Sadly, Gabeba Baderoon, who edited Epiphanie’s collection, was unable to make the launch. She sent her love and congratulations to Epiphanie, and said how proud and happy she was to have been associated with Kilimanjaro on my lap. In her absence Annemarie Hendrikz opened the launch by outlining the background to DAKINI, an imprint which publishes first collections of beautiful poetry.

The Dakini has many guises and is an important figure in Buddhist mythology, and Annemarie introduced her as a goddess of life-changing moments.  What could be more life-changing for a writer than to see her words in print? The power of the Dakini carries beyond this though, to the heart of the reader affected by the words of a writer like Epiphanie. Perspectives shift, new roots take hold, we are taken into a life that is marginalized and often dangerous, and, as is the case with all good writing, after reading Epiphanie’s poems we see the world differently.

Anne Schuster, founder of DAKINI, writer, poet,  writing teacher and facilitator extraordinaire of Women’s Writing Workshops, could herself be seen as a Dakini – a guardian angel of women’s writing who allows a writing space where voices like Epiphanie’s and many others flourish.

6 May, the date of the launch, is also Epiphanie’s birthday and Malika Ndlovu, Durban-born performer-word-weaver-story-lover, then saluted the birth of Epiphanie’s book and her birthday with a performance poem which she had written in 24 hours, after being asked to step in and take Gabeba’s place.

She is mountain’s daughter
yet spirit free like water
Epiphanie
sister born to rolling hills
and weeping sky
yet still she opens
inner eye
Epiphanie
it is clear to me
your home is here
your family is near
You need not run or ever hide
for you have found your home
inside
(Malika Ndlovu)

When she woke up that morning, Epiphanie said, the wind was howling and the rain was pouring down. However, she evoked a childhood rhyme: ‘rain rain go away, come again another day’.  The weather obliged, and it was, Epiphanie said, ‘a good day for me.’ A day which had seen the birth of her book, her family and friends near her, surrounded by kindness and good wishes – she was, truly, counting her blessings.

Counting my blessings
I’m sitting in the setting sun, counting my blessings, They keep slipping out of my hands. Nothing palpable. Nothing to thank God for? Maybe my eyes have turned blind. Maybe my hands have turned numb. Maybe my heart is a living rock. I will start all over again. Counting my blessings. I wish I could fill buckets. No, trucks. No, ships. Still nothing palpable. Nothing to thank God for? I will start all over again. I’m sitting in the deep sleep of the sun. Everything is quiet. Even the mice in my house will not interfere. I can hear my breath, I can hear my heartbeat. At last, right under my nose, I have found something. Something to thank God for. (From Kilimanjaro on my lap)

***

I spoke to Epiphanie about Kilimanjaro on my lap and asked her what lay at the heart of her book.

‘This is my own book – it’s a big step in my life. I never thought I would have a chance like this.

‘Life hasn’t always been easy for my family and me. But writing poetry has given me the opportunity to think this through for myself, and to realise that while it may sometimes seem that we haven’t achieved a great deal, at the heart of all that happens there is always hope. True, there have been many times in my life, when hope looked like dying. Watching people around me die, wondering, will I be the next? We’ve been tossed around by the winds and the storms of life. Then, at a time when I was very low, the chance of publishing my poetry came about. That coincided with hearing big news about my family in Rwanda, some of it harrowing, some of it joyous. I knew then that my poetry had added meaning; it would allow me to share these feelings, the sorrow and the celebration.’

On the edge of madness
the wind carried me away
down the green hill
to land
under a silver tree
(the first lines of  ‘Under the silver tree’, Kilimanjaro on my lap)

‘Sometimes, I feel like a hollow reed. I ask, what has been left at the core of me, and can it ever be filled? I find sounds and music useful. I pour them into the hollowness and they settle. At other times I feel like a branch cut from the mother tree. But then I remind myself, I carry flowers and seeds. Wherever I land my feet I have been able to grow, even in foreign soil, even if that place is plagued by bureaucracy, regulations and xenophobia.  A flower finds a place to grow, even in the hardest soil. My book is a flower – out of nothingness something has blossomed.

‘Working on my poetry, knowing it would become a book, has helped me in another way. I can see my connection to the whole world more clearly. I have often asked who am I? And now I can answer that question. I am someone who has had to work hard, try hard, deal with hardship, but at my core I am someone who wants to celebrate life.

