We invite you to join the LRC’s new online Creative Writing Course and join a community of life righting writers. We’ve priced it generously so the course is accessible to as many people as possible. Discounts are available (see below).
Several LRC graduates have published life writing. Below is a selection of books you can buy either directly from the authors – email addresses are given – or from Amazon, Loot or Takealot. Please click below each book for ordering and payment information.
Read on
This Is How It Is
We forget that the most daring thing we can do is to allow ourselves to be seen. To stand before the world and to say this is who I am. This is how it is.’ Bongani Kona
‘Refreshing, poignant and wide-ranging, this collection surprises with unusual perspectives and gives voice to a broad array of talents’ Helen Moffett
This Is How It Is is the Life Righting Collective’s first anthology published in May 2018, a collection of 54 real life South African stories written by members of the LRC.
R 150
Eloquent Body
Modjaji Books, 2012, ISBN: 978-1-920397-39-5
In Eloquent Body, medical doctor and award-winning writer Dawn Garisch explores the science and poetry of the body, investigating what we can trust. She suggests developing a partnership with oneself, including not abusing the very earth we inhabit. In an engaging manner, Eloquent Body offers a quiet wisdom in response to the instinctual need to find out who we are and why we are here, and how creative practice can help us manage our lives.
“A richly eclectic, deeply insightful text that draws art and science, poetry and medicine, writing and healing into fertile conversation.” – Ivan Vladislavic
R 120
Crazy
CRAZY! is the amazing story of a Marine Biologist, Patrick Garratt, who embraced his passion and followed his dream. It is a story of beauty and drama, loss and heartache, courage and achievement. Whilst it is a life story, it is also a lesson. A lesson that says: find your passion, ignore the doomsayers, follow your dream and know your purpose.
R 200
We Don’t Talk About It. Ever
“Searing, brutal and breathtaking.” (Rehana Roussouw, author of What Will People Say? and New Times)
“Desiree-Anne Martin has spun the straw of addiction into gold.” (Dawn Garisch, The Life Righting Collective)
Not in recent years has there been a local book that so powerfully unpacks and interrogates the brutality of abuse, racial identity, addiction, sex work, recovery, motherhood and mental health issues. While hard-hitting and shocking, it is also deeply inspiring and simply unputdownable. This is a harrowing memoir on the darkness of addiction and dysfunction, but it is also a touching and sometimes humorous account of a little-girl-turned-woman’s deep need and reckless pursuit for love.
R 220
Largo to Larmenier
In this intimate and often humorous account inspired and guided by music, Deysel Stemmet recounts her determined journey from the Highveld dairy farm she grew up on, to the stages of Europe and South Africa. Music lovers will delight in her candid anecdotes of encounters with some of the stage’s most colourful characters, including Birgit Nilsson, Elizabeth Connell and Johan Botha. The book includes a CD with some rare recordings of the author and her peers and the last section of the book is a collection of recipes for the meals that Deysel Stemmet served to guests, family and friends over her lifetime. Truly a feast for the senses.
R 200
Harvesting Stones
The Snapshot Press eChapbook Award is an annual international prize for unpublished small collections of haiku, tanka, and other short poetry. Harvesting Stones was selected for the 2017 award and published in 2019.
Harvesting Stones tells of the coming-to-terms poet Matthew Caretti experiences as his father battles with and ultimately passes from cancer. In the traditional Japanese style of haibun, Matthew captures in vivid detail one man’s struggle for life and the small joys and underlying pain of his final eight months.
Free to Download
Dance with Suitcase
Tiber Tree Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-9921922-6-6
In Dance with Suitcase Dawn Garisch, medical doctor and award-winning author and poet, courageously exposes the narratives that have shaped her as she moves through her life, proposing that the spontaneous dance she practices is a medium of both self discovery and self-recovery, bringing playful and surprising elements into awareness.
Written as a companion piece to the critically acclaimed Eloquent Body, Dance with Suitcase is both a memoir of Dawn’s life experience and her philosophy around movement, dance and expressing creativity.
“Dawn Garisch has crafted an incisive and original memoir… personal, vulnerable, yet deeply objective.” – Ken Barris
R 90.00/R120.00 incl postage
Flame and Song
Philippa Namutebi Kabali-Kagwa’s soul-warming memoir tells of a life enriched by song, literature, food and spirituality at the heart of a loving family. Born into a newly independent Uganda, she grew up in a volatile political landscape but never lacked the inspiration and protection of generations of friends and relatives. Her story travels from her expansive childhood homes in Uganda, to the novelties of living in Addis Ababa, before settling in Cape Town, her current home. But no matter how far her journeys take her, it’s clear that home is not only about places but people.Sample blurb goes over here.
R 250
083 446 1161
