Michelle Shine

                                                    La Delivrance by Emile Guillaume

There has only ever been one word to describe La Délivrance - or The Naked Lady as we used to call her when I was a child -  and that is magnificent.  She was my first introduction to the spirit of a heroine even before I had the intellect to understand what that meant. At around five years old I was shocked at her brazenness and felt s...

It was eleven years since I last went to Israel with my late husband, Jon, and my son, Dan, who recited his bar mitzvah by the wailing wall. It was at the time of the Lebanon war. We stayed in Herzilya and I remember sitting on the beach watching war planes flying back and forth. Everyone we met was extremely gracious, thanking us for being there at that difficult time. Now was the time to go back there, for several reasons:

As a staunch supporter of Israel, I was starting to feel uncomfortable with not having witnessed the current situation for m...

When I think about my writing projects I see them as lines on the wall that indicate a growth spurt for me as a human being. What happens to these pieces after they’re written are never the motivation, as long as they’re nourished with love, gratitude and respect, here in my heart, then they can somehow survive and stand up proudly in their own right, even the ones that are not considered my best writing. For the works themselves, however, empathetic readers are always the main goal. 

A long while ago, I wrote an autobiographical piece that w...

A big thank you to Barnet Synagogue book club who had me come and talk to them yesterday evening about God’s Will and the Yellow Dress.

I’m very happy to say that nine of their members turned up and I was warmly welcomed into their fold as I revealed the story behind the story, and shared details of my trip to Lithuania when I travelled with a Jewish American Genealogy Group in 2013 to check out the shtetls — some of them with their old landscape and buildings still intact — and the social history documented in the archives in Vilnius. 

In return,...

In 2011, with Mesmerised not yet picked up by a publisher or literary agent, I was back to writing short stories. Several of them were chosen to be read at live events, others received publication in magazines and anthologies. 

One in particular, entitled Blind Faith, based upon an anecdote told to me by my maternal grandmother when I was a child, got longlisted for the Cinnamon Press short story award in 2012. When I took it to my writing group they wanted to know what happens next.

God’s Will and the Yellow Dress is a fable. Like Mesmer...

I’m starting to think of my holiday adventures as pieces of memory art. Each one with their own feeling and flavour. Each one coloured by people and landscapes. In my portfolio, there are those trips where I learn a lot, like the time I studied yoga with the Iyengar family in Pune, India. Working trips, such as volunteering for the Ghana Homeopahy Project when a distant land and its people invited me to participate in their world. There are family holidays, and holidays like Bhutan, where  I travel with a group of strange...