‘Life can be as fragile as glass. War breaks hopes and dreams. In one short time, they are all gone. It breaks our contact with family and friends. The whip of war shatters everything. But in the darkness a bell rings and awakens you. It rings hope; it says, there is something beyond the darkness. Carry on. And then I look at my life, at my beautiful family, and I think, we have been through all of these things. But it has not been the end. We still have hope.’

then in the silent dark
somewhere from within
a song finds its way

light comes in the night
the moon relents
and you sing of the beauty of life
(closing lines of ‘Light in the night’, Kilimanjaro on my lap)

‘I know the colour of despair and the sound of hope; I counter my sense of displacement with a determination to settle and put down roots; I see life for what it is, and dream about what it may become. I accept my sorrows and I work hard at moving past nostalgia because nostalgia can kill you. My home is here now, in Cape Town, with the people who make my home: my family. My home is there too – in Rwanda. The people who died there live in my heart.

‘I carry all this with me and in me, and make my poems from it all.’

I am from a remote land
faint memories of undulating hills
and unwinding rivers
I am a rootless tree
standing as if by magic
swinging back and forth
yet battling not to crumble
(the first lines of  ‘I am from’, Kilimanjaro on my lap)

About the poet
Epiphanie Mukasano is originally from Rwanda where she used to be a teacher. She has a Master’s degree in English Literature, and now lives as a refugee in Cape Town with her husband and children. Her poems have been published in Living on the Fence (2007) a collection of writing by women who are refugees from various countries in Africa. Epiphanie contributed ‘When a name is lost’ to the collection of birth stories, Just Keep Breathing and most recently, Cambridge University Press has published her children’s story Shema and the Goat (2009).

Kilimanjaro on my lap is dedicated to Epiphanie’s mother and to the memory of her father, sisters and brothers.

Kilimanjaro on my lap
By Epiphanie Mukasano
ISBN 978-0-620-46153-5
DAKINI
R90.00
Kilimanjaro on my lap is available at Kalk Bay Books, Clarke’s Bookshop, Long Street and direct from DAKINI at : www.anneschuster.co.za.

Live Writing provided material support for Kilimanjaro on my lap, and is delighted to have played a small part in the creation of this collection.

In my early twenties after reading the first two of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographies, I knew I wanted the life of a writer. I have managed very well. I think the two salient points I picked up from that early reading was  how worldly it seemed to write in cafés and to have relationships with wonderfully unsuitable men. The other aspect was to be part of some kind of literary scene, to know writers, to be a writer, to know publishers, to be one. For a long time I thought I wanted to marry a poet. Now I know I want to be one, well a writer. For a long time, I only thought of ‘being a poet.’ As though it was something you could do and be apart from just writing poems. At times some of these desires have led me in conflicting directions, but nevertheless I have persevered with my writing and with the other imperatives.

For me being a writer is writing, it is showing up on the page, it is working away at my writing, trying to get better and better. Sometimes I am thinking about character and how to ‘do characterisation’. Other times a particular character stays with me for a long time, lives alongside me, inside me. I see the world through her eyes.

The thing I find hardest to do is to send out unsolicited work to magazines and journals and to enter writing competitions. It feels too much like admin. But I know it is an important step or set of steps in becoming a writer, being a writer.

I go through periods of writing more, writing less. Lately I have been distracted by amongst many other things, Facebook and starting Modjaji Books.

Sometimes I write down my dreams, often I write To Do lists, sometimes I write about something that is troubling me, that I am trying to get to grips with. I have long periods where I can write nothing, I don’t even try, I am speechless, wordless, like an animal or a small child.

In my office I have most of the notebooks I have written in over the years, they take up two shelves, about 60 notebooks. I lost one once, in fact my newish white Nissan bakkie was broken into outside Naran’s in Grahamstown. I’d popped in to buy some veggies and when I came out the window was smashed, my bag was gone. I lost my purse, ID book, cheque book and notebook and keys to the doors of the NGO I worked for up in Joza. The loss of the notebook disturbed me, left me bereft as though I’d lost a hand or a large piece of flesh from my inner thigh or an ear. The notebook contained writing from a trip Andre and I made to Lesotho, we had visited the trading station where my family had lived when I was four and five – Hellspoort, near Thabana Morena. There was also a picture in my notebook that a friend had given me cut out from The Cape Times ‘society pages’ of the man who may or may not have been my birth father. Sometimes I see the signs for his company up around Cape Town. His son went to Bishops.

Fiction happens when the compulsion to write is more powerful than the fear. Either way, we are talking about an internal war. During the writing my first novel, I became tired of my own anguished ambivalence. I felt worn down by the vicious dialogue between my love of writing and my fear of being seen. Out of desperation, I worked out two ways to sidestep the war.

