, you've got what three weeks to write it, and I think that actually ends up ruining the work, you're showing it too early. I think a better practice is to write when you have lots of time and to have several stories, you know, in the works, and then if competitions come up that you know your story does suit the theme, um, then to to kind of edit it and work on it in that way rather than write quickly for a comp to for a theme that you're not even that passionate about.

SPEAKER_02 58:25

Yeah. Yeah, that's great advice. So what's next for you? Um you don't have to, you know, reveal too much, but are you working on anything at the moment? Or more short stories or novel?

SPEAKER_00 58:40

So um I am not yet working on a longer project yet. Um I I've written about this before that I I've realized my writing um happens in these kind of phases, um, and that I I write very slowly, and I just have to surrender to whatever phase I'm in. So when I'm working on a project, I'll be quite intense and working on it solidly, maybe for a year, 18 months, and then I can't I can multitask in everything except for writing. So when I'm doing the editing or then I'm doing publicity, I find it very hard to actually focus on a new work. I know I've got writer colleagues that always have another project on the go, um, and that works for them. In fact, they feel you know agitated if they're not working on something new. But for me, I can't multitask. So if I'm talking about the work, for instance, the last year or whatever I've been talking about the borough, I haven't been able to focus my attention on a new work. And I find that I then often after the publicity phase do have a bit of a pause, hiatus phase where I'm just reading a lot, reading for pleasure, reading to remind myself of of what I'm looking for, what I'm aiming for, um, and and then I just wait for an idea, and it's and sometimes that takes years. Yeah. But I'm okay with that. I do have my other GP career, so there's less urgency. I appreciate that for me, but um, yeah, it can't be forced. I've realized that now as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:34

Yes, and sometimes you need that time, that reading and and exploring other things to uh open yourself up to new ideas, don't you?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:44

Yeah, and the wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything is material, so you can actually feel like even when you're just living your life and and reading, it's all going into that subconscious, it's all being absorbed, and it will come out in other ways in the future. So you should never feel that oh, you're not writing, you're wasting time, you're living, and all of that is potential material for the next work.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:12

Yes, yes, yes, and that's a great place for us to finish. So I very much look forward to your next work whenever it comes. Thank you, Karen. No pressure. Um, but thank you very much for talking today. That's been wonderful. Thank you, Karen. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks, Melanie. This podcast was recorded on the lands of the younger and terrible people of Norwegian and Brisbane, and on the traditional lands of the cooler nation in Nancy. I would like to pay my respects to the traditional owners, to their elders, past and present, and to acknowledge their rich history of storytelling. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please like it on my subscribe page or your preferred listening telephone and share it with others you think will enjoy it. Thanks so much for listening.