Sarah Dobbs's Blog, page 6
July 21, 2015
In Conversation event . . . with me!
I shall be trundling (wrong verb) down the motorway to do this event with the Creative Writing North West group.
Here are some of the details if you fancy coming along!
Saturday, August 22, 2015
2:30 PM to 4:30pm
Friends Meeting House, 6 Mount Street , Manchester (map)
GBP17.00/per person
In this session, Dr Sarah Dobbs will discuss her writing process and practice from initial idea, to full-length novel. Sarah will explore how she developed and created compelling characters, handled challenging narratives and also discuss the importance of editing. There will be some useful advice on publishers and agents, along with an open Q and A session at the end.
Sarah’s novel, Killing Daniel, was nominated for the Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker prize’ in 2013.
About Dr Sarah Dobbs:
Sarah Dobbs has a PhD and MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Sunderland and has previously taught at MMU, Edge Hill, Manchester and on the Guardian Masterclass series. She’s the founder of Creative Writing the Artist’s Way and her debut crime novel, Killing Daniel, was published in 2012 by Unthank. She’s currently completing her second novel, Death Day. Previous credits include the BBC, Bolton Octagon, Litro, Flax and Flybe’s inflight Magazine! You can visit her at https://sarahjanedobbs.wordpress.com
‘Killing Daniel’ can be bought here:
July 18, 2015
Reality and religion: me without you.
I’ve been reading about reality and the universe and everything. Brian Greene inventively wittering about how ‘humbling and stirring’ it is to ‘imagine just how expansive reality may be’. That there is a reality where Steven’s cancer was caught and he survived and we’re all down Paddock Farm larging it over some fat bastard cream tea and he’s like, d’you remember when we thought I was going to die?LOL. (scone factor at Paddock farm is 7/10 btw).
In my reality, that didn’t happen. There was no sigh of relief. I’m not smart enough to comprehend the quantum mechanics that allow for these possibilities or multiverses or bubble universes etc etc. So maybe it’s that which makes me wonder, are they possibilities or is it faith? How can there be other realities? How can it be proved? If it can’t be proved, isn’t it faith? Isn’t that akin to some sort of mathematical religion? Because yes, it is curiously soothing to think that there is this mirror world (another term) where Steven still exists and is merrily pissing on strawberries (it makes them grow better apparently).
I’ve written about my brother’s cancer before, but not really about his death. Thinking about it, that’s a mistake. But then I couldn’t write about it before because I was hiding in this sun-filled flat in leafy Didsbury, a nice place where everyone puts their litter in a bin and Steven was just back home in Darlington. I didn’t really talk and for a while I didn’t really feel. I didn’t know why I wasn’t sad.
Someone told me recently that grief is sanitised. My idea of what we’d go through after his death is a lone figure leafing through a photograph album. The reality can be quite different.
The inspiration behind Killing Daniel was a boy named Bazyli who I loved and who killed himself when I was 14. Since then, I’ve had a preoccupation with certain achievements in specific time frames and, also, people leaving. There are other reasons for this too, but these are mine.
When my brother got sick, it was easy in a way to be strong. Helping him to hope when there was this blackness of the terminal diagnosis is possibly the most painful thing I remember. Remaining optimistic and clear-headed, emailing doctors, getting second opinions, moving a big bastard of a mountain every day just to complete the day. To get through. We painted and took pictures and thought about how to save his life and how to end it. Again, such a miserable world we live in where a dog can get respectfully put to sleep, but oh no, people must suffer. He suffered. You wouldn’t think it when you see the happy pink cancer advertisements. Even I feel inspired. Nobody needs to be in pain these days, they said. This also was not true.
Here is the reality and I was not prepared for it, despite my nan having the same illness a few years ago. A testicle the size of a baby’s head, where the urine eventually came out through his skin. Cancer in the spine, cancer killing off the kidneys one by one. An illeostomy bag. Blood clots the size of huge slugs coming out half hourly from his penis. They didn’t come out – they had to be pulled. Cleaning up blood and shit for months and months and then going to work and being, like, totally professional teacher mode, nurses in hourly or more. Staying up all night in case this is the night and you don’t want him to be alone. You and him and everyone else sobbing because you’re utterly helpless. At the end, my brother kept trying to stand and fought us to do it, saying I want to live. And in the very very end, he realised he couldn’t and it was done.
Don’t kid yourself that cancer is this happy advert. It’s fucking awful and this country needs to do something better about it (I wish I knew what) but also, the right to die. You might have these conversations about suicide too, or how to end things without choking on your own secretions. I think it’s the helplessness, the absolute and sheer lack of options that hurt everyone.
When Steven was no longer there, I would say that neither was I. At first I felt nothing, and then I feared the loss of everyone else who was important to me, which is more people than I realised. If I’m being honest, there were two precise moments I remember now where I wanted to be dead and I wondered how I would do it. It was scary and I didn’t want anyone around me at that point. Even here, I’m sanitising. The reality was bat-shit fucking mental ugly grief Catherine-wheeling out in all sorts of destructive and fascinating directions.