1. Routine

I dedicate some morning hours to my imaginary world. I get my ass down on a chair by nine in the morning. I get up once an hour for tea or a snack. I ignore the thought that I should really have my thyroid tested instead, or that today is the perfect day to renew my passport. I stay away from the phone. I resist phoning a friend to tell them the thing I forgot to say the other day.

2. Self Deception

When I start writing I tell myself, ‘This is not my book. These are just rough notes to use as reference when I really write it.’

When I have written a couple of hundred pages, I say to myself, ‘Let me take out the bits I don’t need and write in the notes that are missing. Then I’ll really start on the first draft of my book.’

Afterwards, I say, ‘Let me edit these rough notes just to make them readable. It would be nice to print them out before I really start writing.’

Once it’s printed, I say, ‘Goodness gracious me! This could pass for a first draft!’

A few weeks ago I read John Irving’s The World According to Garp. It’s odd I took so  long to get to it considering that I am a huge John Irving fan, but it was an early book and I found the title unappealing; still perhaps there’s some truth to the adage that the teacher appears when the student is ready. An overseas publisher at the 2007 Franschoek Literary Festival mentioned the delight of completing a trans-Atlantic flight with the manuscript of The World According to Garp as reading material. In spite of the story’s unusual nature she pushed for it to be published and the rest is history. The World According to Garp became John Irving’s breakout novel.

Irving’s Garp writes a novel in which the central character knifes her rapist to death in a graphic first chapter. Garp’s publisher considers the book to be x-rated soap-opera, nevertheless the visceral language and controversial subject matter have potential market appeal so he does what he’s done before with books he’s not certain about: he asks the woman who cleans his office to read it, not expecting her to read past the first few pages. We learn that his reputation as a publisher of surprising books destined to be popular is in fact based on the opinions of this unlikely reader who doesn’t even like books. When he realizes that she has actually read the whole book he asks her why. This is the exchange between them:

“Same reason I read anythin’ for,” Jillsy said. “To find out what happens.”

“So you read it to find out?” John Wolf said.

“There surely ain’t no other reason to read a book, is there?” Jilly Sloper said.

When she asks him for a copy he interrogates her as to why she would want to read it again, and she finally responds as follows:

“It feels so true,” she crooned, making the word true cry like a loon over a lake at night … “A book’s true when you can say, ‘Yeah! That’s how damn people behave all the time.’ Then you know it’s true,” Jillsy said.

The mind-blowing realization that hit me as I read these passages was that Irving has always clearly understood the formula for success. Writers in training tend to over-complicate the business of writing a novel and attracting readers to their work; in reality what compels a reader is what compels all of us; we all want to know what happens next to characters we care about. And as for our own writing careers; we are after all the chief protagonist of our own life story. All novelists are waiting for their breakout novel, unless it’s been and gone, in which case they’re working on another one and waiting to find out what happens next. Top of the New York Times Bestseller List?

In my specific case I’m in the throes of tackling a second novel so I’m taking Irving’s directives to heart. Writing a second novel turns out to be a very different process to the first novel which took shape on the UCT Creative Writing Masters Program. Back then gentle suggestions and positive encouragement ensured that I reversed out of cul-de-sacs before hitting a brick wall, halted suicidal dashes down one-way highway lanes and limited how long I went round in circles before recognizing the correct exit to the desired destination. An excitable imagination was channeled. With this second book I must find a way to ratchet the writing up to the next level while remaining true to a central plot and contending with the reality of a book marketplace teeming with original well-written books that have not broken even, never mind broken out. It’s not enough for a novel to be well received. For authors that are not yet established relatively low sales are a blow to any notion of financial survival and have the potential to plunge a writing career into a downward spiral.

As Irving points out any fiction writer worth his or her salt must work towards creating a reality that feels true and that begs the question of what ultimately happens to our characters. If we are serious about honing our craft and making a living as full-time writers then we must be serious about captivating readers. The world is full of readers; we just have to find ways of making them fall under our spell.

Consuelo Roland

After leaving the information technology business Consuelo completed an MA degree in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel The Good Cemetery Guide was short listed for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize 2006 and received special mention from the Olive Schreiner judges. She has had short stories and poetry published in Twist, Women Flashing, South Africa Writing, Writing the Self and The Sunday Times. Her essay “Was Ayn Rand Wrong? An essay on capitalism” appeared in The Face of The Spirit: a century of essays by South African Women published by the Department of Art & Culture. Consuelo is currently working on her second novel. She lives in Hout Bay with her husband and son, and a menagerie of pets.

Consuelo has a blog on BOOK SA, and also runs The Good Cemetery Guide website.

