Crafting diverse storytelling practices with Sally O'Reilly

Sally O'Reilly is a writer whose versatile work spans the creative arts and beyond. She writes for performance, page, and video. Her work often combines the theoretical, the technical, the comic, the fantastical, and the psychosocial. 

In this episode, Sally talks about her sideways entry into the profession of writing, how she was inspired by working in a pub in London's Soho for many years, and she goes into great detail about the challenges of writing an opera for the first time or becoming an art reviewer.

Instagram: @manfredopenarms

Website: https://www.sallyoreilly.org.uk/

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Transcript

Matt: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to the Teach, Inspire, Create podcast. I'm your host Matt Mosley, Chief Examiner for Art and Design at UAL Awarding Body. Each episode I speak to artists and creative industry [00:00:15] leaders about their experience of teaching and being taught, who or what inspires them, and how they explore creativity in their work, with the hope of showing you that there are infinite ways to be creative in the arts.

Today my guest is Sally O'Reilly. Sally is a [00:00:30] writer whose versatile work spans the creative arts and beyond. She writes for performance, page, and video. Her work often combines the theoretical, the technical, the comic, the fantastical, and the psychosocial. 

In [00:00:45] this episode, I'm going to be talking to Sally about her sideways entry into the profession of writing, how she was inspired by working in a pub in London's Soho for many years, and she goes into great detail about the challenges of writing an opera for the first time or becoming an art reviewer. [00:01:00] There is a transcript available for this episode, please click the link in the episode description so you can read as you listen.

Matt: Hello Sally. 

Sally: Hello Matt. 

Matt: I wanted to ask you if there was a [00:01:15] first time that you wrote something for yourself or enjoyed a writing process as a kind of creative output?

Sally: Oh, enjoyment. Now that's difficult. 

Matt: Oh yeah, well that, yes, okay, yeah. 

Sally: Some say the definition of a writer is someone who doesn't enjoy [00:01:30] writing.

Matt: Yes, true. I can imagine there's some angst involved. 

Sally: Yeah. I do remember trying to write a book, probably when I was about nine, and making the little book, but not actually getting around to writing anything in it, and then hiding it under the bed. [00:01:45] Yeah, that's probably emblematic of my relationship to writing to some extent.

Matt: So you're still sort of writing things and then hiding them for a bit and then getting them out again. 

Sally: Yeah, yeah. 

Matt: Interesting. 

Sally: Or letting them gestate maybe. 

Matt: Right. What were you [00:02:00] writing about in that book? 

Sally: I've no idea. I do remember writing for my O level exam and it was English. We had to write a composition and I remember just throwing all my vocabulary at [00:02:15] it, and not having a clue where I was going with this narrative. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Sally: And kind of thoroughly enjoying words, but actually not really understanding what writing was for or what I was trying to do with it. And [00:02:30] that too is something that stuck around for a while. Enjoyment is marbled through with something else. 

Matt: So it's a sort of interplay between, I guess, words as a sort of artistic format, like a material that you can play with and [00:02:45] use, and then, and a narrative, now, is that kind of? 

Sally: Yeah, I mean, there's sort of a mode of communication, maybe a mode of expression, but also a material of inquiry, I think.

Matt: But they're funny [00:03:00] words. I regularly encounter words I have no idea what they mean and they're sort of quite beautiful in their sound. And there's something quite nice I find about not knowing what a word is, and just sort of enjoying the sound of it, before you then attach a meaning to it. 

Sally: They're [00:03:15] definitely material. They're song. They're wooden. They have flight. Yeah, they have all of these qualities, I think. 

Matt: Because you've taken a slightly unconventional route into writing, haven't you? 

Sally: Yes. [00:03:30] Yes, it was a wriggly old route. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Sally: Yeah. So I did study fine art, undergrad and then when I finished that, I was in Hull, and I came down to London, and I didn't know what for, but I worked in a pub in [00:03:45] Soho for about eight years, nine years? Full time. Uh, tried out a few other things, like I worked in animation for a while, in production. After a few other sort of false starts, this guy came into [00:04:00] the pub, he was a painter, and he used to bring in his 35mm slides, as they were then, of seascapes, and like hold them up to the pub lights, and I'd have a look at them, and I'd just sort of get out my old art school, like, lingo, [00:04:15] and just sort of throw that around for fun, and he was a bit impressed by it.

