Sarah Dobbs's Blog, page 8

Novel Masterclass Series, Manchester city centre

**Early bird offer - £99 (instead of £120) for the entire course**


Dates - 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th August (price covers all sessions)

This 4 week face to face course takes place in Manchester city centre, tutored by Dr Sarah Dobbs, author of Killing Daniel (Unthank, 2012). Sarah tutors at Edge Hill and has previously lectured at Blackburn, Lancaster, Manchester and The Open University, as well as on The Guardian's Masterclass series. Other work has been broadcast by the BBC, published in international journals and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.


Who is the course for?

Anyone who is writing or has ever wanted to write a novel. What will I study? You will undertake a series of intensive exercises each week which will help you focus and hone the work you are currently writing or have written. The weeks are broken down into: the idea, the plot, genre and markets. The first hour will be dedicated to exercises and models that can be adapted to improve your own ideas or novels. Work will be underpinned with critical analysis of published work.

Book here: http://www.meetup.com/WritingManchest...

Week 1 -

The idea (fine-tuning your premise, ensuring conflict and character)

Surgeries: intensive peer and tutor feedback on work in progress/drafts


Week 2 -

The plot (Freytag's Pyramid, building your architecture, suspense, plot pictures)

Surgeries: Work in progress/drafts


Week 3 -

Genre (some weeks will interconnect, but knowing your genre, writing within it and also how to write outside and subvert it will hone your writing and give it identity and marketability)

Surgeries: One to one tutorials / group feedback, as group prefers


Week 4 -

Markets (the importance of agents, editors, copy-editors, how to self-edit with lenses. The covering letter and synopsis. Where to go from here.

Surgeries: final WIP and reading of polished work


ADDITIONAL BENEFITS: all course participants receive a free 1 hour follow-up critique of work in progress worth £40 (e.g. 3 chapters / synopsis analysis etc.) These can be taken at any time within 3 months of completing the course.


How will I study? With a small group (max 12) of like-minded writers in a friendly, informal setting. 4 x 2 hour sessions. This is intensive but isn't school! You'll be asked to bring in writing each week in order to fully benefit from the surgeries.


All other materials and refreshments will be provided.

You can email Sarah to ask any questions on sarahjanedobbs@gmail.com

Book here:

http://www.meetup.com/WritingManchest...

Can you teach Creative Writing? *Course offer*

Here’s my Bookbrunch article, which suggests that I think you can – what do you think?

Can you Teach Creative Writing? – article 

In connection to that, there’s now only 2 places left on our next How to: Write a Novel course. It’s a 12 week course that helps you start or continue your own novel, with intensive peer and tutor feedback.

To fill the last 2 spots, it’s on offer for £175 (half-price) – aren’t we nice?

You can find out more about the course and book here:.

Everyone’s got a novel in them… have you? So what’s the difference between novels that languish in dusty drawers and those in the Waterstones display window? For most, the answer is study, perseverance and a helping hand.

This 3 month online course aims to equip you with the things every novelist needs: The idea, the ability and the guidance.

Itinerary

 

Team Charlotte?

Carys Davies poses an interesting theory. You’re either Charlotte or Emily. Brontes, that is. Do you side with the aching plain Jane, or crave the tortured passion of Cathy and Heathcliffe? Maybe Red Room (ed by AJ Ashworth who made it all happen) will change your mind!

Throwing new light on the fictions that introduced many of us to reading and words we needed to look up, Red Room humour, pathos and contemporary reflections on the sisters’ work.

(That’s the only bit of me in my story, Behind all the Closed Doors, by the way, where the young boy is checking words in a dictionary – there’s always something, right?)

Carys’ story Bonnet gets me every time I read or hear it and in this Lancashire Launch of Red Room I also got to hear Elizabeth Baines reading her whole piece, That Turbulent Stillness – and the ending fishtails nicely.

We had a lovely welcome from Blackburn library and it was great to see a new generation of Bronte Lover in her Wuthering Heights t-shirt (the wearer is not Team Emily I don’t think, having heard her talk about it afterwards). Lots of books were bought which happily helps the Bronte Trust.

You can get Red Room here. Published by Unthank Books.

Now, lots of lovely photos below, courtesy of Darren Lee Poole.

Red Room - Blackburn reading

Hello all, if you like the Brontes and / just fancy a nice literary night out, come along to Blackburn library on Wed. I'll be reading from Red Room: New Short Stories inspired by the Brontes with Carys Davies, Elizabeth Baines and AJ Ashworth (ed) will be hosting. A proportion of profits go to the Bronte Trust.



Hope to see some of you there!

https://www.facebook.com/events/22729...

