Sarah Dobbs's Blog

A different class of snobbery

Reading Lisa McInerney’s essay in Common People (edited by Kit de Waal). It’s a thoughtful (and witty) exploration of class and I suppose asks us to question the notion (held by some) that if you’re just good at something you can level up to being middle class.

I took my job at Sunderland to help with my brother’s healthcare. It was my first long-term salaried job. I grew up on a council estate in a block of maisonettes and I remember a colleague telling me oh well, you’re middle class now. As if this is what I had been aiming for. I thought this was offensive. Should I be embarrassed about where I’ve come from, have I finally made it. No and no. So if I quit my job do I revert back to ‘square one’? No. I had never thought about my background in that way.

I realise this is all complex but it’s also frustrating to experience a sort of reverse snobbery. My past (as McInerney explores in this essay) has not been erased. I still worked 6 jobs to pay for my PhD. I still lived in all those dodgy places in all those dodgy areas because it was all I could afford. So does it mean because of what I have made now that other opportunities shouldn’t be open? Or that what brought me here (desire and hard work) just vanishes? Or that drudgery and grafting is the only value? It doesn’t, it isn’t. We should all be constantly finding ways to help each other, to get that door open and keep it that way. There is a certain, I think, reverse snobbery there that acts as a barrier though I can see things changing.

McInerney comments that working class identity is ‘slippery’ and I think that must be remembered. My life before now cannot and won’t be ‘written over’ to suit anyone else’s definition or need to categorise. ‘All those events and words and challenges and joys that informed my personality’ (McInerney) are because of my background and that is an immovable truth. We can’t forget to listen to people’s realities and to continue to question how some would require us to shape ourselves and our identity.

You can get Common People here and you should read it too.

‘Body Song’

Trails of the Unexpected – 2/8

As part of Hartlepool Little Waterfront festival, 8 films were commissioned to give people ways to be creative. The idea that anyone can dance, any making is art, that we’re most alive when we’re doing and connecting and creating.

Every Tuesday and Thursday in June you can see another video and another way to be creative.

Here’s mine:

Thanks to Bloomin Arts, Maxy Neil Bianco and Julia Kent for the music.

You can keep up to date and have a go of the other videos here!

Letters of Hope

Our aerial company, Uncaged, are aiming to bring a little hope back to the community. I’ve definitely felt the impact of not seeing art and theatre. We’ll be performing at Penshaw Monument in July and will be delivering community workshops at Shiney Row Community Library to generate the letters and performance workshops for anyone who might like to read the letters during our performance. There will also be a livestream for those who can’t make it – the event will be very small (- and safe).

Please help us make it a reality by following or sharing the campaign below!

Sarah

If you’re interested in volunteering or supporting the project in any way, please let me know – Sarah @ uncagedaerial@gmail.com

http://spacehive.com/letters-of-hope

http://spacehive.com/letters-of-hope

Creation series

For everyone seeking some creativity. I’ll be running these small-capacity and distanced workshops in movement and writing. The first series of workshops is based around trees and land, the second the sea and coast.

Register on EventbriteRegister on Eventbrite

And They Filled The Skies With Letters of Hope…

In solidarity with everyone who is currently fed up at the moment, in need of a creative outlet or just wants to help, here is how to get involved with a new project that is designed to offer hope. Please share – and write… We are all writers.

Letters of Hope is a voluntary project for anyone here or abroad. It will culminate in an outdoor performance with letters from the community (wherever you might be) addressed to the community. The letters  will be delivered and or displayed in the community after they are part of the performance.

Theme: hope

(Image Kyle Roxas)

Deadline: 1st March

More details here: tinyurl.com/lettersofhope21

Please get in touch if you would like to link up with any similar projects or have spaces to share the letters, particularly in the north east and surrounding areas.

Aerial and narrative

Save draftPreview(opens in a new tab)PublishAdd title

Sharing some work that I’ve been making recently in what has been everyone’s weirdest year. I feel lucky to be working and creating as these are the things, that engagement in life’s narrative, that keep me feeling alive.

I’ve enjoyed finding the rhythm of how I want to explored narrative alongside aerial and vice versa, and this year has opened up many more new ideas.

As a writer I think you’re always looking for what and how you can best change minds or encourage the simmering of thoughts. I’ve loved working on these last two projects:

Oracles in Sepia, commissioned by Compass Presents and No More One in Three, this is part of a larger online protest and I’m so happy to have been involved in a small way.