Matt: Yeah. 

Sally: So, his friend was setting up an art website, to sell art, but it also needed a magazine to attract the web bots, as they were called then. We had a [00:04:30] meeting, or maybe it was even an interview sort of, but at like 11 in the morning in a pub. 

Matt: That's the best kind of interview. Yeah. 

Sally: Yeah. And I said something about installation and he said, what's that? Oh, you're hired. And so I [00:04:45] started writing for this website. Well, actually I started making the whole website, it was just me and him. 

Matt: Right. 

Sally: And so I had to learn to code. Like I say, it was just writing reviews of Monet. 

Matt: Amazing. I mean, thinking about pubs and kind of artists and [00:05:00] creativity, it's interesting the role that pubs have played through, for the arts over the years, isn't it? 

Sally: Yeah, absolutely. You can observe and, or you can collaborate, you can participate. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Sally: And we had a brilliant landlady, Roxy Beaujolais, and she [00:05:15] had tonnes of friends who were writers and artists, and people came through. It was Soho, so, you know, people were bowling through.

Matt: Yeah. 

Sally: Back in the day. So it was kind of riotous, and she turned me on to literature, really. 

Matt: Yeah. [00:05:30] And I guess a lot of unexpected conversations just over the bar. 

Sally: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. What, I think what was interesting in ours was, there were a lot of advertising copywriters would come in, so there'd be some quite high end meetings going on.

And then you'd [00:05:45] also get students from St. Martin's, so there'd be some less high end meetings, but still very important creative chats. And then the pit musicians from Les Miserables, and they were the guys all dressed in black. They'd [00:06:00] have a couple of pints before the music, the curtains went up and then at the intermission they'd come in and sling down another couple of pints. 

Matt:  In the interval? 

Sally: They were very good customers. 

Matt:  That's amazing. Yeah. [00:06:15] During COVID you carried on with the pub theme, didn't you? 

Sally: Yes. So, Roxy, who runs the Seven Stars now, not far from here, behind the Royal Courts of Justice, she had to close the pub and was kind of devastated by [00:06:30] that. Life was rather empty for her, so I thought I would open an online pub that she could be the landlady of.

And she's a brilliant raconteur, so in this pub there are recordings of her telling anecdotes from, [00:06:45] from the pub that we were together in. There was a function room so bands could play. They could record sessions. And there's lost property, so people were invited to write descriptions of items that were found in the pub.[00:07:00] 

I had a friend who had a shop up the road from where I live in Crystal Palace, which also was closed and she was twiddling her thumbs. So I think some of the lost property items came from her, she would just find something, you know in her storage like a knitted [00:07:15] cauliflower and send me a photograph of that as lost property. 

Matt: With a beautiful description of a knitted cauliflower.

Sally: Well, then we get a writer to describe it. 

Matt: Amazing. Right. 

Sally: So there are lots of connections, people responding. 

Matt:  Yeah, so that kind of communal collaborative [00:07:30] thing still happening, but online.

Sally: Yeah and we made a pantomime in there as well, a video pantomime, that involved lots of musicians and voice artists, performers.

Matt:  Anyone and everyone could join the pub, they could just…

Sally: Yeah anyone could [00:07:45] just wander in, anyone could send an email with some… whatever they might want to do in there.

Matt:  Yeah, that's brilliant. So just going back to your initial interview, was that the kind of first time you [00:08:00] thought about writing professionally then?

Sally: Mmm, well it was the first time I had to do it professionally and it was just part of a bundle of things that I had to do for this website. It was incidental and then, then I sort of realised it [00:08:15] was the bit that I relished most and the website expanded, and some other people joined and I met some people from the actual art world and they introduced me to other editors of other [00:08:30] paper publications, Time Out especially, and I started reviewing for Art Monthly and Time Out and the usual places where people start writing for, and then it just snowballed.

And then after about 12 years, [00:08:45] I started to feel a little impatient, I think, or frustrated with the form and then branched out a little into other forms, fiction. 

Matt: What was your experience like as a, [00:09:00] as an art reviewer for those? 

Sally: When I started reviewing, I didn't know what I was doing. I have no schooling in art history or art criticism or nothing beyond kind of [00:09:15] usual kind of secondary school stuff in English either.

