Shelley Davidow – författare

Words are disappearing from the world. Four children from the corners of the earth have been sent on a quest to rediscover lost letters and unlock the treasure of language before wisdom and light vanish from the world altogether.

Drawing on years of experience of writing, teaching and publishing, this book offers essential tools for writers interested in honing their craft. Whether you’re a poet, non-fiction writer, novelist, journalist, student or simply a lover of words, it will take you on an exciting and challenging journey to becoming a sophisticated writer. As in the learning of any true craft or art, first the focus is on specific skills, then on consolidating those skills, which by the end will be innate. Through a variety of exercises and freewriting prompts, Playing with Words will help you develop your writing, trying out new styles and approaches along the way. Use this book in a class, in a group, or alone in a writer’s attic.

Drawing on years of experience of writing, teaching and publishing, this book offers essential tools for writers interested in honing their craft. Whether you’re a poet, non-fiction writer, novelist, journalist, student or simply a lover of words, it will take you on an exciting and challenging journey to becoming a sophisticated writer. As in the learning of any true craft or art, first the focus is on specific skills, then on consolidating those skills, which by the end will be innate. Through a variety of exercises and freewriting prompts, Playing with Words will help you develop your writing, trying out new styles and approaches along the way. Use this book in a class, in a group, or alone in a writer’s attic.

For those that have mastered the basics of memoir and wish to probe this brand of creative nonfiction further, Writing the Radical Memoir uses salient theories about memory and the self to challenge assumptions about how we remember and tell the truth of our lives when we write about it. Innovative in approach and making new critical ideas accessible, each chapter maps out the key principles of such writers as Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Philippe Le Jeune and Joseph Campbell, invokes literary examples to show how other writers have mastered the idea before reflecting on how you can practically apply the theory to your writing. With original exercises and prompts for further reading that bridge the gap between the theoretical and how it might be put into practice, the book is attentive to the multiple facets of the genre of nonfiction writing generally, covering such topics as: - The writer/ reader contract- How to embark on a thematic/ symbolic exploration of themes and incidents in your life- How neuro-scientific theory can inform our understanding of memory and recall and what happens to our memories when we remember them- Character development and the ethics of writing about real people- How constructing your identity in memoir offers a chance to push back against traditional structures- That memoir might not be preservation of your past but a process of self-erasure- How J. M. Coetzee’s Autrebiography trilogy challenges traditional biographyBy bringing together lived experience, post-structuralist and postmodernist theories, praxis and artistic vision as a unique approach to writing memoir, this book encourages you to think the self, how it is portrayed, created, erased and made strange through the process of writing and remembering.

For those that have mastered the basics of memoir and wish to probe this brand of creative nonfiction further, Writing the Radical Memoir uses salient theories about memory and the self to challenge assumptions about how we remember and tell the truth of our lives when we write about it. Innovative in approach and making new critical ideas accessible, each chapter maps out the key principles of such writers as Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Philippe Le Jeune and Joseph Campbell, invokes literary examples to show how other writers have mastered the idea before reflecting on how you can practically apply the theory to your writing. With original exercises and prompts for further reading that bridge the gap between the theoretical and how it might be put into practice, the book is attentive to the multiple facets of the genre of nonfiction writing generally, covering such topics as: - The writer/ reader contract- How to embark on a thematic/ symbolic exploration of themes and incidents in your life- How neuro-scientific theory can inform our understanding of memory and recall and what happens to our memories when we remember them- Character development and the ethics of writing about real people- How constructing your identity in memoir offers a chance to push back against traditional structures- That memoir might not be preservation of your past but a process of self-erasure- How J. M. Coetzee’s Autrebiography trilogy challenges traditional biographyBy bringing together lived experience, post-structuralist and postmodernist theories, praxis and artistic vision as a unique approach to writing memoir, this book encourages you to think the self, how it is portrayed, created, erased and made strange through the process of writing and remembering.

Two women. Two cultures. And a friendship that freed them both.‘We don’t choose where we’re born. Geography ends up being everything.’ Shaimaa Khalil and Shelley Davidow met twenty years ago in the Middle East when Shaimaa was Shelley’s student at the University of Qatar. Strangers in a strange land where the silencing and oppression of women is deeply entrenched, they immediately formed a deep and abiding bond. Shelley saw Shaimaa as her ‘Rosetta Stone’, helping her decode a culture and world so foreign it appeared to be from another planet. Shaimaa saw Shelley and her apartment as her ‘Tardis’, a space where she could glimpse a world she dreamed of inhabiting. Born a decade apart on opposite ends of the African continent – Shaimaa, an Arab Muslim from Egypt and Shelley an Ashkenazi Jew from South Africa – tell the story of a friendship that has defied historical, geographic and temporal boundaries, mapping the vast emotional and geographic territories they have travelled as women pushing against patriarchal confines over the past two decades. In an exchange of words and memories, Shaimaa and Shelley recall what shaped them, what broke them, and how they made themselves whole again through their interwoven stories.