[image error] [image error]

Misrecognition

A strange year of both monumental and no movement. There is ‘that’ change in the air, when you give up on summer and see what a new age brings. New commissions, old novels, so much stasis I’ve wanted to scream. But. Change as well, and that inevitable forward motion.

The other day, I was sat on a bench reading before the sea and this woman leaned in and said, Louise. Louise? I guess I wondered about a story where you did just go along with someone’s misrecognition, even for a while. Would that experience still be valid, if ephemeral.

 

A Walk With Louise

 

Cuentame.

Tell me a story.

Here, a story about love.

I will see you in my other love. Just to one side. You will lean in as I do, to kiss, a shadow beside me when we make love. Your scent lingers.

‘Love?’

I breathe it to the dark when I’m alone to blank reply, the same blankness of sky we looked up at when it was still just us and it had become pointless to name the stars.

The last time we made love, I didn’t love you, and yet I did and do and don’t and will.

I read a book on the train to a place that is supposed to take my mind off things. A Renaissance woman spills skin on the cover and inside, men talk about love.

I think about our closeness and distance, how we would make love in nights and days and afternoons and evenings and nights and days and always. Twisting together, like Chinese burns, wringing out truth. How I was just a mirror of someone else, that bit fainter, that bit less.

These things you hate about me.

Cuentame.

Talk to me.

Say it again, love.

In the book I’m reading, the men say: Love is creativity, love is assuaging insecurity, love is teaching, love is learning, love is balance, love is happiness, love is not that first flush of love, because that is not even love but, surprise, it is the love that comes after what we think of as love that is love.

Okay.

Across the aisle, a woman drinks red wine with a screw-top and talks in a bored voice about someone she is excited about going for a meal with and my irritation beats at her busy chatter. She leans her head on the train window, white breath infecting glass. Loud.

These things you hate about me.

Behind her, a couple put in earphones like a secret and listen to something on the man’s phone. No gap between their bodies.

It has been suggested I sit on the right and look at the coast.

I am on the left but there, the coast. The sea draws a wash of old blue over a beach like your watered inks.

Surf butts my knees, your arms brace the shock of water. I see how you look at me when you kiss and I see how I look at you when I kiss and I still can’t understand how we did this.

A year of fallow heart, to clean you out.

And yet. In my hometown, a pier. Pretend and too-short, something Orwell has famously written of. If we are shaped by landscape, perhaps this is the reason for my pier, my precipice. Or is it because I know one day I will go to climb the shoulders of my family and teeter. One day one, one day none. The knowledge keeps me brittle, reddens my red stomach, already red with hunger.

These things I hate about me.

I remember you told me, in a certain village neither of us recall, they don’t have a word for “but”. I tried never again to create a sentence containing “but” in the hopes I could become a better person.

The man the woman is going for a meal with has spent ages asking her out. And she means, ages.

Cuentame.

Speak.

The last time we made love you told me you were mine. In the spaces between sentences, my inward time, I think of how beautifully you filled me. How much. Mind, body, skin. No room inside myself for me. In the end we couldn’t even catch our breath, could we, love?

There is a picture I took before you left where your hair has grown foreign, thick and wild from the sprawl of this Sunday-world. It is native foliage, the kale your mother makes the caldo Gallego with. And I have never seen anyone so happy in my life.

Don’t start a sentence with And.

And once, by the river, we had a messy house and study, the habit of coffee and meals and walks and thought. Once a child. Do you remember him? I don’t think you ever quite met. Once a reed you cut for me to draw with which, of course, I have given back.

These things we hate about me.

Tell me a story.

When you talked to me after, I saw the gaps. Gaps fill. When you talked to me after, I saw how your speaking to me was a betrayal to another.

But don’t tell me about that, love.

Cuentame.

I can’t really know what it means, if this is not my language.

Love, the men say, is answering a need in the other.

I have forgotten what I needed. Rest, forgiveness, breath?

‘Louise?’ the man says.

The train slows, bottles clash and laughter clatters. My chest is tight, returned to the clean air and changeable skies of your home, the green you could never describe to me and on seeing, neither could I. I had never felt so free or so engorged with empty dread. It took so much to love you, love. I would do it again.

‘It is you, isn’t it?’ The man says.

While I look up and play my role, you’re at my side where you will stay a while. When I blink, we kiss in another time, my face embarrassed with love. How did we get here, from there?

