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 one’s 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’. We will learn how to make ourselves available to
be in service of that which needs to be written.
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: The Forge, Kalk Bay

The Fee: R1100 for 5 mornings. A deposit of R500 secures your place.

Dates: 2nd – 6th March

Times : 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, coming out in 2011, is a mix of memoir and non-fiction, 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 Garisch’s 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 Dawn’s 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