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This impeccable, cosy, winter retreat is generously offered by LRC member Judy Bekker. Take inspiring walks on Fish Hoek Beach just 60m away, or dreamily take in the view at the beautiful window seat. Judy usually rents it out on Airbnb - so you can find out and see more here.
Meals are excluded, but there is a fully equipped kitchen and free wifi available. Included is a meeting with an LRC facilitator once a day on days 2 and 3 for an hour via zoom or Whatsapp video, to discuss any difficulties, or to read from your work and get feedback. The dates of the retreat are: Wednesday 9th – Saturday 13th July 2025. The winner will be decided by a random draw at noon on Friday 9th May and will be notified via email.
All you have to do is purchase a lucky draw ticket by paying R100 to the LRC banking account: ABSA, Life Righting Collective Cheque account number: 40 9382 6013 Branch code number 632005.
Please include your full name as reference. Send your POP to admin@liferighting.com with your name and contact details (email and phone number so we can contact you if you're the winner). All proceeds will go towards supporting the LRC. You're very welcome to purchase more than one ticket and increase your chances of winning! (Previous winners have done this... just sayin’!)
Our last raffle raised R5 700! Let’s see if we can top that. Every R100 that comes in will help to raise funds so we can continue to do our work and will also have us dancing an inspired jig of happiness! Here's to your best writing (and our best dancing!).
With love and gratitude,
And the LRC EXCO team
Throughout recorded history, people in diverse cultures have embraced the idea that creative expression - including visual art, stories, dance and music - contributes to healing.
In recent times, the therapeutic benefit of expressive writing has been well researched in the global north but not in the global south. In South Africa, in particular, this is a significant gap because of our traumatic and divided history, our increasingly limited resources and the urgent need to build a caring and compassionate society.
We can now release the results of a peer-reviewed qualitative study on the work of the Life Righting Collective, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). It is a study of a diverse group of Africans, who were members of the Life Righting Collective.
We were co-authors of the paper with medical practitioners, medical students and academics with interests in mental health and medical humanities. Most of the 20 participants reported improvements in overall wellness and mental health as a result of our writing courses, in line with other research findings which show that creative writing can promote healthier choices as well as improve relationships, mental health and work prospects.
The research findings show that the courses can be a useful, non-medical, cost-efficient method to improve psychological well-being. This, we believe, proves our purpose and promise that creative writing has the power to heal.
A little more detail, in the participants’ own words
Some participants reported an improvement in their writing capabilities and their mental health, as well as life skills and personal development. As one participant put it: “We lost our oldest son to cancer … I then started writing a journal, which I called my grief journal… working with your emotions towards healing from grief.”
Another said: “There were new voices inside of me… it really has affected my whole way of seeing myself and the melancholy – it helps lift it.”
And one said: “Once you’ve shared your stories, there is a kind of a bond that is very special.”
In conclusion
The study concluded that shared writing in group settings is invaluable in promoting care of self and others, in both homogeneous and diverse communities. The experiences of course attendees suggests that bearing witness to issues that need attention in our lives, and communicating one’s life experience through life writing, can promote confidence and advocacy. If you would like to read more about the study, there is a review article from The Conversation here and you can read the full academic article from the BMJ here.
Another lovely review for This is how it is. Thank you to Margaret von Klemperer and The Witness, who published this review on Monday 14 October 2019. 'Accomplished and entertaining work'. If you somehow don't have a copy, stocks are limited so buy now direct from us for the discounted price of R220. Simply email admin@liferighting.com to place your order. While stocks last...
