Online Interview with Anthea Garman

Anthea has a wonderful blog Writing Across Genres. Check it out.

http://writexgenres.wordpress.com/dialogues/dialogue-with-dawn-strengthening-the-spirit-of-my-writing/

Poetry writing workshop at the FynArts Festival

I will be running a three day poetry writing workshop in Hermanus as part of their new cultural festival. Monday 10th to Wednesday 12th June. Get out your pencils and join me...
http://www.hermanusfynarts.co.za/

Oliver Sacks on Memory

What a lovely man and role model. I am reviewing his latest book "Hallucinations', which is fascinating reading. http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/04/oliver-sacks-on-memory-and-plagiarism/

A Tough Language

‘When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it should not be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that it what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say it how it is.

It isn’t a hiding place, it is a finding place.’

Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Dance Project with Bettie Coetzee Lambrecht

This collaboration, where I danced some of my poems for Bettie's camera, was a rich experience, and has resulted in a book: To Life; Dance It. The current trend towards an interdisciplinary approach to art and life can help us understand each other and ourselves better.

http://www.facebook.com/bettie.coetzeelambrecht/timeline/story?ut=32&wstart=1359705600&wend=1362124799&hash=594915223856875&pagefilter=3&ustart=1

The book and prints of the photographs can be ordered from Bettie: bcbrecht@gmail.com .

The Bird Novel

I have come to think of birds as the original anti-depressant. A friend posted the following to me today, which just about sums it up, and more. The review is about writing, keeping what is important alive, and having a reference point outside the narcissistic world of human beings:

http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article08221202.aspx

Memoir writing course in Cape Town Feb 2013

The next memoir writing course is from February 25th to March 1st 2013, mornings 9am to 1pm. For more information, please email dawn.garisch@gmail.com.

FOR THOSE OF US WITH DAMAGED SIGHT

Monet Refuses the Operation

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/236810

Review from Goodreads

This is not a book easily categorised. A non-fiction book, yes. Part memoir, yes. Part medical observances, yes. Then there is poetry and musing on how we live life - both socially, politically, career-wise and in the family. What I would not call it, is a self-help book. Yet, it may help. But no, the book does not strive to solve all your life's problems. Nor will it. 

Over the course of the year I have had to come to terms that my health problems are not curable. At least two of them are chronic conditions. Chronic - it will not end until I do. What I had to finally say to myself is, 'I will not live in fear.' To stop worrying how bad it will be later. This is very different from living in denial or some fantasy land where all is happy-go-lucky. One needs to do today what one can to ensure the body works as best it can in the future. This means being aware of the condition, the options to manage it and making sure life is - as best one can - lived to cause minimal harm. But one must still live. And one must not sit and stew, creating horrific scenarios playing 'what if.' Practical - fine. But spending too much time worrying that someday I may be unable to write / walk - or whatever - is only going to make living today harder. 

Neither condition is like breaking a bone. There is no perfect manual that says, 'If X happens, do Y.' It is more of guessing game between PT, medicine and making changes in my day-to-day life. Nor does the PT and meds always 'work' the way we thought they would. There is this fine line we all walk, trying to make things better and not worse. Sometimes something looks promising and actually turns out to be a poor choice. Learning as we go, while still trying to live a life. 

Having others in my life respect my new boundaries and being willing to help or work within my boundaries is helpful. 

What does not help is people telling me to 'not give up hoping for a cure.' The cure will be discovered or not regardless if I hope for one. Right now I'm busy figuring out how to open a can or get my groceries loaded into the car. Or how to type out my thoughts. Practical suggestions in these matters ARE helpful (like the person who reminded me that there IS the invention called an electric can opener). Hoping for a cure does not actually DO anything, nor does it make it any more or less likely for a cure to be discovered. 

Nor do I have patience for those who ask me me to be grateful for my current state. I am, however, grateful the author addressed this - especially the load of crap heaped on cancer patients as if their 'negative attitude' CAUSED cancer. 

The author also has a chronic condition. What I took away from her words is a woman trying to learn to live with her body. That her body is also linked to her mind, and the two co-exist together. What happens to one can impact the other - but not necessarily 'cure' each other. There needs to an understanding so one can live - keep mentally sane - while also an acceptance that THIS is the body you live with. There are unknowns. There are question marks hanging over the body's future. How we mentally deal with this unknown - like the unknowns in all aspects of life - will dictate how well a person lives each day. 

