Fictionable Fictionable

We've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie and Shauna Mackay on the Fictionable podcast. Now we bring this autumn series to a close with Catriona Bolt and her mycological short story Bloom.
Bolt tells us how she fell in love with mushrooms despite, or perhaps because of, their double nature. These mysterious organisms were the perfect lens through which to explore the expectations surrounding young women at the beginning of the 19th century, she explains, an issue that still has resonance in the 21st. With historical fiction, "you can step into another land", she continues, but it's always connected to the present day.
Fairy-Land hovers at the edges of Bloom. Bolt reveals how she had to resist its pull and how she found the model for her sparring sisters closer to home.

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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.

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This autumn we've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa and her band, Qarpa. This week we have an appointment with Seán Padraic Birnie and his story The Medical Room.
Birnie tells us how he was fuelled by frustration at work and struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome. "It made me laugh, I think," he says, "but I wasn't sure it would make anyone else laugh."
Elements of the gruesome office mechanics in The Medical Room are drawn from life, Birnie explains, but the pull of horror fiction lays bare the power structures that are always at play.
Next time we welcome Shauna Mackay, with Catriona Bolt joining us the following week.


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After hearing last week from M John Harrison, who discussed how he makes fiction from fragments of reality, this week we turn it up to eleven as we welcome Irena Karpa. Fuelled by the latest track from her band, Qarpa, she reads from Kate Tsurkan's translation of her short story, Fellow Traveler, and gives us the inside track on that journey.
Karpa explains why the language from the streets that she used in her early novels came as such a shock to Ukrainian literary culture, and how her pride in her country is "like being proud that you have kidneys or heart or lungs – you're just born like this". Her fiction and her music are part of the same artistic project, she adds, even though sometimes her fans don't even know she does both.
Looking back to 2014, Karpa remembers playing to crowds of thousands in Maidan square. She explores what life is like as the war grinds on, and looks forward to a day when Ukrainians can build a new society.
Next time we'll be focusing on Seán Padraic Birnie, with Shauna Mackay and Catriona Bolt joining us over the weeks to come. In the meantime, you can read Kate Tsurkan's report on how Ukrainian writers have been responding to Russian aggression since 2014.

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Over the next few weeks, we'll be hearing from Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie, Shauna Mackay and Catriona Bolt. But we launch this autumn podcast series with M John Harrison and his haunting short story, I Can't Tell.
Harrison tells us how he constructs his stories from fragments of real life, filed in notebooks and then reassembled into uncanny structures on the page. At one stage, this process was "consciously not very fictiony" he says, but by the time you’ve spent ten years exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, "it's stopped being conscious any more, and it's just a thing that you do".
Fiction should be "read like nonfiction", he continues. "It's not there for you to put on like clothes and re-enact."
The past looms large over both I Can't Tell and his recent anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here, but according to Harrison writing has always been a struggle with things that have gone before. That and his "very, very unrelatable" characters, who are uniformly tricky to get on with – tricky, that is, apart from the cats.

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This summer we've been hearing a little more from our amazing authors in an expanded series of podcasts. Joyce Carol Oates confessed she feels "like a fourteen-year-old girl" while Fiona Mozley admitted to an "awkward personality". José Falero – voiced by Maria Jacqueline Evans – argued that the 21st century's obscene inequalities can only be addressed through "diversity in the spaces of power" and Donal McLaughlin declared that he does "expect the reader to keep up".
We bring this series to a close with Sabba Khan, who joins us to talk about At the Door. She tells us how she started working on this graphic short story at a difficult time in her own life, and how the move from memoir into fiction gave her a sense of freedom. She reveals her obsession with London's Victorian terraced housing and a fascination with the spirit realm of black magic, djinns and demons. Khan also examines the barriers that divide comics from writing in prose, and reflects on the mystery of her mother tongue.

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