Hi, I’m Marilyn Rodrigues and I write about Catholic family life and the burning desire to stay close to God and grow into our real selves in a messed-up, frenetic, yet fantastic and beautiful world.

I’m a wife to Peter and mother to five young children. We live in Sydney.

I write a regular column for Sydney’s Catholic archdiocesan newspaper, The Catholic Weekly .

I’m also the editor of the CathFamily e-newsletter, the FRANKLY bookazine and am a contributor to the Catholic radio program The Journey.

But you can probably tell more about a person not by what they write for others, but what they read to please themselves.

I love anything by Pamela Allen, Julia Donaldson, and Stephen Michael King.  Marrisa Burt is a great author for pre-teen readers.

For adult reading I recently enjoyed Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas series, and anything by Michael D O’Brien, but especially Fr Elijah and its sequel, Elijah in Jerusalem. For poetry give me Les Murray and Gerard Manly Hopkins.

I prefer Mr Bean, Star Trek (The Next Generation), and the Lord of the Rings to anything else you can watch on a screen.

God’s biggest joke with me is having made me a minimalist mother-of-five. Our second biggest is that I’m not nearly as good and holy at 40 as I imagined I was already at 20.

I’m good at cleaning and at hanging out laundry. I get a lot of practice in.

I enjoy knitting, gardening, candle-making, and fish-keeping, and am pretty rubbish at all of them.

Welcome to my website and you are quite welcome, also, to drop me a line via the contact form below.