Our very own Nathan Festus was instrumental in organising a Readathon at Exclusive Books in Claremont, held on Sunday 4th of August. We're indebted to Linda McCullogh of Exclusive's who was wonderfully supportive, set up a great reading space and provided refreshments, and a display table. We sold a total of 19 copies of the anthology, contributing to our sponsorship funds. Here follows Nathan’s report:
"So when I was confronted with the invitation of creating a greater awareness for the Life Righting Collective, I thought READATHON! Instead of running tirelessly along a never-ending stretch of road, panting and puffing, conquering the tarred road with blistered aching feet, why not do it from the page, allowing your tongue to do the leaping and lapping, conquering pages of writing whilst imparting life stories to eagerly listening ears, pierced attentively to hear the next twist in the tale, and so, the READATHON was born.
I had initially envisaged it as non-stop reading with participants passing the book onto each other, a sweaty baton marking the end of each distance as the tick-tocking of the tired wall clock signaled the start of a new participant, anxiously waiting and ready to enter the race. Refreshingly, this was not so, though we did meet the objective of keeping ears pierced waiting intently for the next twist in the tale.
Hosted at the up-market Claremont, Cavendish Square book store, Exclusive Books, the event drew a range of inquisitive onlookers and folk with long-desired dreams of penning their own life journey to paper.
Participating authors of stories published on the LRC website www.liferighting.com and in the LRC anthology, This Is How It Is, read their own stories and those of others to an audience of both elderly and young, the curious and yet others just eager to sip the free wine and eat the biscuits on offer.
Overall, the debut five hour event was a standing ovation success. The objective of creating the awareness that writing is a healing and therapeutic expression was echoed by the inspired folk I chatted to afterwards. Some who were eager to begin the journey of exploring their own creativity, left names and email addresses. I was moved by a particular Gogo who sat frowning and smiling as she intently took in the reading from various stories and could not help wondering how many experiences she could share.
I am excited, the starting gun has been fired, marking the beginning of what I envisage to be a yearly event, the Life Righting Collective Readathon and fundraiser.
I have a dream that at the next LRC Readathon aspiring writers and poets from every race, colour, creed and age will be invited to share their own short prose and poetry in an open mic session as we continue to encourage creative writing and the learning of other life-journeys in our quest to bring about greater healing, restoration and reconciliation both to the individual and a nation still reeling from its traumatic past."
The LRC exco are always looking for ways to raise funds so that we can continue to sponsor writers and to publish the stories that come out of the courses so that South Africans can get to know each other and grow compassion and community.
We also aim to get our stories out to the world, so that people who live elsewhere can be more informed about the people of this country. So we cooked up an idea to apply for an intern to assist us with putting together an ebook as our second anthology of true stories from South Africa.
An ebook of stories would be a little cheaper to produce than a hard copy book, as there are no storage and distribution costs. Lars Millingsford arrived from Oslo in Norway, and set out to find out how to do this. His research discovered that ebooks are very hard to sell and to market, so halfway through his stay we scrapped that idea, and he instead assisted us with some social media projects. We are very grateful to him for his willingness and enthusiasm, and hope he will visit us again in the future. The photo is from Lars' farewell dinner hosted by wonderful friend to the LRC, Rosie Campbell. [In the pic: from left: Lucy Alexander, Nina Geraghty, Linda Kaoma, Dawn Garisch, Giles Griffin & of course Lars)
There's so much fabulous writing coming out of the courses, so we still want to bring out a second anthology. Despite the huge amount of volunteer work that went into the first anthology, it still cost a lot to publish, and we as yet do not have a reliable source of funding. If anyone has a contact in the business world who might be prepared to finance the next anthology, please get in touch. Another way is to take pre-orders. A third is to encourage you all to ask friends and family to support our work through a monthly donation via Patreon.
We have SEVEN patrons so far! Thank you so much. Click here to become a Patron. If you donate just $5 (R77) a month, every little bit helps!
Are stories harmful?
While visiting a friend, I picked up Yuval Harari’s latest book and was intrigued by an essay titled: Life Is Not A Story[1]. As a medical doctor who sees the consequences of self-destructive narratives in the consulting room, as an author who works within the domain of story, and as a facilitator who assists participants to write about their lives, I read this chapter with interest.