So I was making it up as I went along. And when I would start writing a review, I didn't know whether I was going to be positive or negative about the work, for instance. [00:09:30] So I would think about the work through writing and I came to understand reviewing as a thought process, as a way of coming to understand art in this particular instance of whatever I was reviewing, but also as a whole.

And [00:09:45] I felt very strongly about what I thought art should be, which I don't anymore. And I used to see art criticism as a forum for discourse and a forum for people to explore [00:10:00] how art was operating in society more generally and to kind of thrash out amongst us what we thought it should or could do.

Matt: Yes, so as a vehicle to communicate ideas or to change perceptions or to create.

Sally: Yeah, to be interfering [00:10:15] of other structures. 

Matt: Disruptive. 

Sally: Mm-hmm.

Matt: And so were you tasked with going [00:10:30] to see exhibitions? Was that how it, you would see the work in situ and then review it? Is that how the process worked? 

Sally: Yeah. I was always commissioned. I was never really good at proposing features 'cause like the universe is vast and how you choose [00:10:45] which segment of it to focus on has always troubled me, so I preferred to be sent places. 

Matt: And so when you said that you began to want to sort of segue out of that or kind of go in a different direction, what was the [00:11:00] first direction that you went in after reviewing? 

Sally: I felt a bit itchy about… I felt like I was writing marketing material for a luxury goods industry. It was round about that, the time where the art market was really, really [00:11:15] dominating and it was starting to feel awkward.

But people were still asking me to write catalogue essays for quite big institutions in this country and Europe. But there was also a bit of a moment where [00:11:30] artists were starting to enjoy people writing creative responses to their work. So I would say, yeah, I'll, I'll write something, but I don't want to just write an essay about the works in the show.

I want to respond [00:11:45] thematically or I want to write a script and I wouldn't really know what I wanted to do. I just always had this sort of ache to do something exploratory. 

Matt: Well, and to use that experience of you as the [00:12:00] viewer of their, or experiencer, of their work as a jumping off point for some, for a creative response, isn't it?

Sally: Yeah, and to write something analogous, something that did something similar to what the artwork is doing. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Sally: You know, a kind of fellow [00:12:15] traveler. 

Matt: And so was there a particular first version of that that stood out? 

Sally: I do remember writing something for Dave Austin in the Milton Keynes Gallery that was a script and I can't remember what the scenario [00:12:30] was, but it was in response to his quite playful paintings and I do remember the editor saying something like ‘yeah when it's sort of made up like this it's sort of hard to tell if it's good or not, isn't it?’ [00:12:45] Which is a fair point. 

Matt: I mean, can you tell us a little bit about the projects within which you've written for? 

Sally: Oh, okay, so let's think so yeah, they've been novels and short fiction and opera, [00:13:00] that's probably the most outlandish. 

Matt: Yeah. I mean I've seen the images from the opera. It looks incredible I mean, what was the process of creating that?

Sally: Well, so we've done a few, and I say we as me and a composer, Matt Rogers, who [00:13:15] also happens to be my partner.

Matt: Right. 

Sally: So we are collabolovers. 

Matt: That's convenient. 

Sally: Yeah. And that's sort of how it started. I met this composer and he introduced me to loads of musician friends. The great thing about musicians is that they always want to collaborate with one another, they're already in [00:13:30] five bands each. They all want to know what they can do with you in particular, because you're a new untapped mystery to them.

So Matt and I, he was asked by an opera festival to make a short [00:13:45] Opera. So he said, I think you and I could do something together, baby. So we did this short test one. And as ever, I had no idea what I was doing and had no, no history of the form, and [00:14:00] so who knows what that was. And then the next opportunity was when the Royal Opera House asked him if he had any ideas and he again asked if I wanted to have a go at it.

And then they asked us to go away and come up with a [00:14:15] like an outline and a series of scenarios and we did and then they had some more cogitation, because I wasn't a known poet or anything like that. I think in Opera the commissioners either like to commission known librettists or poets. So [00:14:30] there's a…

Matt: There is a sense of safety I suppose in that.

Sally: Yes and there's not a lot of words in opera, conventionally, so poets have the pacing that they're used to as well.

Matt: It's a lovely term, the libretto as well, isn't [00:14:45] it? 

