On Saturday 6th July, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, UEA, led a workshop in the Sailors’ Reading Room as part of the event programme for the exhibition W.G Sebald- Far away but from where?
https://scva.ac.uk/art-and-artists/exhibitions/wg-sebald-far-away-but-from-where
Marking what would have been the 75th birthday of W.G. Sebald (1944–2001), the exhibition combines rare and unseen archive material with work by leading contemporary artists.
In Sebald’s celebrated book, The Rings of Saturn, the narrator visits the Sailors’ Reading Room on a journey along the Suffolk coast. Inspired by this passage in the book, the Sainsbury Centre invited Dr Sarah Lowndes to lead a shared reading and writing workshop in the Sailors’ Reading Room.
Prior to the event, Sarah presented the Reading Room with a copy of of ‘Like The Sea I Think’ which she edited.
Nell Croose Myhill – Learning Programme Manager, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, UEA describes the event.
Members of the group took it in turns to read aloud from the chapter set in the Sailors’ Reading Room, before pausing to discuss the text. This approach enabled a close engagement with the text, reflecting on the content, form and tone of the writing. Sarah posed questions at key points in the reading, allowing the group to consider key words or themes and gain a greater understanding of the way ideas and images were constructed.
Using the shared reading of Sebald as a point of departure and following our discussion, we each chose one word from the chapter we thought best exemplified Sebald’s writing:
Dark, Haunt, Hoist, Work, Great Height, Stray Individual, Reminiscences, Spectacle, Shimmering, Pallid, Detailed, Trail.
Using these words as a starting point, we each wrote a passage incorporating as many of them as we could. After ten minutes, some people shared what they had written. We heard about a mother at her sleeping child’s bedside; we heard of a refugee’s plight.
The next exercise mirrored that of Sebald’s narrator: we wrote about our journey to the Reading Room that morning. Following ten minutes of writing, some people read their pieces aloud. This time, we heard about a car journey along the Norwich ring road and the streets of Southwold, busy with tourists.
Just as Sebald’s writing offers divergent accounts of familiar places, the workshop offered a shared starting point for participants to creatively respond. The Sailors’ Reading Room – a place of many stories- was a wonderfully inspiring setting to imagine stories of our own.