This is not an advocacy to plaster smiles / stiff upper lip / deny anything is wrong. In fact, the author is very honest about emotion, including the small sorrow that she felt when her project - this book - was at its conclusion. She brings out the imagery of a dance - the mind and body learning to move out of respect of one another. To be give the self space to morn / grieve - yet also not to wallow. 

Such fine lines. We like things put in sound bites: Be positive! Exercise is healthy! Work hard!
The truth, however, does not fit so neatly into slogans. Which is perhaps why I am rambling rather than describing this book. 

What I do know is this: I read many, many books - more than I even bother to list on goodreads. There are books that I enjoy, but never loan or buy for another because I can not easily pin-point people I know in my life who are a good match for that book. Then there are books that while I read them names of people who also NEED this book keep popping into my head. I have already bought two copies of this book. I easily see myself giving this to three more people. Not loaning - because I visualise them wanting their own to lend to others. I look forward to hearing what bits intrigued others. I am sure there will be many differing responses. As for me - I've got over 30 stickies peeping out from the pages. 

It is that kind of book.

- Tiah Beautement

Top Seller Kalk Bay Books

Another shot in the arm: Eloquent Body is the top selling book at Kalk Bay Books for the past year. Thank you to a great book shop.

A Great Leg Up

I am pleased to report that Eloquent Body was rated one of the top ten books published locally in 2012:
http://notnowdarling.co.za/top-ten-2012/

Wonderful review of Eloquent Body in Slipnet by Liesl Jobson

http://slipnet.co.za/view/reviews/bearing-witness-to-the-truth-of-our-own-lives/

Article for Body Language, Mail & Guardian 16th Nov 2012

Ordinary Madness

Recently an overweight friend announced proudly: ‘I lost two kilogrammes this week, so I celebrated by going to the deli and eating a big piece of chocolate cake.’

The other day I was called to see a patient who was having palpitations and difficulty breathing. Her symptoms were caused by a large intake of caffeine, nicotine and the stress of building renovations. I advised her to reduce drinking coffee and smoking, and to look at how she can manage her situation better. ‘Oh I can’t give up coffee and cigarettes now,’ she objected. ‘I am far too stressed for that.’

These are wonderful examples of ordinary madness. Both these women recognised the irony, and we had a good laugh.

When I started out as a doctor, I thought well-presented arguments would change people’s minds. Here are the facts, I would declare, conjuring up ghastly images of blackened, stiff lungs, and scarred, hardened livers. I would draw graphs, and pull out charts. My patients’ eyes would glaze; they would wait impatiently for me to finish so they could hurry off to the pub to have a double whiskey and a smoke. I could see them laughing with their buddies about the ridiculous GP while hacking up pieces of lung.

My training is in evidence-based medicine - prescribing treatments that have been proven to work. Yet if my patients acted on what researchers know is good for health, I might well be out of a job. Self-inflicted conditions are the doctor’s bread-and-butter.

I confess that I, too, exhibit some worrying trends. I bite my nails. I would rather no-one knows that I tear off bits of my own body with my teeth while reading. Not again, I think. What happened? This has to stop. I work with the public. I put my hands on their bodies, and they look down and see: a self-mutilator. My patients will know I am as mad as they are.

I have painted my nails. I have invested in gloves which remain at the bottom of my sock drawer. I sit on my hands while reading. I have a nail file next to my computer to deal with those irritating little sticky-out bits that tempt me to the point of my undoing. I reassure myself that - unlike eating sugar when you are diabetic – nail-biting is not a life-threatening condition.

In my defense, I never hurt myself. Almost never. I have perfected the art of nibbling down to the verge of hurt.

Rationally, like quitting smoking or resisting the cream cake, I could just stop. Stop it. STOP it. But the groove is so deep, so well-worn, so . . . potentially comforting. If logic is frequently, and surprisingly, unhelpful, instead of trying to get rid of our non-rational ways, we could turn and face them. Bravely, with curiosity.

For thousands of years, humans have understood why we are here and what to do about it by telling stories. Thunder was an angry god. The moon was Mantis’s shoe. Now that science gives us new ways of looking at thunder and the moon, many have ceased to take stories seriously.