Sally: Little book. Yeah. 

Matt: Is that what it stands for? Right. I had to, I had to look it up this morning.

Sally: Because in… because in musical theatre, it's called the book. So in opera, the little book is in recognition of how few words there should be in it. 

Matt: I see, OK. I mean, does that present a different [00:15:00] challenge as a writer as well? To think you have such a restricted amount of words to use to create something?

Sally: Yeah, I didn't, I didn't restrict the amount of words. I outraged the opera critics by having thousands of words in there. And they all said, ‘this is [00:15:15] too many words for an opera’. But we thought like all opera audiences probably, to the person, have watched television and film. They can deal with fast paced narrative. They don't need things to be treacly slow. 

Matt: Well, [00:15:30] I'm one of the, I, you know, having spoken to a few people involved in the opera world, one of the challenges for Opera is trying to push back on those traditionalists that want to hold on to these aspects of opera [00:15:45] which are actually potentially stifling it from reaching new audiences.

Sally: I think like most disciplines, there's many opera audiences and there is a contemporary classical music scene that produces some pretty amazing [00:16:00] operas. And maybe not many of them get produced at the big opera houses, but they're around. And the same with all the arts, I think there are different enclaves, different levels of traditionalists and [00:16:15] practitioners.

Matt: So could you tell us a bit more about that first opera that you were the librettist? Is that the right term? 

Sally: Librettist. 

Matt: Librettist for?

Sally: Yeah. It was called The Virtues of Things and it was a chamber piece, which meant that there's this [00:16:30] lovely phrase, which is, what are your forces? So there were five singers and I think 12 instrumentalists. Hmm, I might be slightly misremembering that. 

And it was set in the workshop of a family [00:16:45] who made props for opera. Aha. So you can see the potential there for some meta. It was a very meta opera. And the stage set was this quite lifelike reconstruction of an old style workshop with [00:17:00] tools, like families of tools, like jigsaws and spanners up the wall.

And rather beautifully, those tools were made by the prop makers in the opera house, and there'd be one real tool, and then there'd be a family of [00:17:15] different sizes of that tool made from balsa wood. So one would be like normal weight and the rest would be really, really light. Anyway, that has nothing to do with the plot. That's just a little backstage insight there. 

Matt: Yeah that’s brilliant.

Sally: And this family were [00:17:30] developing an illness in response to, have you heard of Stendhal syndrome, which is when people have a physical response, like a breakdown, a conniption of some sort, in response to objects of beauty. But in our [00:17:45] opera, it was objects of meaningfulness.

So they're actually making the props, the items that were causing this neurological physical response, and they had to bring in a freelancer. The [00:18:00] family are traditionalists and the newcomer has newfangled ideas about how things should be made and what things should look like. So the whole opera is a kind of essay in a way of, on making [00:18:15] creative processes. But it is also an opera in the, like, they all die at the end. 

Matt: So in terms of the design and creation of this Opera, what's your role as the writer within that? 

Sally: So, I guess it's slightly [00:18:30] unusual in that the composer and I work very closely together. We worked on the idea together and then I write the script and it changes as I write.

So, when we come up with the idea, [00:18:45] it's sort of loose. We don't really know the details of it. Maybe we don't even know the beginning, middle, end. We just know the world and some of the relations and the sort of things that we want to happen. And so then I [00:19:00] write it, and we pass it between us a fair bit and iron out some wrinkles because we, both of us, Matt and I, the composer and I, both make really complicated things with high metabolisms.

So [00:19:15] there's tonnes and tonnes of ideas and details in it, and sometimes it doesn't all quite line up and there are a few little irrationalities in it. So we have to take it all apart and I have to put it all back together again and sort of rewrite bits and when the libretto is complete, once the Opera [00:19:30] House have signed it off, then it goes to Matt, who then sets the words to music.

So it's always, well, generally it's the words first and then the music gets set to that. And then the score and words get passed to the Opera House, who [00:19:45] then send it to a director, or some directors, a few directors who might be interested. And we have a conversation with, with a few directors to see who suits, who speaks our language.

[00:20:00] And then they tend to come with a designer. I think with opera particularly, part of the excitement and difficulty is letting go when you have to hand it over to someone else. 

Matt: Yes, yeah, I can imagine. 

