Good advice: Rilke’s Gift to the World
So all I see is young artists and they ask me how they can publish their work, how they can become better writers? It...
Assia Wevill
Journal entry In these early days Assia Wevill needs proof. Will a village life be enough for us? I am planting...
Ingrid Jonker’s Black Butterflies
Let us tell ghost stories. Jonker is a ghost of her former self, but she is still in the land of the living —...
Optimism for the Elite
Poetry always smelled like spring dirt to me. In the distance, the future imagined like clockwork. Chronic pain is always both an illusion and...
Anne Sexton Renaissance woman
When you are a manic-depressive, you are married to the unction of your fears. Up and down your moods will go....
A Brave New World
There is power and justice in everything that we read until we give our perspective the permission to see it as thus. ...
Lost in Translation
African writers’ stories have often been fragmented in Africa since Nelson Mandela was released from prison. They have often not been told, put into...
African Cinema
Television, films and churches formed a large part of the origins of my writing when I was younger. My childhood was not as bleak...
The Post-apartheid Dilemma
War and peace. There are blurred lines in the realities of both. A separation anxiety as the paradigm shifts from the air that a...
Apartheid and Xenophobia
“In the face of pain there are no heroes.” ― George Orwell, 1984 The future of democracy is uncertain after the recent xenophobic attacks...