It does pass.
I’m sure there are other dips to be found however, and it might not be the same for everyone of course, it’s personal and dependent on your situation, your relationship with the person who’s died, your own past. I’ve talked to some people lately who tell me how the years move but it stays with you and I imagine the grief to be like some slow-moving glacial shift.
Still. The painful and interesting thing I’ve found lately is the sense of newness and possibility. I would say I was very shaped by my brother, our blurredness at times and some of the difficulties of our growing up. And there’s this song I listen to now when I’m pushing up a motorway, towards things – Years and Years’ Shine. I’m not interested in the rest of the lyrics, but I like ‘I’ll be redefined – can you see me I’m shining?’. I grin when I hear it and think of all the things I’ll get up to. A little glee tickled in the other day – a, look what I’m going to do. It’s for Steven, yes, but also for me, whoever that might turn out to be.
Next week I’m going paragliding and I’ve started painting again, something we used to do together. Crap at it like, but it interests me. I’ve written the shit out of this current novel. The week after I’m going abroad, just me and my camera. The thing I feared – of not knowing myself without my brother, of being totally alone – has happened. First, as I say, was the blankness, then I would say a complete and utter crash. If there’s anything unresolved in you, don’t expect it to patiently wait for a more opportune moment.
There is though now this sense of the future. Something that isn’t ending, a thing that isn’t known or definite (sounds like a Terminator movie I know). There are anchors in the past that I need to confront and set down. There are pictures to take and laughter and cake. Walks with your cousin. Most importantly, there is something beyond that trauma. I thought I would never forget the still finality of his stopped white eyes, when his heart finally gave in, but I am and the other, better memories are coming back and it’s those that drive me to get up and out and on with things. Meet life head on, when you can, that is. I’m not pretending there aren’t or won’t be sheer and shocking slumps.
Last week I drove up to Darlington to visit my brother’s grave for the first time. I didn’t want to go with other people. It still surprises me that he isn’t here. The reality is almost too big and maybe you need to handle it in bite-sized pieces. Being alone is okay; it’s interesting – being me without him is weirdly new and full of opportunities.
A few weeks ago there was this thunder and lightening and I hoped and hoped my brother was there, in the universe in some way. I don’t think so. But he is in my head and heart and somehow guides the things I do. When I’m up in the air next week I’ll be thinking, see, Steve, I’m doing alright. I don’t have faith in science or religion, but I’m going to dance with my friends and make new ones and get over the troughs and explore the metaverse (or whatever you want to call it).
July 9, 2015
Muttering about mimesis and anti-mimesis
Art imitates life or life imitates art?
Apparently, Aristotle suggested that art imitates life – the mimetic. That what we have in our everyday, concrete must-get-bananas-at-Tesco world is instinctively reconfigured in the mind and perhaps then on paper (drawings, text, notation etc).
Wilde intimated the opposite – life imitates art (anti-mimetic). In a crude example, the Taylor Swift red lipped classic spreads like a bush-fire. Or, perhaps more scarily, how the Slenderman urban myth could create actual terror.
Why the waffle?
The novel I’m writing is funny. It’s fucking miserable actually, but with hopeful glittery bits of humour. I had been planning to write an adjacent story to the recent documentary, The Man on the Bridge. I’d found one woman’s story interesting – not the ‘main narrator’s’, though it was also intriguing. The woman had lost her brother to suicide and he hadn’t left a note. I thought, that’s an interesting story – all the whys and wherefores – opportunities for plotting, how to progress. And then my own brother, who had been ill for a couple of years, died. You’re not supposed to say passed away. ‘Died’ is clear and actual. (This line is in the book and is, I suppose, a little fist of the mimetic and anti mimetic and takes me back to the idea of how narrative can tell us a lot about the nature of life. But that was the PhD and I can’t be bothered to go there).
I’ve found myself though writing through my own grief in the novel and the two blur strangely and, I think, helpfully. The other ‘funny’ – proper hilarious, like – thing, is that my brother had wanted us to do a pub quiz at his funeral. To keep his memory alive by us meeting all the other people he knew. And so I’ve been talking to people and finding out things, like the detention he just shrugged his shoulders about and never turned up for. (not in the novel). Also something, the main character does in my novel – in a sort of detective-like manner.
I can’t work out whether this is mimetic or anti-mimetic, the writing, but it’s working at the moment and you can’t mutter darkly about that.
June 16, 2015
New review: English Language, Literature and Creative Writing
Happy to have a new review of our textbook – a snippet of it here:
‘Language is life’ is just one of the lines in this book that draws you in and makes you aware that the writers know exactly what they are talking about from experience.