Sally: We did have great conversations with the [00:20:15] designer and the director so they know where we're coming from. And also we were in the rehearsal rooms as well. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Sally: So it's, it's discursive all the way through.[00:20:30] 

Matt: I wanted to ask you about your novel as well. Crude in particular. Yeah, I was really interested about that. I mean, could you tell us a bit about the the novel? 

Sally: Yeah, so I think I started it when I was 40 and I was [00:20:45] panicking. I go, ah! Life! 

Matt: Yeah, yeah. I'll write a book, because that's easy. Yeah. 

Sally: And I'd started to get a bit fed up with the art world as well. So there's a sort of critical take in there on the art world. It's set in a place called [00:21:00] Academia, where art and philosophy have the, I suppose, the social cachet of sport and pop that it does, they do in our world. And the protagonist is an art critic. She puts her foot wrong [00:21:15] on the radio and she, she gets into a bit of hot water and needs to retrieve herself. 

Matt: She's slightly like too honest. 

Sally: Yeah, she gets a bit carried away by the applause. But she needs to retrieve her, her public persona, her public standing. So she wants to write a [00:21:30] blockbuster thesis. And she meets some underground sensualists who are… they're interested in this peculiar cult substance called oil. So she, she tries to track down [00:21:45] this oil to write an amazing revelatory thesis about it. 

Matt: Yeah, I just, I also just really loved that kind of turning that narrative on its head in terms of like art becoming the kind of, perceived, [00:22:00] I don't know, like foundation of like the most important thing in society.

Sally: Yeah, imagine that. 

Matt: Yeah, and then oil is like this sort of subculture, this sort of frivolity that kind of is not widely talked about or known about. I just loved that kind of [00:22:15] turning the tables on those ideas. 

Sally: Yeah, it's possibly a bit of a cheap trick, but to invert things. It's a metaphor that can, you can run and run with.

Matt: Yeah. What was the process of writing a novel? 

Sally: That one took years. I mean, [00:22:30] I didn't take it seriously to begin with. I was just sort of dabbling about to see what I could figure out, what I could pull off. I got a travel bursary and then I realized, aha, right, okay, I've got to take this seriously then, and then I completed it and finished it.

The narrative is [00:22:45] chronological. It's linear. I was, I was finding my feet, I think. And then with the, with the most recent one, Helping Cucumbers, it's formally very, very different. And I think, weirdly, even though [00:23:00] the first one is linearly narrative and it has this kind of recognizable inversion in it, and the second one is formally much more scrambled and a bit more chaotic. I think the second one is a [00:23:15] bit more, well I've heard people have said it's a bit more accessible as it's set in a pub. 

Matt: Right, yeah, yeah.

Sally: I wonder if that's the thematics that are more accessible or whether there's just some, oh yeah, maybe I've got the hang of it now.

Matt: Yeah. Does the concept [00:23:30] come first before the action of writing or does writing happen and the idea and concept comes through that?

Sally: I tend to think formally, actually, and thematically, so I never, ever have an idea for a narrative. That's [00:23:45] cobbled together. I never know what that's going to be. But whether something comes out as a performance or as a novel, it almost doesn't matter.

Or maybe it's like the possibilities for getting it out [00:24:00] there might lead. I mean, maybe it's just as pragmatic as that. .

Matt: Yeah. 

Sally: Someone might say. Do you want to do a performance? Do you want to do an opera? 

Matt: Okay, yeah, yeah, the opportunity presents itself and then you, you can fill the space with, with something.

Sally: Yeah, and then if not, [00:24:15] if there isn't anything like that, then maybe that's when they settle into a page based form. Or then sometimes the book does lead. Yeah, I, I don't know the answer to that.

Matt: Yeah, because it's a very artistic, you know, approach to writing, isn't it? Sort of [00:24:30] walks between those different areas of…

Sally: Yeah, it walks a very wobbly line.

Matt: A very wobbly line. 

Sally: A drunken walk, maybe. 

Matt: It's very interesting. I was wondering as well if we could sort of segway slightly into teaching as well. Because you've taught quite a bit, haven't you? 

Sally: Yeah, yeah. That came [00:24:45] about because I was writing, I was very visible as a reviewer. And people think when you can write, you can also speak, which isn't necessarily the case, but they would ask me to come and do lectures.

