blank page | empty stage
Sarah Orrell
story, stage, Presence
humour, Memoir, Scripture, creative Thinking
Sarah Orrell writes across fiction and non-fiction, poetry, theatre and audio — often somewhere between the funny, the strange and the deeply serious.
Her work makes space for questions and encounter, beyond superficial certainty in search of a deeper knowing. Ordinary lives, with their everyday details, become unexpected treasure troves of the wonderful, and the things we cannot measure turn out to matter most.
Current Books:
The follow projects are currently seeking representation.
In non-fiction, Stay With Me: An Adventure in Going Through It offers a kind of a portable theatre of companionship through suffering, faith, and moments of absurdity. Scripture, Slowly is a Bible companion that steps back from answering questions or filling the gaps, giving the reader some extra elbow room.
In fiction, PERSPEX looks at what cannot be measured and how we encounter each other in a world of data. Papercuts and Paper Planes follows two men named Bob and their different journeys out of shipwreck. Surviving systems that were trying to be helpful sends them in opposite directions.
The Man with the Microscope and the Man with the Telescope is an all-age fable set in a lighthouse. Two friends and their goldfish navigate their days wearing lenses strapped to their faces with sellotape and string.
NON-fiction
Scripture, Slowly
Reading the Bible should be a fresh and extraordinary experience.
But we can find ourselves thinking only through what we've already heard about it — responses and interpretations other people came up with.
Scripture, Slowly is a year-long companion volume that steps back, leaving space for the reader to encounter the text for themselves.
With a light touch, it returns the reader to the page, and to their own life experience, leaving space to listen.
Selected passages from every single book of the Bible — Old and New Testament — over eight seasons that may be read straight through, or out of order, repeated, or skipped over.
The focus remains on the reader's unique relationship with the text.
Intimate, challenging, consoling, and personal.
Stay With Me: An Adventure in Going Through It
"Hi, how are you?"
Stay With Me starts here. It's a harder question than it seems, isn't it?
Through memoir, humour, thought experiments, and questions, author and reader share an imaginative conversation.
Adventure is redefined from the Hollywood epic to a journey into the unknown.
The author's own travel-writing blogs become part of the scenery, inviting readers to consider their own versions of adventure.
Stay with me could be the cry of a child. The fixed gaze of a midwife. A mountain guide calling you to dig deeper. The stranger at the roadside with someone on the edge of life and death…
A book for marginalia — for adding your own postcards and Polaroids.
Scripture, Slowly
clears the stage.
returns the reader
to the text
without
so many voices
in the way
Stay with Me:
An Adventure in
Going Through It
ponders
the empty stage,
sitting alongside
the reader
in the theatre
and on the road
reader and writer
sharing notes,
and jokes,
and
stories of love,
loss,
exile,
wonder,
and hope
fiction
PERSPEX
Set in the near future, where everyone is wearing Spex.
Edward is a recently widowed grandfather, helped by Charlie, his tech-professional grandson.
Charlie keeps a careful eye on him — stocking up on groceries, tidying things, monitoring his data, quietly.
It's not spying. Charlie's worn Spex all his life. Data is how works, isn't it? It's how we understand each other.
It's not until after his grandfather's death that Charlie realises what cannot be captured and measured, and the importance of the margins.
Papercuts and Paper Planes
Two men named Bob both hit the rocks. They have to fill in forms to get help, which is the next problem.
When life can't be reduced to tidy boxes, Bob with a Cat makes friends with other 'Bobs' on the margins, while Bob with a Dog climbs the ranks to become a 'George,' — and has the brainwave of solving everything through a prime-time TV show.
While Bob with the Cat is getting his haircut from a man who lives in a box, Bob with the Dog is sent to Scotland for taking it all so seriously.
The Man with the Microscope and the Man with the Telescope
The old strip of red paint around the lighthouse quietly flakes…
Meanwhile, upstairs lives the Man with the Telescope, and downstairs, the Man with the Microscope. All lenses are permanently attached. But nobody minds.
And there's a goldfish called Quark who doesn't say much. It's no wonder they all get on so well.
POETRY
Noah's Raft, An Aerial View
Inspired by ‘The Seating Plan’ (Mixed Media) by Pip Woolf
Newport Gallery February 2006.
Two-by-two the unruly crew go forth to mix and mingle
ignoring all requests to sit symmetrically and single.
He tries high-rising intonation, seating plan in hand - says
he’d feel safer if they’d settle down?
They sympathise, but stand.
Plan A is folded by day three
into a cracking aeroplane that hits the dove,
and then the sea.
Plan B.
For thirty-seven days and nights
unlikely social circles carve
in soft, warm, sawdust wrinkles, and re-carve.
Side-winding slides, hard hooves, wide-angled grooves
of dodgy treetrunk sealegs kindly skidding
round the humps of hidden heads.
Stir-crazy scribbling tails, and dips
where flustered, flapping wingtips lap the ground.
All Earth is drowned except for this blessed place
Where playful features crease upon a well-worn face.
THEATRE AND RADIO PLAYS
A two-person play shifting between crucifixion and temptation, film set and therapy room keeps changing goalposts.
Who is there to perform.
Who is there to really listen.
What's happening?
Reframing Jesus
Three Scenes in Darkness
A play moving from a man looping through an imagined life inside a flotation tank, to a deathbed held in the pause before a final baton rises, to a stage where the fourth wall dismantles itself before the audience's eyes and ears.
Official BBC procedures for Keeping Calm
A comic radio script imagining the corporation drafting new emergency guidelines for chaos, complete with fictional presenters buried under bureaucratic paperwork — delivered regularly by forklift truck.
Other WORK
Projects, Experiments, and things still in motion
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Virtual Camino - everyday pilgrimage right where you are
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Meet the Curator - seven anonymous, imaginative exchanges
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The Broken Shop - where found objects are treasured and made whole
Contact
For agents, publishers and collaborators
For publishing enquiries, creative collaborations, or to stay in touch.
hello@sarahorrell.com