Harari argues that all stories are both false and destructive, making a compelling case for there being no evidence that the nationalist, cultural, historical, religious and relationship stories we tell ourselves and each other have any basis in fact. He advocates that we learn how our minds operate through meditation practices and thereby attempt to abandon story-making altogether. Meditation is an effective way to notice, reflect on and discard damaging habits of thought.
Yet Homo sapiens is a story-telling animal. As far as we know, we are the only creatures that have evolved this ability. Why would we have developed this capacity if the consequence serves only as self-deception? It is true that many stories we encourage promote the dominance of the group – to bind people together in the belief that their way way of seeing the world is correct, leading to ideas of superiority. Conversely, stories can be used to persuade groups that they are inferior.
The novelist and essayist, Chimamanda Adichie, warns against the danger of the single story in her TED talk[2]. She was confronted by one idea of African people when she studied in the USA. The recently deceased novelist Binyavanga Wainaina highlighted our human tendency towards cliché and stereotype in his essay How To Write About Africa[3].
Can stories heal?
We can use narratives to justify behaviour, to arouse sentiment and action, to avoid reality, to feel special and to manipulate. Some stories allow us to believe things that are patently not true, but can only properly be understood through prejudice, brainwashing and self-deceit on the one hand, and mythology, metaphor and ritual on the other.
Homo Sapiens seems to be the only species that needs to find meaning in order to live with purpose and enjoyment. The novelist Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”[4]. We rely on meaning-making in order to accept the difficulties of life and to help guide us through them. We use story to soothe and comfort, to feel at home, to teach and to explore our own capacities and boundaries. I know a woman whose chronic anxiety and eczema was not cured by years of psychiatry and medication – solutions that rely on facts − but by a religious conversion: in essence, a story assisted her.
Meaning is created by association, linking this with that by means of narrative. We create difficulty for ourselves, our communities and the earth when we make destructive associations and tell a single story.
Story and identity
We understand ourselves through the collective and individual narratives we believe about who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. These stories form our national, cultural, religious and personal identities. They can foster a sense of security and belonging. They can also engender conflict when these identities are disrupted by new information, unconscious impulses, loss, illness, migration, invasion or other traumas and events.
The structure of most stories is: There’s a person who has a problem. All of us have encountered difficulties; we read to find out how the protagonist got into the situation and what they are going to do about it, if anything.
We affect and influence each other’s stories and identities in a multiplicity of ways, often without knowing that we do so. Hearing about other people’s experiences can allow us to dip into the circumstances of other lives, which might then give us pause for thought about our own.
Stories as acts of creation
Many stories that we absorb through historical, cultural, family and religious norms operate below the level of consciousness. We need to identify the stories that shape our lives. The world urgently needs stories that enhance and augment life, not only our own but those of people around us, not only those we love, but those whom we regard with suspicion as different, not only of human beings, but all life.
Stories can promote beliefs that harm or heal, that support or demean, that put us to sleep or wake us up. I am interested in our predisposition for assumptions and how they relate to the associations we make. These associations, based on memory, image and narrative, can improve quality of life for ourselves and others – or destroy lives. Imagination can convince us that because someone has a different skin colour, language or custom, they cannot be trusted – or imagination can open our hearts and understanding to learn about a stranger.
I propose that there is a valuable reason we have evolved as story-telling creatures. We can develop this resource by telling stories that reveal the harm embedded in many of the unconscious mottos and motifs by which we live – narratives that are fuelled by prejudice, stereotype, sentiment, and self-sabotage. We can expand our capacity by discovering that there is more than one story about Africa, about each other and even about ourselves.
Discover the stories living in and through you
The courses run by the Life Righting Collective assist participants to write effective narratives that can help us live more curiously and creatively. We publish some of these stories on our website and in our anthology This Is How It Is. Have a look. Come on a course. Opening these story doors might reveal different endings.