‘It’s Mike. Remember? God I haven’t seen you since uni. How many bloody decades is that then?’

I could just say he’s got the wrong person.

I see myself  things in the basket in the supermarket.

Don’t throw things like that.

Carefully careful, wrong wrong, waking in nighttimes my pulse fast twitching in my throat. The strain of restraint, of editing myself to a point where I split. I tried to tell you, I try to speak, I tried to say, I can’t breathe, love.

‘Oh wow. Oh yeah. Mike. God, too many than I care to remember. Right?’

‘Right? So what’re you doing up here?’

‘Sick of seeing my own four walls.’

‘All know that feeling.’

‘You?’

‘Work. Have time though, just if you fancy catching up? Go for a walk or something, all that tourist stuff. There’s that castle people are always harping on about, dunno why. God, what was your last name again? Sorry, it’s the age -’

Or maybe love is like your scent, or maybe a constantly changing state, moveable and unmeasurable absolutes we wish we could name.

‘Louise?’

What could my name be?

The woman who is finally meeting the man for the meal walks by, sees me looking and I wonder if my face betrays a dislike, if she sleeps on her side with a pillow and drinks to fill her red stomach. I smile; she looks away.

But maybe the woman with my name is still waiting for you on a stool in that cafe which no longer exists, the unsteadiness in her evening out when you walk by the window, with that neat navy coat, your worried face and those fingers that will know her geography, smoothing – or soothing – her into someone else.

 

My stories, your stories

I write stories for a living and lately the ways of telling these is evolving. I think each area I work in feeds back into the other, but here is some book-related news.

How to Write A Novel with my publisher’s education arm, Unthank School

Runs from 5th January. You can find out more info / book here: https://www.unthankschool.com/course/how-to-write-a-novel/

[image error]

Reviews of my latest novel:

Stephen Theaker at Interzone – “A grown-up, fiercely feminist sf novel”

Alex Lockwood, The Chernobyl Priviledges – “A book well worth reading and lingering over”

Emily Harrison at Storgy – ‘The Sea Inside Me’ is a novel that touches those edges deftly, but clearly. In a society where images of violence, specifically terrorism and acts of brutality, are so easily accessible, and in a climate that is ever reaching for the brink of unrest, Dobbs takes the current moment and gives an insight into where we could end up.

How to Write A Novel

We write to articulate the stories in our minds and bodies that we can’t say out loud.

We write to share an experience so that it exists and lives and changes state when conferred to another.

We write to share the unique beauty of our own individual experience and take on language.

We write to change.

We write just simply – to share the story…

Why do you write?

Whatever your reason, have a think about why you write, what you want to say and how you want to say it. I’m looking forward to teaching on the Unthank School’s course How to Write A Novel next year. These are some of the questions we’ll consider, as well as how to best construct your narrative and engage your readership. We’ll think about character-driven stories versus plot-driven stories. Above all, one of the nicest things I found on my own courses, is that booking one gives you permission to say, I am a writer, this is not a hobby, this is what I want to say.

Listen …

xxx

Stories are good for you

Well it’s an exciting (read: no sleep ever) time at the moment. I went away to do an aerial course last year and on return co-founded Uncaged: Aerial Theatre with my now business partner, Emma Bloomfield.

We tell stories. We try to do that in a bold and engaging way. Soon we have a Creative Summer residency at Dance City and are running an immersive for emerging aerialists in July, to help them tell a story and find their voice. In October we’ll be sharing some of that work at a scratch showing at the Sunderland Literature Festival in October. The debut of our piece, I Am No Bird, will be at the Sunderland Creative Writing Festival. The drive of the piece is female cooperation.

[image error]

Image Simon Richardson

I have quite an untidy mind (no??) and shaping thought into narrative has always been a way to have a conversation about those things that tap away at me. So many of the aerialists at Emma’s club have talked about how aerial improves their wellbeing. I’m no different and get quite anxious if I haven’t somehow satisfied that movement, intention and /or sense of expression. So it’s nice that I’ve been invited to talk about aerial and narrative as part of a wellbeing panel. I’ll post dates as and when.

October is a good good month as it also sees the launch of a new novella, The Sea Inside Me from Unthank Books. I love the complexity of the novella’s form, so this was a really interesting project. The plan is to share words with lots of lovely local authors because book launches are so painfully embarrassing. Oh here, here’s all my words: listen. I am really looking forward to the book getting out there though.

[image error]