Sarah Murphy
Arts Council England Fellowship at The Word Hoard
Artist in Residence
July 17th - December 18th 2007

As well as working on her own writing, Sarah collaborated with Word Hoard artists in a variety of ways. Our first discussions after her arrival in July were around creating a performance version of her anti-war piece when bill danced the war. she also be worked with close to the bone.

Fellowship journals begin here:

1st August 2007
marvellous sound artist Shaun Blezard aka Clutter, of Barrow Island, will bring his skills with live processing, sampling and remixing to work with us on the performance version of when bill danced the war. part of net label and world liberation programme earth monkey productions, Shaun will combine with saxophonist and Word Hoard member Keith Jafrate to begin the collaboration with Sarah later this month.

Tons of work with close to the bone scheduled for August & September: writing, filming, editing, making. look here for results of work already done before then.

6th August 2007
we've been discussing a project around ideas of displacement and locality, how we place and situate ourselves in a landscape. we're planning to visit the Peak district in September, to look at stone circles and other landmarks, and in the meantime we'll probably do some wandering closer to The Word Hoard, looking at industrial sites in the Pennines. everything we talk about seems to move towards a common, inclusive process, where the end result, whatever it may turn out to be, arises from writing, sound, music, drawing, painting, photography and film. will everything turn out the same, we wonder, like mixing all the colours of the plasticene? part of the point is to find out how processes define and individualise themselves through process itself. please check back here to see what arises: at this time we're still very much starting everything, so there will be a small time-lag before work appears onsite.

Sarah Murphy's latest book is The Forgotten Voices of Jane Dark, a combination of short fiction and personal essays, published in autumn 2003 by Pedlar Press. She has published three collections of short stories, The Deconstruction of Wesley Smithson (Mercury Press 1992), Comic Book Heroine and Other Stories (NeWest 1990) and die tinkerbell die (Spout Publications 2002). She has also published the novels Connie Many Stories (Mercury Press 1996) The Measure of Miranda (NeWest Press 1987) and Lilac in Leather (Pedlar Press 1998). Lilac in Leather has been described by Sharon Twiss as "no bathtub novel. It raises questions of relationship, gender relations, power dynamics, consumption, art and sanity. The details of the narrative are not laid out in a neat package for the reader to discover in order - it's messy, as any woman's story of her teens and twenties would be, and requires that the reader work hard at staying on track. Sarah Murphy's visually dynamic prose and honesty is disturbing, emotionally powerful, beautiful, and worth the effort."

Her short fiction, non-fiction and translation work has been widely published and anthologised in Canada and Australia, in anthologies and journals such as Erotica: An Anthology of Womens Writing, TESSERA, NeWest Review and West Coast Review, as well as in the text in the UK.

In her first book published in Britain, Sarah Murphy explores the dangerous borderline between truth and fiction, memory and invention, to find a way of telling that can do justice to the enormity of everyday life. these writings are also scripts for performance, and they carry the urgency of a secret revealed for the first time.

Consisting of 9 linked stories, interleaved with Sarah's strange, compelling images created especially for the book, die tinkerbell die is an exceptional collection, unlike any fiction currently published in Britain.

Sarah Murphy spins her tales of the tragedies of everyday life the way Bob Dylan used to write songs. In her beguiling, savage and sometimes witty style, she prods her readers to look into worlds they prefer to ignore. The Ottawa Citizen

...written so close to the bone you can hear the scraping. The Saskatoon Star Phoenix

Funny, angry, passionate, joyful, Sarah is a true storyteller, and her fiction shows a profound understanding of our need to make stories, to communicate, to confirm ourselves and our understanding of the events that make us who we are, and the world what it is. Dianne Darby