[1] Harari, YN (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Penguin Random House.
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en
[3] https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/
[4] Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Harper Collins, 1979
Open by Andre Agassi (Knopf, 2009) and The Tender Bar by JR Moehringer (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005)
At the end of Andre Agassi’s superbly written memoir Open, there are two pages of acknowledgements. In those pages, it becomes clear that there is another writer behind this extraordinary autobiography: a man who goes by the name of JR Moehringer. But his name is not on the cover.
You are unlikely to have heard of him, even though he’s won a Pulitzer Prize and written his own memoir, The Tender Bar. But rest assured of one thing: he can write.
Agassi writes that he was reading Moehringers’s ‘staggering’ memoir during his final US Open in 2006 and that he phoned him to request a meeting after his first round match. They meet, Moehringer moves to Vegas, where Agassi lives, and 250 hours of interview time and a friendship later, this sports memoir of note emerges.
First things first: you don’t have to love tennis to appreciate this book. The story of the man who claims he hated tennis, forced by a manic father to face his demonic ball-machine (aka The Dragon) from the age of seven, has all the makings of a tragedy from the start. Physically, he barely survives: there are several passages where you wince at what he does to himself in the name of the game. The very first chapter, called The End, is a case in point.
Emotionally, he’s not always entirely balanced either – witness the weirdness of his first marriage to Brooke Shields. But what becomes abundantly clear is that his second marriage to Steffi Graf saved him in many ways. As did his remarkable support team in the form of Gil Reyes and Brad Gilbert.
Some have called this biography ‘risible’. Perhaps they had some sort of moral axe to grind about the famous ‘crystal meth’ episode – small fry compared to the drug debacles now common in professional sports. To me there may be the odd laugh and yes, Agassi is a showman of note, but it becomes increasingly clear that much of that posturing was simply a search for identity and meaning on a circuit that is viciously gruelling. It is no wonder Esquire named it one of the Top 30 Sports Memoirs of All Time last year. It absolutely deserves to be right up there.
So what of Agassi’s ghost collaborator’s memoir, The Tender Bar? Well, clearly JR Moehringer is nowhere near as famous as Agassi, nor is he a sportsman of any sort. What he excels at – and this is both the heart and the horror of the book – is drinking. This is because his primary father figure is his Uncle Charlie, who presides over a bar called Publicans in his home town of Manhasset, Long Island. And seeking father figures in the absence of his own equally dissolute DJ father, aka The Voice, he ends up spending a lot of his time at Publicans, or with the lovingly characterised and eclectic denizens of this eponymous 'tender bar'. These same characters stand witness, together with his fairly crazy family, to his surprising progression to Harvard on a scholarship and his rather less surprising descent from it to selling tableware and, to be fair, eventually becoming a trainee journalist of sorts at the New York Times.
For anyone who has had to deal with addiction in their lives, this may be a hard read. Not only are Uncle Charlie and his entourage all alcoholics, but it becomes pretty clear that Moehringer is too. Indeed, one of the great sadnesses of the story is the loss of his first great love to her assertion that she "had been apprehensive about a young man so enthralled by a bar". It’s not difficult to agree with Moehringer’s own assertion that her apprehension was understandable.
But don’t be too put off. The writing is excellent, the schadenfreude touching. In particular, you feel for his utterly devoted mother, to whom the book is dedicated, and who must have struggled, at times, to make sense of her son and his desperate search for alcoholic father figures to guide him. A search that, to mangle Auden’s definition of poetry, ultimately leaves one with “the clear impression of mixed feelings”. The result may not have the breathless pace and drama of Open but it does have a tender semi-Dickensian heart with a range of quirky characters to which you do genuinely warm. But the chill of his addiction – and that of many of his father figures – is never far away.
At a recent Life Righting Collective Follow-up Group (aka FUG), I got to thinking about the sort of healing that writing can initiate.
