Thursday 26 July 2012


So. This is how it is.


Publishers in SA go a little way towards helping their authors market their work, but mostly it is up to us and word of mouth. So please bear with me, I am going to mouth away for a while.

Eloquent Body is the result of over 5 years work. It felt like my life work; I felt propelled to garner everything that had helped me through crises in art, psychology and medicine, and to investigate these fields further. I wrote it to assist my workshop participants and my patients and myself. We all have areas where we do not act in our own best interests, and we need to get curious about that. Methinks.

The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive. This is hugely gratifying, as I did what I had to do, wrestled it down onto the page, and was frequently worried that I was not doing my subject matter justice. Eventually I just had to walk away, and hope that it was good enough.

It turns out that Eloquent Body is a word-of-mouth book; lucky thing, as it has only had two (good) reviews since the launch. I have had a number of people ordering several copies to send to their friends and relatives. One young man asked me to write an inscription to his family member: Dear X, Let go. Get a life. I declined politely.

The more books go out into the world, the more people are likely to talk about it, the more people will buy it. This is not (just) about my retirement plan (heh heh), this is about getting interesting, helpful and collated ideas out into the world.

So, if you liked the book, for the month of August 2012, I am offering copies at R140 each if you fetch them from Kalk Bay or Tokai. If you are wondering about what to give your mother / uncle / friend / lover as a present, please consider Eloquent Body at this much reduced price. You will be gifting me too. You can place orders at dawn.garisch@gmail.com.

Sjoe. Phew. How do I look with my marketing hat on?

Saturday 7 July 2012



    A WORKSHOP ON WRITING MEMOIR


Writing is a way of getting to know who you are, what you are feeling and how you relate to people and the planet. Writing memoir focuses this project on the themes or motifs in one’s own life. We each have a life motif that is more or less unconscious. Yet a distinctive and evolving pattern binds our journey from birth to death into a whole coherent piece.
Imagination is an extraordinary tool. In this workshop we will reclaim imagination as a means to release ourselves into awe and creativity, connectedness and purpose, awareness and pleasure. Through becoming conscious of and engaging with the images that shape our time on earth, we will discover ways to live more creatively, as well as finding refreshing approaches to put our personal stories down on the page.
Beginner writers are welcome.
    Venue:             The Forge, Windsor Rd, Kalk Bay      
     Fee:                 R1400
     Dates:              Thursday 13th to Sunday 16th September 2012          
     Times :            9am to 2pm daily
     To book:              dawn.garisch@gmail.com

      A deposit of R400 secures your place.
References:
 “I found Dawn Garisch’s memoir-writing course extremely useful and helpful: she provided a structure that held all of us would-be memoirists firmly to our task, while at the same time helping us to get in touch with our senses, our fears, our dreams, our stories. The image that comes to mind is of holding tight to the golden thread that will allow us to go down to the depths and emerge again, unscathed though not unchanged. The sense of community and support that is born of twenty-odd people meeting daily for four days to address themselves to such a deeply individual task was also one of the unexpected pleasures of the experience. I would heartily recommend this course.”
- Athalie Crawford
 “This course helped me to break through the block created by my own diffidence and reluctance, enabling me to find and become confident in the thread I must pursue in order to be true to myself. Dawn created an atmosphere of trust in which the participants felt free to go as far as they wished on this journey into memory and onto the page. The structure of the course was well thought out and effective, both day by day and as a whole. An unusual, highly effective and striking aspect of Dawn’s facilitative work is her insistence that writing, memory and creativity are not simply to be found in the ‘head’, but are lodged in and distributed through the ‘memory’ to be discovered in the body itself. The course was enlightening, stimulating, moving and fun.”
- John Cartwright
"Dawn's memoir writing workshop was a finely crafted and facilitated process that encouraged and enabled us to write. My creativity was stimulated by her use of poetry and prose, her listening and sensing exercises, her considerable knowledge and experience of the act of writing, and her easy manner when it came to holding and guiding the group and the process. In short: an excellent and productive experience!"
- Judy Bekker
“The evaluations from your students indicate that many felt they benefitted greatly from your facilitation and encouragement to draw on their own inner resources to spark their writing, and that through this they gained knowledge about themselves and insights that were highly enriching to the writing process. They were given some methodology and tools and felt supported and enabled to be self-reliant in their work. Although this made others used to a more didactic approach insecure at first, they adapted to it and acknowledged its value.”
                                                                                               - Feedback from UCT Summer School 2012
Short Biography
Dawn Garisch has had five novels and a collection of poetry published, a short play and short film produced, and has written for television, magazines and newspapers. Three of her novels have been published in the UK. In 2010 Trespass was short-listed for the Commonwealth prize in Africa, and in 2011 her poem Miracle won the EU Sol Plaatjie Poetry Award. A non-fiction work Eloquent Body was published by Modjaji in March. She runs workshops on writing and creative method, is a practising medical doctor and lives in Cape Town.