Yet we resist being fully known through the tape measure and the set square. We are poetic as well as scientific beings. We respond to holy stones, lotus flowers and sacrifice. These images stimulate the poetic foundation of the mind – which merges and connects.

Mythological narratives inform our decisions. Psychologists and artists know this; their work is to reveal these underlying patterns and motifs.

The bite at my fingertips is also in my back. I have the jaws of a bull mastiff locked into my right thoracic back muscles. I have tried many therapies, but it is determined to hang on forever.

My backache is part of an autoimmune condition. There are scientific ways to describe my intransigent illness. Doctors usually stop at that. Yet the dog also resides there. This is the poetry of the body – the subjective experience. It is another way of understanding, and it is as valuable as medication.

My back talks to me in the only way it can, using symbol / symptoms, making me aware of an embedded story. Since investigating the biting motif through imagination and art, I am not as tensed against the ferocious canine. When I notice the grip, I become aware of a need to get tough, more protective.

The body does not speak English, so it can be difficult to work out what these crazy symptom-poems are saying. I wait, with curiosity, for the ordinary madness of my story to unfold. And sometimes I risk appearing really deranged by suggesting this approach to my intransigent patients. 

Review of Eloquent Body for the SA Medical Journal

by Prof Peter Folb 

There is a creative artist within every person and everyone has something unique to explore.   Few realise and actualise it; many have no time or interest, or are overcome with the apprehension of self-revelation.   It may be that doctors and scientists have a special opportunity or talent for creative art, be it music, poetry, writing or the fine arts, given their privileged insights into the human condition and the scientific method.   One thinks here of Chekhov, Marie Curie, Borodin, Frida Kahlo, William Carlos Williams, AJ Cronin, Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Alexander Doblin, Keats, and Kathe Kollwitz.   Not uncommonly, patients, too, seek refuge in the creative arts.

In “Eloquent Body” Dawn Garisch examines her own creativity in a frank and carefully researched semi-autobiographical new book.   She is medical practitioner, novelist, poet, walker, mother and patient herself.   She sees herself as a doctor who writes, wanting to become a writer who doctors. Her conflict is not resolved.   She is an accomplished writer and her life is enriched by doctoring.   She draws widely on her experience with patients – their fortitude, frailties, obstinacy and quirks.   She is influenced by Jung.   It is as a doctor that she explores, confronts and embraces issues of truth, fear, doubt, service and trust in the creative process.   She believes in the innate self-healing capacity of the body and in the part that the arts can play in achieving that.   She has discovered that it is important to relinquish the illusion of control.   She maintains that in completing her book the two streams of her life converge.   One is not convinced that she has at last found repose, and quite possibly that is a good thing – for her, for us her readers and, not least, for her patients.

Creative art is therapeutic, if not necessarily curative, for patient and for health practitioner alike.   Dawn Garisch knows.   It’s there, clearly, in her book and she has written it modestly and with courage.

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation." ~ Graham Greene

Dance with Suitcase

Work in progress - A memoir that rests on movement

An aspect of writing that interests me is how to make form and content work together to enhance the piece. When I started this memoir, I intuitively decided against too formal a structure in which to place the narrative. I wished to honour an analogy between a particular approach to writing and to dance. In this second half of life I am more attracted to free movement than in learning formal steps.

The thrust of the book is towards developing an attitude of trusting body signals and symptoms, and trusting error, as means to invite untutored unconscious material to spill over into awareness. It assumes that non-rational physical and artistic processes have immense value, both in anchoring ourselves and in finding a way forward.

Yet the unconscious is hard to follow, difficult to grasp, as we know from our dreams. I sometimes think of the flow of life as an incomprehensible wash over which we must superimpose a grid or raft – something to hold onto to help us make sense of our lives and the world, to prevent us from drowning.

If we hold on too hard, we can mistake the grid for reality itself and we become rigid, unable to sense the enigmatic flux. But without the grid, we flounder and feel lost.

The art, I think, is to develop an ability to both stable oneself using an approximate raft, and a the same time, to be able to see through the mesh – of words, guidelines, rules, interpretations, models, analysis, structure – so as not to lose sight of the immensity of the mystery out of which we exist and live.

In dance - in movement of any kind - we have schools and forms, cultural practices and rituals, taboos and constraints. Underneath this, and within us all, is the flux and wash of life in all its patterns and guises.