One of us wrote about writing off a car at the age of 21 – and the subsequent loss of dignity, mobility, cash and car that initiated: leave alone the potential loss of life and/or limb it might have caused if the driver had not been wearing a seat belt.
Another writer talked of a different type of loss – a wife gone missing, the husband calling a counselling service to talk it through, unable to communicate clearly exactly what had happened. Still another talked of the losses (and gains) of being a mother; while another woman talked of the loss of dignity, power and voice in a difficult and overtly sexist episode whose violence was implicit rather than explicit. What, in these cases, prevents us from speaking out when we know that our lives depend on it?
This loss of dignity and freedom was writ large on the final piece another woman read to us – a multi-layered draft of a play about an abuse of authority inflicted on her at an airport, just because she ‘looked like’ a terrorist.
These incremental losses – of things, of people, of love, of integrity, of opportunity, of hope, of faith – affect us all; but perhaps even more so in a world subjected to institutionalised violence in many states – even, perhaps especially, the United States of America, despite its on-paper constitutional freedoms.
Much of the writing in our first anthology – This Is How It Is (Jacana, 2018) – finds itself grappling with such losses. There is, for example, a deeply poignant story of a first kiss and dance with a charming neighbour, who within a month is dead. This is echoed in Siya Khumalo’s extraordinary debut memoir You’ve Got to be Gay to Know God (Kwela, 2018), where his first boyhood crush on a green-eyed, copper-haired boy is scythed down by the boy’s early death from meningitis.
In that case, and in many others, these were losses that could not be fully expressed or explained – Khumalo was in the closet at the time – but now, through writing, this and other losses can be processed and grieved, both privately and publically. For myself, bereaved by suicide several times, the taboo around particular types of loss – to AIDS, to suicide, to violence and murder – is particularly close to home. So much so that I chose to use a pseudonym for a piece in our anthology about suicide – because I knew that there were people who would read it that I had chosen not to tell; and perhaps to protect my family from making such a tragic loss public. These sorts of subterfuges, however well-intentioned, keep us hidden, feed our shame and – often – make us ill. Blowing open these taboos – even if there is some collateral damage – is almost always, ultimately, more healing than harmful.
This is because all of these types of loss – and many others – are intertwined with feelings of guilt and shame, which prevent us from declaring our losses, for fear that we – those left behind – will be judged. And yet the more there is silence around these taboos, the greater the hold they have and the less opportunity we have to share our experiences and heal. It is no accident that one of the earliest Act-Up activist slogans around HIV and AIDS was 'Silence=Death'. If we do not speak out, who will know we are hurting? Is our shame worth hiding when our sanity, our loves and our lives are at stake? History seems to tell us not.
Today we have treatment for HIV, if not yet a cure for AIDS, and there is no doubt that the trajectory of the research that has brought us here is due to the sacrifices that gay men made in the first years of the pandemic. In much the same way, the slow – to my mind, way TOO slow – movement towards some sort of accommodation of the concept of euthanasia is another step towards eradicating the shame, guilt and taboo that remains around assisted death, which others still wish to call suicide. Sad to say, South Africa has a long, conservative way to go in this regard. At the same time, constitutional freedoms for LGBTIQ people are by no means vote winners and are hugely under threat from the proto-fascist moral majority – again, Khumalo talks wisely and chillingly to this point.
I have an interest in these particular invisible losses, of course – I too am gay, have worked in HIV education and have lost loved ones to both the virus and to suicide. All of these leave their scars. But it is my firm belief that the work the Life Righting Collective does helps to heal them as we give the people who live in this damaged country of ours the chance to talk of the hurt and the anger they feel, as well as the indignities and losses they have suffered.
I am running a Life Righting Collective Memoir Course in November, from Friday November 15th to Sunday November 17th, in Table View, Cape Town. If you would like to write out, about and through some of the loves, lives and losses in your own life, you are most welcome to join us. Please write to admin@liferighting.com and check out the courses section of our website on www.liferighting.com/courses. You will be amazed how when we read to each other about our lives, how much more connected, heard, witnessed and healed we can feel.
