One aspect of creative writing not well understood or researched is how associations from the unconscious can bring spontaneous and unexpected insights and connections to the writer’s awareness. This feature promotes wellbeing by providing motivation to alter harmful attitudes and behaviour. From linguistics comes the term mirativity, which expresses a speaker’s surprise at the discovery of new information. Mirativity can also apply to the creative writing process, when unforeseen and beneficial material appears from idiosyncratic associations, and therefore cannot be reproduced by AI. Creative writing is a low-cost, inbuilt resource to help people manage their lives and circumstances, to bear witness to influence policy change, and to improve self-care.
Dawn Garisch is an author and medical doctor. She is a founding member of the Life Righting Collective (liferighting.com), running writing courses. She has had seven novels, poetry, short stories, a nonfiction work, and a memoir published. She has had five plays and a short film produced, and has written for television. Dawn has won numerous awards for her published works.
Karavan Press published the following titles by Dawn:
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.
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.
My mother’s garments
never seemed to grow old.
Slack suits and twin sets
from the seventies,
woven from some synthetic
substance that did not wear
or tear, unlike the natural fibre
of her skin. My aged mother’s
delicate covering bled
every time she stumbled.
Worn out; worn to shreds.
— "Going home", Disturbance, Dawn Garisch
It has just gone six a.m. I walk my son down the road to the corner where we wait for his lift. The sun is rising, the light streaking the horizon gold. I comment on the morning buzz, the company we keep, power-walkers, the dog walkers, workers and school kids heading for the train. ‘The day carries on.’
Without you, the day must carry on.
Al says, ‘Of course, but let me remind you that you’re wearing pyjamas.’
— Death and the After Parties, Joanne Hichens
They fled with nothing, never stopping. Not even when his mother tripped, his sister, tied to her back, knocking her head so hard that a bump rose immediately. She had been crying, now she screamed. Yet still they ran, amid their own blood and spittle, as the black cloud of the burning valley hunted them, chasing them forward, forward, towards the blue sky.
— An Island, Karen Jennings
Now Shirley, you know, became a mother quite young – sixteen or something like that. She ran away from home with newborn Jason; his naeltjie at his belly hadn’t even fallen off yet. Came to Cape Town where she thought no one would find her. The Northern Cape was far.
— "Homeful", Let It Fall Where It Will, Lester Walbrugh
Lexi shrugged off her coat. She heard the rustle of beads as her mother, Sandra, came through the hippie curtain from the kitchen at the end of the long hallway. Like the town was bisected by a highway, so was their house by the passage.
‘I thought you would be asleep by now.’ Lexi feigned surprise.
‘I waited up. You’re my responsibility now.’ Her mother was in a kaftan, her hair long and loose. She looked like she’d escaped from the Mamas and the Papas.
‘Yay.’ The joys of being dumped and fleeced by her husband never ceased.
— A Fractured Land, Melissa A. Volker
I still remember my mother’s words when we got in the car to go to mass. ‘It’s Christmas, Mary, not a funeral.’ But I’ve always worn black. I would have said she was tempting providence, if that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing she would say. I should have, though. When we got home, a bunch of armed response cars were blocking the gates to the complex. The police were there. Men in bulletproof vests. Guns.
— A Hibiscus Coast, Nick Mulgrew
Not a word was exchanged between us as my mother and I made our way home. She must have seen how disappointed I was for, as soon as we walked into the house, she turned to me, demanding – ‘Where is the form?’
Puzzled, I looked at her. What use was that form now? What would she do with it? Only my father could sign it; and he had flatly refused, hadn’t he?
‘Give me the form, Thembi.’
‘Why, Mama?’
‘Letha, bo!’
My mother forged Baba’s signature.
I applied for a passport, astounded by my mother’s actions. She had shown me a side of her I didn’t suspect existed.
— Theatre Road, Sindiwe Magona
The lagoon has
forgotten us
like a son
sometimes
forgets his father
but never his mother
— "Port is red and starboard green", For Everything That Is Pointless and Perfect, Stephen Symons
But tell me this: where is his irrepressible, eternal soul? Because that is what interests me more. Where is his spirit, free of the gritty, grey residue of his body, which I have felt with my own hands? Because I, with the five senses of a woman, and undeniable sixth one 16 of a mother, cannot fathom the dimension within which my child now exists.
— "Lost", Earth to Mom, Sue Brown
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