And then from that, they [00:25:00] would ask me to come and do some days of tutorials or run some seminars and things. So that sort of slowly, like the writing sort of built up. So now I teach at the Royal College of Art and I'm a regular [00:25:15] visiting person at the Royal Academy and I'm a mentor at Open School East. So there's a few different models there, fee paying, non fee paying and then really community embedded.

So I like being involved in the full [00:25:30] spectrum. I started there and then I moved to Contemporary Art Practice and now I'm in the writing program, been there about seven years. And I'll have a go at anything else. 

Matt: So, so in your terms of your teaching, were you helping students to explore narratives or [00:25:45] was there a focus on terms of helping them to talk about their work?

Sally: Yeah, so I would never bring narrative or text to their work unless it was already there or I felt what they were trying to do [00:26:00] was crying out for it.

Matt: Yeah, when you were lecturing in those different spaces or teaching tutoring those different spaces, what does that look like in terms of work?

Sally: So these days, now that I'm in the writing program, that's very different to teaching on the contemporary art practice or the [00:26:15] painting programs. Then it was more tutorially based, so I would be very much in their spaces with them talking about what they were trying to do at that moment and giving them references.

And we would be discussing their ideas. It could get a bit [00:26:30] psychological at times, a bit therapeutic. But on the writing program, it's quite different because the medium is so difficult to share without everyone reading one another's work for hours on end. There's not really enough [00:26:45] time for that, so we have to find other ways of supporting learning. It used to be Critical Writing in Art and Design, so now it's just called writing, but it still has a bit of that focus.

But people [00:27:00] will come from say an art history background or they might be artists themselves or they might be poets. We've had anthropologists, economists, human rights lawyers. But it is primarily nonfiction, but that's not to say no to [00:27:15] if people do want to bring fiction to a project, and quite often it's a hybrid form. My colleagues will run critical reading sessions where there are set texts and the students discuss them together and they think about it in relation to their own [00:27:30] individual practices. And I tend to run sessions where there's more sort of spontaneous writing exercises.

Matt: Ok. So they’ll bring ideas into the room and then through the activities they'll develop these.

Sally: Yeah, we might be thinking about structure [00:27:45] or we might be thinking about voice or we might be working towards an end point, like at the moment we're collaborating with The Cosmic House in West London to make an ABC in response to the house. So every student is writing a [00:28:00] couple of short pieces about an object or an idea that's embodied by the house. So I'll run workshops that support different ways of thinking about writing through objects, so we'll set them prompts and we'll have discussions and [00:28:15] people come in to present their own methods of writing and thinking as well.

So it's quite a hybrid form of teaching.[00:28:30] 

Matt: Could you tell us a little bit about things that you're working on at the moment? 

Sally: Yeah, so I've got another novel that's coming into being. It seems to be about speaking and voice and logistics [00:28:45] management. 

Matt: Oh right ok, yeah.

Sally: I don't know where that's come from. I think we need more infrastructure in fiction. Fiction quite often, the fictional world seems to be a bit free floating and I think, come on, let's be a bit more realistic. 

Matt: Let's get to the [00:29:00] brass tacks of, yeah, the nuts and bolts of this. 

Sally: How does the world work? 

Matt:  Exactly. Yeah, operations. Absolutely.

Sally: How things have come to be as they are and how mangled the world is and how mangling it is. I don't have anywhere for it to go at the moment.

Matt: Okay. [00:29:15] Right. So you're not working to sort of major deadlines and things. It's kind of, uh, it's forming itself over, over time. 

Sally: There's generally several strata of time management things going on. So something else that's just about [00:29:30] to come out in spring is a new edition of the body in contemporary art. She's being published by Thames and Hudson and that was like a very contained written in four months kind of thing, so very different to writing the novel.[00:29:45] 

A bit like squeezing out a pumpkin. And then, the other thing which is ongoing is a performance collaborative with Janet Thomas and Clara Coffin called The Big Throw. Yes. So we did a performance event at Matt's [00:30:00] Gallery in December and we're working towards maybe doing another one in summer where we each make a piece and hopefully this time we can invite some other people to make pieces as well.

Sally: [00:30:15] And it's like a very convivial, supportive collaborative venture. 

