Karina Author, Book, Event

The Red Wheelbarrow: Dawn Garisch

Dawn Garisch will be the featured poet at The Red Wheelbarrow next week.

Dawn Garisch is an award-winning author and poet, a medical doctor and founding member of the Life Righting Collective. As an LRC facilitator, she teaches writing and poetry as a route to self-discovery, self-recovery and community building. Her second collection, Disturbance, (Karavan Press) came out in 2020.

Broken

A toy horse falls from the shelf, breaks a leg.
The small boy, tearful, shows an uncle 
who gives him a tube of glue:
The boy tries hard like he always does, 
not knowing how to fix 
his parent’s domestic mess. 

The horse leg sets, stuck back skew, 
now it’s lame, he’s made things worse. 
His father’s long gone, but he’s to blame, 
the glue of family rendered useless. 

The boy wanders out of the house, 
climbs the tree, sits by himself, sick
with crying. Wanting his father 
joined to his mother, wanting 
the father to come home to help him. 

What he wants is impossible, so he prays
for the leg to be restored like magic, 
so he can ride away.

— 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: Dawn Garisch at The Red Wheelbarrow
Date: 18th August 2022
Time: 19:30 SAST

Meeting ID: 952 904 1131
Passcode: 12345

Karina Author, Event, Festival

Open Book Festival Workshop Week: Two Workshops with Life Righting Collective’s Dawn Garisch

The Life Righting Collective has been running powerful workshops for a number of years and those who have attended any of them can attest to their ability to transform how one understands one’s own story. Dawn Garisch will facilitate two full day workshops on the 26th and 27th of July. Please note that these two workshops are not connected. If you would like to attend both, you will need to complete two bookings.

Have a look at other Open Book Festival workshops here: Open Book Workshop Programme

Karina Author

LRC Memoir Course: Routes to Meaning in Johannesburg!

The Life Righting Collective (LRC), founded by Dawn Garisch, is offering a memoir course in Joahnnesburg at the end of the month. Dawn will be facilitating the course:

We all have a story to tell from our own lives about how we became who we are. Stories about the way we were born, or about how someone helped us. About how we got ill or overcame a terrible loss.

Stories about how someone we loved to hurt us, or how a political or spiritual circumstance almost broke us. Stories about how we were bullied, about how an accident changed the course of our lives, or about how we were able to make a difference in someone else’s life. These stories are often invisible to others. They might still influence the way we think and feel in ways we don’t fully understand.

Writing about your own life can help you connect with the story you are living, and it can help to heal or manage the effects of trauma. It is a powerful way for us to communicate and to grow compassion for ourselves and for each other. 

During this course we will find refreshing approaches to assist us in putting our personal stories down on the page.

Beginner writers are welcome!

DATES: Saturday 30 April – Monday 2 May 2022
TIME: 9 – 2 pm daily
VENUE: Family Life Centre, 1 Cardigan Road, Parkwood, Johannesburg
FEE: R3 000 
FACILITATOR: Dawn Garisch

If you are keen on joining this course please make your bookings via admin@liferighting.com  and kindly forward to anyone you feel might be interested.

Remember, for our health and safety, all LRC in-person courses will be conducted in strict compliance with current Covid-19 rules and procedures.

We look forward to having you on the course! 

With thanks from the LRC team.

LRC

A note from Dawn: People who cannot afford the full course fee, please get in touch with the organisers (contact details above) and they will try to accommodate you.

Karina Author, Book, Event, Festival

Poetry in McGregor 2021

The first Poetry in McGregor Festival Karavan Press poets participated in at a group event and it was a total success. Because of his academic commitments which took him to Pretoria this past weekend, Stephen Symons could not be with us, but John Maytham kindly agreed to read from Stephen’s poetry collections, FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS POINTLESS AND PERFECT and Small Souls (a very limited special edition of his latest poems, not for sale, but the poems included will feature in Stephen’s forthcoming Selected Poems). Dawn Garisch and Justin Fox answered a few general questions about their poetry and read from their own collections, Disturbance and Beat Routes respectively, and it was obvious from the reactions of the audience that I am not the only one in love with the way these three poets craft words into art. Thank you to everyone who attended and who asked questions and bought books! We are grateful for the enthusiasm and generosity with which we have been received.

The rest of the festival was an immersion in words. ‘You are a river that cannot be denied,’ Malika Ndlovu began her reading at the festival with this line and reminded us that ‘love is persistently at work’, that ‘in my heart it is harvest time’, that ‘we are found’ – and so it felt, the bounty and the homecoming we experienced at the feast of poetry that was Poetry in McGregor this weekend.

During his performance of a script that Finuala Dowling compiled for him during lockdown, “Ice Cream, Thank You”, John Maytham quoted the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski: ‘praise the mutilated world’. The last twenty months have brought many of us to our knees, or worse. To be celebrating the written word among poets in front of live audiences was truly healing.

Poetry is ‘necessary’, Lara Kirsten said during her reading. Thank goodness there are so many fine poets who hold this truth close to their hearts and share it with us so abundantly.

It was also a joy to tell one of the young poets attending that it will be an honour to publish (hopefully, in the near future) the stunning poetry manuscript she had shared with me earlier this year. I hope that she will be reading from her debut collection at the next Poetry in McGregor Festival. Watch this space!

Thank you to all who make Poetry in McGregor possible! You are all ‘necessary’ and I am deeply grateful.

Literary greetings, Karina

Karina Author, Book, Event

POETRY IN MCGREGOR: KARAVAN POETS

Karavan Press Poets Dawn Garisch, Stephen Symons and Justin Fox read from and discuss their poetry collections

MC: Karina M. Szczurek (Karavan Press)

Sunday, 21 November: 9-10:30AM

@ Caritas | Temenos

Caritas at Temenos Cnr Voortrekker and Bree St., McGregor, Western Cape

Book your ticket here: R50