Sarah

Baby

A WIP thing. I keep coming back to the thought, and seeing it everywhere in various forms, that we can write the world we want to create. Or well, create the world we’d like to live in. There’s a funny new Lilly Allen video to this effect, Sinead O’Connor’s open letter (and other non-pop references). But still, I’m just playing with ways to explore that idea. I like grit in fiction (hello, Killing Daniel) but I also want to find a way to write what I’d like to see. So how to create not utopia but equality without it going 4 legs good 2 legs bad? I half think it can’t be quite as easy as censorship, as removing violence from the visual, but wonder if that would have an effect. If every script writer novelist flasher poet story jockey wrote a different world, would the world be different a little bit. Then again, where’s the fun in that? Then again, it’s late and my hair’s not red and I need to somehow find some answers to this for my conference paper.

Oh well.

Here’s a draft of Baby – or Skittles or Prawn. Yes I think ‘prawn’ is a bit too close to District 9 and you might (almost definitely now) see a little bebeh with mandibles nibbling batteries.

Baby

Your shoes smell of popcorn, baby. The red ones with the buckles. You know? That’s it, yes. Those. They’re shiny as skittles. You always liked red. You might catch me sometimes holding one to my mouth, inhale, as though I’m on a plane, there has been turbulence and your little red skittle shoes have dropped from a cupboard. Breathe, mummy, breathe.

On your wedding day, you will marry a man I have reservations about. You are too beautiful to be cold in your simple strapless gown in the clean April morning, the straight hair I’d brushed 100 times after hundreds of stories about rainbows (as your great grandmother taught me) our sound – that easy mother-daughter quiet, when we were still in love with each other, when you knew I still knew things you didn’t – it is a sound that contains your breath, my clicking knee, that straight hair is all riddled into scribbles. Let’s call this husband Jeff, no, Rob. It doesn’t really matter. He has that stocky build I didn’t expect you to go for. He doesn’t look me straight in the eye when he calls me Mrs and never mum. My mind stops you as you are about to tuck yourself into the Jaguar. Your twisted hair, your perfect shoulders, petals red and pink stopped over your English skin so I can’t see your mouth.

I carried the feeling as I carried you. And now you are a prawn in my bed. A sick, slack grub-like thing. I think of your skittle shoes and you learning to tie your laces and your legs kicking up in ankle socks as you go hop-scotch, hop-scotch, hop turn and – how your face registered mortification when our spaniel (yes, why not? a spaniel) weed on your belly then sloped away with big eyes when you created a sound like an air raid siren. I see all the times you feet betrayed you in the front room, the play ground, the street and me watching me in the kitchen windows, watching for you and then my husband, but always you.

Husband? Okay. Stoic figure, dull. Away mostly and cannot compete with our love so doesn’t try – I would say he likes golf or motor-sport and the golf has created nice biceps at least in one arm which I like – so sometimes we find each other in the night when you have done something special and we roast in your news and think, well, at least he managed to mow the back lawn and I have cleaned the conservatory windows, despite the creeping rheumatism, but yes, your specialness. It reminds us. This husband, he loves me for you now where before he loved me hoping for you and this has kept knitting us together when a million restless nights and money worries and broken boilers and the fact that he spends without thinking and I save 3p on Own Brand washing powder and solve the conundrums of voucher codes to compensate, when twenty seven Milk Tray birthdays – that’s 108 Turkish Delights which I hate and he should know it – have come and gone and tried to fray us.

Maybe he isn’t into golf if we’re so strapped. Maybe he likes football and supports Man U. Once, he will have bought me Gucci perfume and I will have thought we’d ‘turned a corner’ but the perfume stings my skin so I don’t wear it and he develops a sulk over the fact I don’t wear it and this multiplies like the tribbles you liked. But yes, he is stoic, baby. He is that. And that is something you don’t know yet.

I’ve stared out of windows waiting for your various bikes to curl in; the pink BMX, the girls’ mountain bike, that brief flirtation with the Irish boy and his moped. When you are home, the fear that spreads like damp when you leave recovers. Tonight, you have curled into the drive in a taxi, its engine tractor-loud, its driver a man who has delivered me from Morrisons many times, and waits till you are inside the door. We smile.

I’d been expecting you, baby.

You are shaped in my bed as you were shaped in the womb. It is nearly Christmas and where once there would have been furry tinsel, BLUE and GOLD and GREEN – LOUDLOUDLOUD! and CHRISTMAS there is sedate Colour Scheme tasteful silver beads Christmas. You are in my bed and I want you to sleep like in the fairy tales I sewed you, till the pain is gone. I wonder if this is Beauty’s real reason for her 100 year sleep. I hear your breath now, as I would hear it at your cot or when I brushed your hair. I ease and shift and play a soap on mute (I’m not sure which will be running these days). My knee clicks. He never could look me in the eye, is what I will think when I watch people shout at each other.

