The Life Righting Collective (LRC) is a South African NPO with two main aims:
We are a group of like-minded, life-minded writers led by life writing mentor Dawn Garisch, who has been running life writing courses since 2010. Stimulated by her desire to publish the work that has emerged from her courses and to raise funds to sponsor more participants, she gathered a group of people around her to make the Life Righting Collective a reality. You can find out more about them in the about section of our website here.
The LRC believes life writing allows people to learn ways to reflect on and write about life events that can help resolve difficulties and develop a more curious and creative attitude to life.
We further believe that sharing life experiences with a wide readership can help reduce discrimination and promote mutual understanding and tolerance. We call that life righting.
We meet our mission by running life writing courses – both prose and poetry – and through our publications, both in print (This Is How It is is our first anthology) and on our website.
If you have done a Dawn Garisch or LRC life writing course, you are eligible to join the LRC and we would be delighted to have you join our life righting movement. Once you have done a Dawn Garisch life writing course, you will automatically be signed up as an LRC member unless you’d prefer not to join. People who want to support the organisation can become friends of the LRC and they will receive our newsletter, as well as invitations to public events.
If you have done a Dawn Garisch or LRC life writing course, you are eligible to join the LRC and we would be delighted to have you join our life righting movement. The benefits to you include:
We run courses most months of the year, depending on demand. Our course calendar and booking information can be found here.
We intend to publish a printed anthology once a year. The first anthology: This Is How It Is was published in April 2018.
One reason for setting up the Life Righting Collective as an NPO is to raise funds to sponsor places on our courses for those who cannot afford to pay for them. This we have successfully done to date in Cape Town, Barrydale, Port Elizabeth and Nieu Bethesda. Sponsored places are available on all courses, but do depend on paying participants subsidising those places sufficiently. Please go to our course calendar for further details on costs and booking information.
Yes, as above, we do. Please write to our administrator for more details. We will also provide free copies of our anthology: This Is How It Is, to literacy NGOs and under-resourced school and community libraries.
At the moment, the LRC is predominantly Western Cape-based; but we have run courses in the Eastern Cape and intend to run them in the Northern Cape as well, once we have raised funds to do so.
Our course calendar gives more detail of when and where we run our courses here.
Memoir is a slice of your life about a particular time or theme – for example, what happened when I ran away to the circus or living with a chronic illness like HIV or polio. Autobiography is when you write about your whole life from birth to the present time. Life writing is any writing about your lived experience – from a haiku to a full-length narrative poem to a novel-length book.
Although we run life writing or memoir courses, the skills you learn will apply to any kind of creative writing. Also, there are people who come on a course who choose to write their story as a work of fiction. Any story needs to contain an emotional truth, and the tools you learn on the course will assist you to identify and describe the experience or situation as effectively as possible, no matter whether you are writing a play, a poem, a work of fiction or non-fiction.
We do not publish books or collections by a single author, but when there is a call for submissions for the anthology, absolutely, please do. We intend to publish a printed anthology on a chosen theme once a year. The first anthology: This Is How It Is was published in April 2018 and it contains both prose and poetry.
We do for a fee. Please send an email to our administrator and we will refer you to someone who knows their dashes from their colons and their its from their it’s…
You can also try PEG (Professional Editor’s Guild).
As we are passionate about what we do, and what we do is a valuable resource for building confidence and creativity among individuals in community, yes, we can do that with pleasure, once we have been properly briefed. Wherever possible, we hope to include this as a fundraising activity, but we are very willing to speak for nothing to promote our work. Please send a request to admin@liferighting.com
If you do a course with us, you will receive a raft of writing tips along the way…