Matt: Are you working independently on those pieces that will then get brought together? 

Sally: We start off independently and then we show them to one [00:30:30] another or we talk through them and we get feedback. 

Matt: Yeah, so there is workshopping.

Sally: We dramaturge. We act as one another's dramaturges. We might also perform in one another's pieces, if someone needs an extra pair of hands, we can press a button on someone else's [00:30:45] tech. It's like a tools and skills and resources sharing kind of approach. 

Matt: It sounds, I mean, it's lovely…

Sally: But actually even when writing novels, so Helping Cucumbers and the current one, also have input from other people.

So in [00:31:00] Helping Cucumbers, some artists appear in the pub. And some of them made new pieces to go in the pub. Some of them relocated existing pieces to go in there, but it was really nice to hand over sections of narrative space for [00:31:15] someone else to input and potentially make a whole mess of what it is that I was trying to achieve.

Matt: Yeah.

Sally: I find responding so much more exciting than sort of dragging everything up from my own interiority. 

Matt: Performing arts is a very collaborative course. [00:31:30] Students arrive on those courses and they're immediately part of a collective, you know, a performance collective or whatever, and they're under direction from people who are interested in directing. And then often the sort of art and design or like the fine art students, etc., they're feeling like they've got to [00:31:45] work much more kind of on their own and there's a sort of sense of isolation sometimes. 

Sally: I think the disciplines could learn from one another. 

Matt: Yeah.

Sally: Art has plenty that it can bring to theatre and opera. It has idiosyncrasies. It has [00:32:00] a messiness that I think other disciplines can take from.

But I think also that stripping away of, like, that stand alone tendency that artists have, I think is really important. 

Matt: Well, I think the most [00:32:15] interesting things happen in the spaces where those things collide, don't they? 

Sally: Yeah, I mean, the great thing about calling yourself a writer is that you also can just do quite straightforward jobs under that banner as well, like copy [00:32:30] editing as well. You've got this skill that you can sort of dial down certain aspects of it. 

Matt: So it can take you anywhere into lots of different industries. 

Sally: Yeah. 

Matt: Great. Well, hopefully you've inspired some of our students and listeners to be a writer. [00:32:45] 

Sally: Yeah, and to be a messy all over the place kind of writer. 

Matt: Absolutely.  We always ask our interviewee if they could set a creative provocation to our listeners, so that can be a thought, an action, a call to arms. [00:33:00] Do you have anything that you'd like to put to our listeners?

Sally: Well, actually, I just happen to have in my pocket here, in my back pocket, a video called How to Rewild Your Writing. 

Matt: Marvellous. 

Sally: So it's for anyone out there who feels like their writing has got a bit [00:33:15] tame lately. It's more explanatory in the video, but in short, what you need to do is just get a piece of pre-existing writing of your own, and think about what animal you would like it to be, [00:33:30] and then go and watch some videos of that animal in movement, and analyze that movement, and bring that new understanding of the movement of that animal.

You know, it might be sort of quite twitchy, or it might be really, you know, kind of fluid, mellifluous, a bit wriggly. Bring an [00:33:45] understanding of that movement back to the writing and rewrite your sentences, with that movement, somehow, they're installed in those words. The video will go into detail as to [00:34:00] quite what that means.

Matt: Oh, I love it. I think, yeah, I have to do quite a bit of quite dry policy type educational writing, so I'm going to make that more jellyfish, I think. 

Sally:  Perfect. Yeah. You can really sting your reader. 

Matt: Absolutely. Sting, [00:34:15] wobbly all over the place. Perfect. Yes. Thank you ever so much, Sally. That was absolutely wonderful.

Sally:  Thank you for having me.

Matt: Thank you for listening to this episode of Teach, [00:34:30] Inspire, Create. A massive thank you to Sally. What a brilliant interview and a really interesting person. I can't wait to read one of her books and think about how I can rewild my writing. If you want to know more about Sally and her work, you can visit her website sallyoreilly.org. uk and a link is available to the rewilding your writing video in the episode description. As always, we really hope you've enjoyed this podcast and are continuing to subscribe and share with your friends and family. Please rate and [00:35:00] review us where you get your podcasts as this really helps us to understand what you think of the show.

So as ever, thanks for listening and until next time, take care. Bye [00:35:15] bye.