I had to hide when you became a woman. I had to reassess and rethink and rethink and rethink. How do I speak to you now, baby? Put your coat on becomes Do you think you need a jacket? I had to sting with your separation and exasperation and mu-um and rolled eyes to your friends when you thought I couldn’t see. And when you’d gone (upstairs for a sleepover to giggle about inflated or deflated willies, the language of this would change but not the content, and argue the merits of Peter over Paul, or out in mousse-crunched hair and sparkly tights and heels you won’t understand how to walk in for ten years, in a skirt you might roll up in the school loos, excited that you have made yourself into a decoration when I know one day you will look at school girls with stiff, high hairstyles and rolled skirts and wish) I’d smell the boots I like you wearing for walking Charlie. He’s called Charlie now, this Spaniel. I’m confident of that. Comfortable, sand-coloured. Things you can run in should you need to. One day we will have a conversation where I admit that I had dreams too and that your father is stoic, yes, but that marriage – marriage is not what you expect but it is also not that, it does not make your eyes swell over and your features vague like a newborn mouse, or shape you into a prawn on my bed.

Every time you leave until every time you’re home the feeling sits inside me, an electric hum. The same feeling I have felt at the kitchen window waiting for your bike, at the school gates when I get a claw of fear that the gush of children will trickle and then run out and mine won’t be there and sometimes I test what that would feel like. That yawning, unsteady horror. The feeling is not morbid or overwhelming, but it sits and waits with me as Charlie does, turning his chin from left paw to right and checking the clock.

This feeling wishes you would always wear sensible shoes and only walk Charlie and never go to discos in demi-stilettos and marry a man called Jeff or Rob (this still doesn’t matter) in ivory satin courts, who calls me Mrs and never mum and is stocky and makes you, my bright, bright girl, whose insteps I’d tickled when no one else was there, when you were still heated from me and your toes had scrunched in such a way my stomach pinched and I blew like a horn with delighted laughter, a moment I thought to share but didn’t, because you were mine, are mine, baby, not a man’s who makes you fall into me with your perfect haircut and outfit that is more expensive than my wardrobe which both embarrasses me and makes me proud,  makes that fear which has sat inside me all your life – no, before your life – waiting though hoping not for this moment, but waiting, because all mothers will have these moments won’t they? Because that is what happens when you say yes. But he has made that feeling real. I feel wrong with the weight of it. Your eyelids are glossy purple. I think of a prawn and its vague black eyes, skinned over or showing under nude skin. 

You won’t go back, will you, baby?

I have whispered it but you moan like Charlie – where is Charlie? Ah, he’s near the bedroom door, nose to tail, and you half push yourself up, sleepy, hair uncoiling to smack the ivory duvet. The stoic husband is away and he won’t know, will he? You have demanded this and I have nodded. 

You will get over him. After you go back and back and I wait for phone calls or knocks I don’t recognise but will somehow be familiar. I will see you scab over after the last of these times when he returns his wedding ring in a Jiffy bag with another woman’s name crossed out on the front. You will be overdone. I will think of those ticklish feet and how the ground should have been soft enough for you to walk barefoot forever. You should not be a person who shrugs your shoulders. This will make you resolute, it will make you dangerously focussed, you will grow more and more special but you will date, yes, but only if people ask. You won’t search. There will be someone who seems kind but who your stoic father who never has an opinion has an opinion and he will cheat and you will shrug your shoulders. There will be another man who we all shake our heads at because he looked me in the eye and seemed to be from a good family and not someone who would leave you in the middle of the night.

And then, baby? Then Jeff or Rob will get in touch and I will ache, waiting, and love you when you shrug your shoulders. I will wonder about you at home in the house you’ve bought yourself, something I had never done, crying over this man. You still love him. I’m your mother; I know. And you still don’t really understand.

You’ll get up each day and draw on your profession, your suitcase rolling thunder outside your swanky flat (I tell people you’re staying at the Hilton) and you go and be amazing and the world sometimes complements you in articles I find on the Internet in between taking Charlie out, who’s on his last legs at this point, and keep in a folder called ‘skittles’ so you won’t find it (I have my secrets, too) and roll your eyes at your silly old mother who used to do handstands with you, like you used to when your friends came for sleepovers.

I don’t know your ending. I don’t know it. I imagine for you one day that you stop having to shrug your shoulders. You stop having to be amazing to fill the erosion that Jeff or Rob has created in you. That you stop being stopped, like the red and pink confetti. I still know more than you in this respect and I don’t feel glad for it, baby, I would give it to you. I have lost breath keeping pace, writing in my diary what part of the world you will be in so I can say, How is Copenhagen? Or how is Brussels? (I think you do something political, something helpful and you bring me chocolates in miniature boxes with elaborate ribbons that smell intensely of cocoa even though I now keep jewellery in them and make me almost care about the body I once had that you now tow around airports, shrugging at men’s glances) The best I have is something you still don’t know and that is my saddest thing.

