Today on the podcast I’m talking with Dawn Garisch – a true contemporary maverick.

Dawn is a medical doctor and a published writer. She has had seven novels, a collection of poetry, short stories, a non-fiction work and a memoir published. She has had five plays and short film produced, and has written for television. Three of her novels have been published in the UK.

This publishing journey has not gone unnoticed. Her poem Blood Delta won the DALRO prize in 2007; her novel Trespass was short-listed for the Commonwealth prize in Africa in 2010; Miracle won the EU Sol Plaatjie Poetry Award in 2011; and What To Do About Ricky won the Short.Sharp.Story competition in 2013. Her novel Accident was long-listed for the Barry Ronge Sunday Times fiction award in 2018.

Her seventh novel, Breaking Milk came out in 2019, and her next collection of poetry Disturbance (taking note) was out in November 2020.

She is part of the medical humanities movement and a founding member of the Life Righting Collective https://www.liferighting.com/where she runs courses in memoir writing and poetry. Dawn is still a practising medical doctor. She lives in Cape Town and has two adult sons.

Her piece in Living While Feminist is called ‘The Risk’ and it explores the difficulty of speaking up when those around you say harmful things. In that piece she says.

“As a child I was taught to ignore conflict, to pretend that everything should be nice and fine. I have rebelled against that, seeking to understand those things that disturb me and the world – trying to stand up for what is right. Yet there are moments when I fail. Moments where I do nothing but quail. There is a trapped bird in me that is afraid to object. How to protest? How to say what needs to be said in order to understand and be understood? Consequences are hard to predict.”

So today I’m going to be talking to Dawn about speaking up, about writing as healing, and about the Life Righting Collective.