Shauna Mackay: 'It's listening to the characters and letting them take the lead'

In this autumn series of podcasts we've heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa and Seán Padraic Birnie. This week we welcome Shauna Mackay to discuss her short story Matching up the Pattern at the Join.Mackay tells us how her short stories are driven by voice, by characters she conjures up and then follows on the page: "I sound like a witch now." The characters come from mixing and banging words together, she explains, so she enjoys spending time with them, even if they're sometimes a little awkward.According to Mackay, the northern texture of these voices emerges from the rhythms and tones of her everyday life, but it's hard to say exactly where they come from. Perhaps she's drawing on the time she spent working as a nurse, she continues, where you "see humanity in all its messy glory".Next week we'll be joined by Catriona Bolt, who'll be talking mushrooms and reading from her short story Bloom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.