Image credit: -sandid-from-pixabay.jpg
Logical Family: A Memoir by Armistead Maupin, published on 10 March 2017 by Harper Collins: R291.00
This is the long-awaited ‘real story’ of the much-loved Tales of the City author, Armistead Maupin. Perhaps best known for his much-lauded and much-copied coming-out letter ‘Letter to Mama’, Maupin’s warm, witty and inclusive style has helped several generations of queer folk come out and find their ‘logical family’, which may not always be – and frequently isn’t – their biological one.
Armistead Maupin appears to be, loosely, Michael Tolliver of the Tales of the City series, although Maupin has confessed more broadly that "I’ve always been all of the characters in one way or another."Logical Family confirms this, plotting his life path from a conservative, naval, Southern background, through to San Francisco where he found himself and his ‘logical family’.
"Sooner or later, we have to venture beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us," he writes. "We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives." In finding that life, he faced homophobia and the HIV pandemic, which hit hardest and earliest at the US gay community. He confronted both head on, controversially outing Rock Hudson, who he knew and who later died of AIDS, in the process. His activism is a matter of record but he is still best known for his novels, including two outside the Tales series, Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener, the latter of which was made into a movie starring Robin Williams.
So this, finally, is the official author-penned tale behind the Tales that has, in its short, twenty-chapter format, much the same accessibility, wit and pathos (clichéd but absolutely true) of his fiction. It is a crucial companion to his fiction work and will delight – and, occasionally, reduce to tears – anyone who has read any of the Tales series, which first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976.
It’s an important book because Maupin is a critical figure in the LGBTI literary world and, I would hope, in the literary world as a whole. Comparisons with Dickens are frequent and fair, though Maupin trumps him on camp hands down.
It’s 1995 and we’re on the 2 633 mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) with a young woman who’s using 1 100 miles of it as life repair. She’s in the middle of nowhere, her feet are a bloody mess (in all sorts of senses) and she’s lost her boots, irretrievably tumbled down a mountain. And this is just the wonderfully written Prologue…
The PCT runs from the Mexican to the Canadian border through unforgiving mountains, breathtaking scenery and heart-stopping wildlife. Combining gruellingly long, hot waterless stretches with ice-cold peaks and, to be fair, those spectacular vistas, this is - to mangle the cliché - nowhere near a walk in the park, even if she staggers through a fair few national ones along the way. Quite the contrary. It’s a body-mauling, soul-stretching, character-battering-yet-forming pilgrimage dedicated to her mother, whose early loss to cancer 26-year-old Cheryl has not grieved. As we will find out.
Strayed wrote and published this enthralling memoir 15 years after the events she writes about: she clearly wrote good journals and – spoiler – there are bears, rattlesnakes and dodgy characters aplenty; but there aren’t any Sasquatch, bigfoots or yetis. There are some warmer, nicer characters too; but they are mostly bit parts. Our heroine, centre stage, is Cheryl. With the PCT a close second.
Wild is an honest appraisal of a life more than a bit off the rails and needing some serious introspection and processing. Most people would go meditate up just one mountain or talk to a therapist. Cheryl Strayed changed her name – read the book to find out why – and then went serious walkabout in the wilderness to piece her chaotic life back together.
Here’s an extract from the middle of the book: a chapter called The Accumulation of Trees. She’s good on chapter headings – try Corvidology; Range of Light; Lou out of Lou and Box of Rain. In this one she writes about: "…what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild…" A wild, she goes on to say, that "would both shatter and shelter her".
So this is a story of woman vs Nature and also woman vs her own nature. Is it redemptive? You’ll have to read it to find out but I can promise you one thing: it will be well worth the journey, lost boots and all.