Click here to read more about what South African writers have to say about writing.

But it gets worse: I once spent ages sculpting a spectacular horse, only to discover that a horseshoe was all I needed. I still have the horse, stained with blood, sweat and tears where I beat my head against it until I saw the light.

I now work with the 3S system – structure, structure, structure. Needless to say, this process takes place before the real writing begins. Very few people set off on a journey without knowing where they are headed. Those that do, often end up wandering aimlessly, gibbering to themselves, with a bottle of cheap booze in hand. Those are hard luck stories no one really ever wants to hear.

If you want to learn about structure, screenwriting is a great place to start. No screenplay is sold without a synopsis. And no synopsis is read without a logline. The reason is simple: to produce a film, you need money, which means you need to convince a lot of people that their money will be well spent. You hook them with the logline, reel them in with the synopsis, and then land them with the screenplay. Only then does the cooking, serving and tasting begin.

Granted, book publishing works in more mysterious ways. But ultimately a publisher will have to decide whether your book is worth spending money on. So it’s a good idea to have ready answers to any questions that may be asked. And by doing the prep work – logline, synopsis, character biographies, etc. – you can save yourself a lot of time when you’re writing. If you know the essence, the premise, the logline of your story, it’s easier to spot superfluous or irrelevant material. A good synopsis and chapter breakdown works like a global positioning system, telling you exactly where you are, even in the most convoluted plot. And if you write biographies in advance, you won’t have characters who suffer from multiple personality syndrome.

All this may sound very anal and restrictive – there was a time when I would have said the same – but I still have that bloody horse to remind me that I needed a horseshoe.

Richard de Nooy grew up in Johannesburg, but has lived in Amsterdam for more than 20 years. His first novel Six Fang Marks and a Tetanus Shot (Jacana, 2007) won the University of Johannesburg Prize for Best First Book in 2008. He would love to write a second novel, but spends too much time feeding the corporate crocodile as a translator, editor and copywriter. De Nooy is deeply intrigued by his own quirks, foibles, obsessions, and lack of discipline, which he enjoys projecting on humanity.

I’ve purposely kept the topic broad – don’t want to tie people down to a description of writing routines and rituals (if you’re anything like me those don’t exist in your life). So – the joys, the highs, the lows, the advantages of being a writer in south Africa, the disadvantages, what it’s like to write for a living, some good how-to-write tips, your writing space, something funny, something poignant – whatever you feel moved to write!

I’ll be posting these regularly on BOOK SA – over the next weeks, months and years I hope!

The first writer featured is BOOK SA’s very own and very dear Richard de Nooy.

PS If you know of anyone who’d like to be featured please do let me know.

We talked about looking beyond tips, resources and exercises and the like and offering freelance opportunities to writers. And over and above all of that we wanted to see if there was some way in which a community of writers could offer financial and material support to writers of exceptional talent but limited resources. Although this was to be my project, Colleen, in typically generous fashion, gave hours of her time to helping to formulate exactly what it is that writers need.

The next step was to look at what sort of website I would need. I won’t bore you with details – suffice to say that the wonderful team at Create Design gave me detailed advice and suggestions. I needed a Content Management System, not cheap or easy to set up, and so began the next round of what to do and how to do it. I approached seda (the Small Enterprise Development Agency) where a wonderful man called Thobela Ndlebe devoted hours of his time to ensuring that I, a true naïf (should the feminine of this be naïve?) when it comes to business, had some idea of what I was letting myself in for. I received assistance from seda for the web design and CMS and in the meantime another application for funding (from the National Arts Council) bore fruit and I was able to spend some time on writing the basic content for the site and to offer support to Epiphanie Mukasano – the first recipient of assistance from the Live Writing fund.

And so it went on: meetings with seda, approaching writers and editors, trying to get content written. (Hours and hours of work there, with hours and hours still to do – welcome though it was the NAC money covered a fraction of this time.)

It’s been a wonderfully collaborative effort and I can’t say thank you enough to all the fantastic folk who have listened to me going on and on, offered their time and resources and firmly believed that Live Writing was going to happen – because there were times when I certainly didn’t!

It’s still not perfect – I have piles to do and write yet – but it’s a bit like having children, or going sailing, or embarking on anything where the unknown beckons – if you wait for the timing and all else to be just right you’ll never take the plunge!

And then of course there’s taking this plunge too – writing a blog post for book.co.za as opposed to lurking on the sidelines and popping my head up to make the odd comment. Somewhat nerve-racking!

But here it is written and yet another proof positive that the baby’s (a)live and kicking. Let’s hope I can keep it fed and clothed!