Sarah Dobbs states ‘This guide was born out of a genuine desire to help students through their journey,’ which is evident in the presentation of information in the book. Each section is clear and concise despite engaging the reader with a conversational tone…
May 6, 2015
Death-Day: In progress work…
DEATH-DAY
ONE
4.31am
The man, indie-thin but sinewy with runners��� muscle, girl-lipped with poetic cheekbones and gothic skin, tuppeny-coloured hair slicked into an almost Danny Suko quiff, stood crooked before the Holiday Inn window, dense in chalky-black. The glow from the sign seeped into his temporary room, the colour of the insides of a fridge or a tub of margarine. An old Reebok backpack, neat as a cat, a nucleus on the white bedspread. His Converse, paired, waited by the ankles of the old desk. His usually busy, analysing eyes, blanked out on the cityscape. Still, bar the occasional whoosh of a taxi or car��pressing up the A6. Dark, but for the red and amber of streetlamps and brake lights, the lit billboard on the opposite side of the street advertising drink and youth, beauty and popularity: Live a Little. An utter of a laugh. His voice, from what you could tell – low, warm. A voice that had, in the past, said to strangers, No probs. Don’t worry. I’ve got 20p if that helps? He took some breaths, as the therapist had taught him, so that you could see his shoulders rise and fall, rise and fall, up to his ears, hold, aaaaand ��� relax. His breath made a comfortable surfing sound, his body lengthening out to its full six-two. The room smelled of popcorn and old towels. He considered the��almosty meaty-grease of his hair.
For the first time in twenty-five years, he felt like living. Because it was finally decided. Finally ��� peace. Finally.
Another light beat into the darkness. He looked to the source: Nina calling.
TWO
9.35pm
He did it on their twenty-fifth birthday.
Helium balloons flowered around Nina. She was spot-lit by friends leering in for smeared kisses and sweating hugs, arms boxy with presents or a spiky card. Chumbawumba thumped on the cheap stereo in her third floor leather-and-wood apartment that she was secretly proud of. Others were still living in post-uni house-shares. She���d moved on. Nina tugged at the hem, midway up her long thigh, of the stingy dress Alex had bought her. Checked the door and her phone for a face more familiar than her own.
She said things to people that day. Her mother���s punctual 9am birthday call: D���you know ��� can���t get hold of him at all. Have you heard anything? Her best friend���s recorded Whatsapp rendition of Happy Birthday: He���s not been on Facebook you know. It says 11 hours! What’s he like?! His best friend���s Facebook message which exclaimed, May as well send you one an all! Happy b���Day! Female version of my bezza!
People responded with things like:
He���s probably just got distracted with uni work. You know what he���s like.
Maybe he went on a bender. You know what he���s like.
There���s that anorexic one he���s been hooking up with ��� well, you know what that���s like.
it was true. When she and Alex first got together after a work���s party, Nina went off-grid. Something she knew he���d been hurt by, a jealousy that spiked into brief, but powerful dislike. Self-righteousness. She was allowed her own life. She���d thought Alex was why he���d not made it to many of their Sunday bacon brunches and hungover��moaning-the-world sessions in the run-down art cafes they used to like.
But not this. Not: ���Nina? Nina! It���s Edward! Edward? Yes. It’s loud there? Nina – have you seen the TV? Can you hear me?���
Her step-father’s dry voice made words that erased her childhood. That cut the other side of herself – the living, organic memory of her entire life, something that couldn’t be backed up or sent to iCloud – right out. Excised, like black in a bad tooth.
*
New work and Saboteur awards
Quite happy to say I’ve got a couple of stories coming out in Unthology 8 and 9: The Imaginary Wife and As Linda Was buying the Flowers
That’s nice eh?
The publisher, Unthank, are up for an award for Unthology 6 at Saboteur – you can vote for them here
You can submit to the Unthology series yourself here:
http://www.unthankbooks.com/unthology.html
March 23, 2015
Witness: Crime and execution
Hello all,
I’m putting together an anthology called Witness: Crime and Executions.
You can see more details here:
Deadline: 1 June
November 19, 2014
Extended deadline..
Quick update on this:
If anyone happens to still be this young/knows anyone who might be interested… (18-22)
@sarahjanedobbs Deadline for this comp has been extended to Jan & is now open to anyone in greater #Manchester http://www.salford.gov.uk/pr-14-3858.htm #shelaghdelaneyday
October 31, 2014
New writing workshops, Serendipitea, Chorlton
Cake! And writing. Come along to our new creative writing workshops at Serendipitea, Chorlton.
These workshops are cheaper than our city centre ones, to allow you to indulge in their lovely offer of a pot of tea and cake for £3.95. We’ll be doing lots of writing exercises, lots of feedback and lots of chatting. Hope to see you there.
To book a place, join and RSVP at our writing group here: http://meetup.com/writingmanchester
October 26, 2014
Dark fiction and suspense: Halloween creative writing workshop, 28th Oct, Manchester
Manchester Writing workshop
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Friends Meeting House
Room 4, 6 Mount Street, Manchester M2 5NS, Manchester (edit map)
Spooky stories – Halloween special edition.
Our writing workshop this week will have a dark side. Plus cake.
Just bring yourselves and your pen and paper – or however you like to write. If you want to bring work to share that would be great too. There are plugs in the rooms.
Remember, all levels of writers welcome – expertise and freshness compliments each other. Hope to see you all soon.
Sarah
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How much? £10
Book here: http://meetup.com/WritingManchester
