“For writer, author, poet, doctor and teacher Dawn Garisch, writing is life. Listen as she explains how it’s helped her navigate her own journey – and also how it’s worked for so many others who have found themselves through her Life Righting Collective. Dawn is both our Finding Herself candidate and WZ Book Club Guest Author for April.”
A magical evening! Earlier today, we launched FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS POINTLESS AND PERFECT by Stephen Symons at Wordsworth Books Gardens. Real bookshop, real people, live poetry reading! Stephen was in conversation with author Paul Morris and read from his stunning poetry collection as well as yet unpublished poems, which will feature in his forthcoming book … Watch this space!
Our gratitude to the booksellers of Wordsworth Books Gardens for their dedication and support. Thank you, Stephen and Paul – it was wonderful to listen to you talk about poetry and its magic. And thank you to all who attended the event. It was so good to interact with readers in real life again! Thank you.
“Her eyes had adjusted, and the light was that of another country.”
Durban North, 1997. Following two shocking and insidious incidents of violence, nineteen-year-old Mary Da Costa is flying to Auckland ahead of her parents to make a new start. She is riddled with reservations – New Zealand is where her late brother was supposed to move – and all she really wants to do is keep to herself and work on her art.
On arrival, Mary comes under the wings of the South African ex-pat community, struggling with its own tensions between homesickness and belonging. Finding work at a local dairy, she meets self-appointed Māori leader Nepukaneha Cooper – Buck, as he’s better known. He and his family have some history with these rugby-mad lovers of apartheid, even more now that they’re encroaching on his turf. If only he had the means to fight them off and realise his life-long dream of establishing a marae on the beautiful strip of coast he has always called home.
Meanwhile, adrift between past and present, Mary is forced to dig deep in order to find her own truths and place in the world.
Nick Mulgrew’s long-awaited debut novel – of grand metaphors, silences, absences, and two cities and countries in flux – is a delightfully innovative, surprising, and warm-hearted meditation on family, loss, and home, as well as a deft examination of dislocation, dispossession, and the cultural blind spots of two very different (and in some ways similar) communities.
ISBN: 978-1-990992-58-2
Publication date: May 2021
About the author:
NICK MULGREW was born in Durban in 1990. He is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, the recipient of the 2016 Thomas Pringle and 2018 Nadine Gordimer Awards, and the director of the award-winning poetry press, uHlanga.
Raised in Durban North and Orewa, he currently lives in Edinburgh, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Dundee. A Hibiscus Coast is his fourth book, and first novel.
The intricacy of a body in the dark These are the days of the clouds and colours of his childhood, of the secrets of forgotten garages with unwilling doors and small-paned windows, of the mysteries of broken glass, rust and enigmas of dust, And of the sides of houses too, of shadows leopard-crawling over mossed brick, and cool green thoughts and concrete crumbling to nothingness at the edge of tired swimming pools spun with holiday light. The intricacy of a body in the dark, how it reminds him of a life lived a lifetime away, where memory tastes of salted skin after a day at a beach, part sunlight, part ocean, and at the tip of its tongue the bitterness of its end. He stands, looking out at the waves and last scraps of surfers, imagining someone else watching him flared against sky leaking into cobalt. He has been turning a perfectly good key in a lock over and over his whole life but the door remains locked. He imagines she stands behind the door brushing the years between them from her hair. Now everything is silent and made of first light, except for the sound of that key turning helplessly and the distant keening of gulls. — Stephen Symons
Next week’s featured poet is Dawn Garisch.
As always, the reading by the featured poet will be followed by an open mic session for poets from the audience. Poets are welcome to read from their own work as well as from the work of a favourite poet.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9529041131?pwd=M2VUL3RNWGMvMFZCU1Zuemt6QnU3Zz09
Date: 4 March 2021
Time: 19:30
Meeting ID: 952 904 1131
Passcode: 12345
“I didn’t set out to write a fable – or, rather, I did not think about it explicitly in those terms – yet I believe that the description is an apt one, to a certain extent. I wanted to explore certain complexities relating to the history of the African continent and how that history continues to influence the lives of individuals to this day. Because that history is such a multifaceted one that is shared, to varying degrees, by numerous African countries, I wanted to reduce the narrative to a small location, with few characters, and by those means amplify the key concerns.
One of those concerns is examining the life of an ordinary individual. There is nothing special about Samuel. He is not heroic, intelligent, skilled or wealthy. He is very much an everyman – an everyman who has experienced aspects of colonisation, of being made to flee his home, of poverty, of the fight for independence, of torture and imprisonment under a dictatorship, and of trying to find his place in all of that chaos and horror. What does a man like Samuel have? How does he feel? What will he do in order to protect his home?“
AN ISLAND by KAREN JENNINGS: AN INTERVIEW
karavanpress.com 