Shahd Alshammari’s Confetti and Ashes: Reflections on Wellness (Literary Mentor Words for Wellness, 2025) is a speculative memoir that questions what it means to live a good life. Blending personal experiences with the voices of ghosts and a seductive Qareen, this is a meditative exploration of consciousness and the liminal spaces we exist in.

As a passionate Squash player, the narrator delves into the transformative power of sports. This lyrical narrative is genre-defying, refusing to adhere to conventional ways of narrating stories we carry within our bodies. Multi-layered and in many voices, this is a narrative of memory, disability, and movement.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Shahd Alshammari about her creative process, her personal journey with multiple sclerosis, as well as how her writings explore illness, wellness, and the search for meaning.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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