When you were newborn, I tickled your feet and thought it would all be much simpler.

For us to blend together again, I need to not feel embarrassed that I know something you don’t. I didn’t want stoic for you, baby. I wanted those skittle shoes, baby. But stoic, yes, now stoic looks good, doesn’t it?This is not modern, no, but we will blend again when you sit here as I sit here now, holding a white wand with two dots that ask a question which will be echoed by a man who might become the husband if I can find the answer when I finally emerge from the bathroom: What do you want to do, baby? 

I am brushing your hair in a room with beige carpets and stickers of all the things you enjoy this year on an oval mirror; you’re playing with an old lipstick of mine, a similar shade to the one you’ll wear at your wedding where I will fuss behind you, raking loosening ringlets with my fingers. See you off into a Jaguar, stop you as you tuck yourself away, confetti hiding your mouth. If I can see it blow away, I think. If I can see that.

Guardian masterclass, Manchester

Just a little plug – I’ll be teaching on this course in Manchester on November 30th. Details and other tutors are below – there are a few places left. It’s a day event and my section focuses on structuring narrative and the editing process.

See link below for details:

http://www.theguardian.com/guardian-masterclasses/an-introduction-to-self-publishing-course-manchester

Course content

The masterclass will cover:

• The book marketplace

• The economics of self-publishing

• The publishing process

• Selling your book

Tutors

Dr Alison Baverstock

Edward Peppitt

JD Smith

Sarah Dobbs

Nick Sidwell

Project U 2 (not the band)

So Unthology 4 and Red Room were launched on 7 November. I had a ‘nice’ drive down to Norwich to celebrate and do a little reading alongside some of the other wonderful writers in the collections.

It was brilliant to finally meet some writers whose work I already knew – Sarah Bower who is jetting off somewhere special to complete her third novel and Rowena Macdonald whose collection Smoked Meat was short listed for the Edge Hill prize. Both great stories too in Unthology 4 and Red Room respectively. Sarah’s spanning a whole lifetime of a marriage and Rowena’s updating the friendship between Ginevre Fanshawe and her tutor. Hilariously delivered. I also really enjoyed Ruby Cowling’s story with its lovely ending – I won’t spoil it. Turns out Ruby used to be my manager at AQA and has a file on me. (Not really) Yet evidence of small world syndrome.

Then there were writers who were celebrating first time publication. One of my favourites was Marc Jones’ story Murder of Crows. Compelling and quietly written – I need to finish.

Red Room and Unthology 4 are out now. Submissions are being accepted for Unthology 6. See unthankbooks.com

Hope Fades for the Hostages – 3am Reading at The Bluecoat

This was a lovely night of readings from Ailsa Cox with her story that was commissioned for the anthology, Hope Fades for the Hostages. Told in three distinctive voices (student readers were brought in to give this sense on the night) it considers the moment of 3am for people in other places. I found that really intriguing. 3am here, that old and lonely none-time when you somehow feel the world is quiet, and yet are somehow more aware of the rest of the world.

Alongside a beautiful stage which my photographs don’t do justice (a hung crescent moon and stars) students read poetry and fiction, written themselves or by old favourites. I read a tiny extract from Behind all the Closed Doors (Red Room) which I hoped was fitting, as it’s about the moment a young boy’s mother dies in the night.

The wind raged outside, perfectly (I thought) and we ended on a suitably biblical note. All in all, really good.

Here’s a great review of Ailsa’s collection The Real Louise

Plus a link to one of Ailsa’s stories  -  No Problemo

The Red Room, New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës

Reblogged from Petals and Pages:

This collection of short fiction is another Unthank publication (I recently reviewed their new writing Unthology here) in which editor A. J. Ashworth has gathered together twelve new stories inspired by all things Brontë. As she explains in her Introduction, the collection came about as part of an effort  to celebrate the Brontës' association with the village of Thornton where, "Our nation's most famous sisters - Charlotte, Emily and Anne" were in fact born.

Read more… 519 more words

Another review of Red Room - out tomorrow!

Redrumredrum – I mean, Red Room. Readings, launches and 3 am

Am doing stuff.

First up, Ailsa Cox is reading her new short story, Hope Fades for the Hostages at 3am, a spectacular spooky night at The Bluecoat.

Some Edge Hill students are reading and I’ll be sharing a little snippet from my story in Red Room.

More info here

Have a look, come along! 2 Nov, 7.30pm onwards

***

Also, am then off to Project U, for the launch of Unthology 4 and Red Room.

Tell me if you’re coming and you’re um, Northern (so we can share stuff, yes?)

7 November, Norwich, 7.30pm

Sign up here

Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes, edited by AJ Ashworth and featuring David Constantine, Alison Moore, Simon Armitage, Sarah Dobbs, David Rose and many more.