Working with your Life Stories

A workshop on writing memoir facilitated by Dawn Garisch here I am once again, disguised as myself from About Death and Other Things poem by Aleksandar Ristovic 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 ones 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. We tend to live out of the structure of our egos and minds. We all need an identity and clear thinking in order to function effectively. Yet the way we see ourselves and our lives is blinkered, and ignores the symbolic aspects that run through our dreams and bodies. Reason, in our culture, is held in higher regard than the non-rational. In writing memoir, even if extraordinary things have happened in our lives, if we stick to a rational, logical approach, the writing is likely to be dead on the page. If we write only out of what we are thinking and what we know, we will never do our best work. In this workshop, we will identify the central symbols and images that underlie and drive our lives and our creative projects. We will find ways to quieten the critic and the ego so that undercurrents can emerge from what James Hillman calls the poetic base of the mind. 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 engender ways to live a fleshed-out, creative and fully-fledged life, as well as finding refreshing ways of putting our personal stories down on the page. Beginner writers are welcome. Venue: Fee: Dates: Times : The False Bay Rendevous, Muizenberg R 1100 -00 27th 31st July 9am to 1pm daily

To bring: * Unlined, ring-bound A4 notebook and pen * A cushion and a blanket or rug. * Two objects from the period of your life that you want to write about - one that represents something you loved about it, and one that represents something you disliked about that time. To book: dawn.garisch@gmail.com

Dawn Garisch has had five novels, poetry and adult literacy books published. Her latest novel, Trespass, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth prize in Africa. She has had a short film and short play produced, and has written for newspapers, magazines and for television. She has run workshops on creativity at Dakini, the Mother City Book Fair and The Forge. Her next book is a mix of memoir and popular science, and examines the two legs of her working life writing and doctoring. It explores how science and art perceive the world and the truth, what the body has to do with this, and how the tools required to develop a creative project are also essential for living life creatively. * * *

References: I found Dawn Garischs 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 Dawns 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