I wish for this memoir – run through as it is by the origins and development of my own movement practice – to pay homage to it all.

Published in The Cape Times on Aug 15th 2012

Revolutionary New Programme Brings Art And Medicine Together

Recently I found myself in a seminar room in the old Groote Schuur Hospital – the establishment where I trained to be a doctor. I was invited there to give one of a series of talks to six arts students from the University of New Mexico and six medical students from UCT.  They constitute a pioneer group of an Art-In-Medicine (AIM) initiative.

The last time I stood on that spot, it was the trauma unit on the black side. The place was crammed with bloody patients. Two of them come to mind: an elderly man in his Sunday best, waiting in patient disbelief with a large gash on his head, his clothes soaked with blood. A female farm worker, referred from upcountry where her leg had been dragged and crushed in some vehicle accident a few days before. Her bones had not broken, but the local doctor had managed the injury so badly that she had a serious infection. There were still pieces of grass and small pebbles stuck in the wounds.

The ER been moved to the new hospital. The space I stood in is now a common room with a flip chart and place for making tea. Over a cuppa, I asked Professor Steve Reid, who is developing AIM, how the UCT students were selected for the course. He explained that the 200 second year students have a month in which they can choose one of many options from the medical to the artistic. AIM was hugely oversubscribed. A computer made the selection, then he asked each student why they had chosen this field.

Their replies echo a familiar refrain, one I have heard frequently from colleagues. These students were afraid that a career in medicine would require them to sacrifice their love of and engagement with one of the arts. They are musicians, dancers, poets, painters. They wanted to know how they might keep that nourishing flame alive as they succumbed to the demands of the training and work as doctors; also how to use their creative energies to assist patients.

Associate Professor Patrice Repar, the Director of an established AIM department at the University of New Mexico, and who brought the arts students out for the collaboration, told me a little about what she and her colleagues do. There are three prongs to her work: helping medical students and health care professionals to integrate their artistic selves with their medical practice, using art to assist patients, families, and medical staff cope with stress and trauma, and promoting art in rural community clinics as a way to foster health and wellness.  Hospital staff can participate in a meditation group, and are offered massage, artistic activities, and deep relaxation treatments during hospital hours. Staff musicians also collaborate for an on-going concert series.

I was so excited to discover that this revolution is already starting to take place in my own city, I was the first to arrive in the seminar room. As I stood up to give my talk, I half expected one of the professors who taught me over thirty years ago to storm in, demanding that we stop this nonsense immediately, that Groote Schuur is a place of serious scientific study, and flaky nonsense does not belong in the hallowed halls of learning.

But just imagine a hospital where a musician is called to play singing bowls beside your deathbed. Imagine knowing that your specialist is rehearsing for a concert, and one of the performances will be for patients, or having a general practitioner who prescribes journaling, singing or clay work to help decrease your levels of stress and gain insight into your difficulties. Imagine hospital staff painting murals to make the new Groote Schuur building a less forbidding place, one that your body might delight in. Imagine nurses, physiotherapists and doctors singing acapella to patients at the beginning of a ward round.

Last year a group of medical students played their instruments in the Groote Schuur hospital corridor as an experiment. A security guard tried to stop them, saying it was against the rules. When the students politely asked which rule they were infringing, all he managed to insist on was that we are free, but we are not free.

It is counter-intuitive for anyone, whether they inhabit the role of doctor or patient, or any other for that matter – teachers, lawyers, politicians, street sweepers – to cut off their creative limbs. Creativity is allied to eros, to libido, to the life force itself. Why would we want to exclude the life force from the healing of our bodies, our politics, our education systems?

There is an ever-widening crack in the way we have been brought up to think of as the normal and effective way of doing things. The Art-in-Medicine initiative is one of the new shoots that will flourish in the gap.

NEW PRINT RUN IS OUT

I am pleased to report - back to the normal price. Eloquent Body is also available as electronic downloads.

BAD TIMING

Just as Eloquent Body gets a big thumbs up from both Oprah and Shape Magazines, the first edition sold out! A delay with the next print run means the book is currently advertised at a huge price online (as it reverts to print on demand). I am assured that it will sell at the normal price shortly.... Thank you for all the support!

 HOW WELL DO WE SEE?

Two investigations into problems with vision, both recommended:
Oliver Sacks' The Mind's Eye and Teju Cole's piece
http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Blind-Spot