BANNISTER PRESS

There’s no myth that hasn’t a little truth to it. Sometimes it’s a deep truth of the dark eras, a long-obscured ghost of flood or fire. Sometimes it’s a symbol-truth, a reflection of how we know the world to really be, underneath. Sometimes, very rarely, there’s a literal truth, a real and present truth, the grit at the heart of the pearl. 

“Strandline” is a modern selkie story loosely inspired by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” as another strange figure grabs a reveller and tells a dark tale.

Emily Mackay is a Scottish writer and editor based in Hertfordshire, England. She has written about music for the Guardian, Uncut, NME and more, and is a news copy editor for the Guardian. In 2017, she wrote Björk’s Homogenic, a volume in Bloomsbury’s 33 ⅓ series on classic albums. She has since edited several books in the series, as well as in the Manchester University Press series British Pop Archive, and contributed the chapter, “Kenickie’s At the Club,” to 33 ⅓: The B-Sides.  Her first published story, “Tin Can Alley,” appeared in the journal Riffs in 2021.

How did you come up with idea for your story?
I had always wanted to write a selkie story that tried to cut through the romanticism that can weigh Scottish mythology down; a modern take that didn’t feel escapist or wafty. This was one of the earliest things I wrote when I started writing fiction, and it was the first time I felt the flow of a character’s voice that had its own energy. I loved the idea of this elder selkie letting a human, picked almost at random, in on her kind’s secrets, and that image of someone being buttonholed on the beach got caught up in my mind with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner a bit.

How does your story relate to the theme of “feeling other”?
I think selkie stories have always been about the other, whether it’s the lure of the other from the mortal lover’s point of view, or the selkie-child feeling that so many people have that they only have one foot in the world of humans, and that there must be a place somewhere where they really belong. For my story, I wanted the character to give voice to a weary double otherness that would be familiar to anyone who has made a big move in their life: that you no longer really fit in either place, being too changed for your old home and too strange for your new one.

How do you keep your creative spark alive?
I work full-time as a news subeditor (copy editor), so it can be tough to get into the right sort of relaxed state for good writing when it’s WORDS WORDS WORDS at high speed all the time in the office. But I try to write at least a little every day, even if it’s just an automatic sentence from off the top of my head. I think it helps that I also try to find time for a little (bad) drawing and painting, as that’s a good palate-cleanser from all the verbiage, and it gets you in noticing mode.

What’s next for you? Do you have any stories coming out in 2025?
I have a few irons in the fire, though nothing confirmed yet. I am hoping to get my teeth into something bigger, so I’m just knocking a lot of ideas around in my brain cauldron at the moment.

Thank you, Emily!

“Strandline” is in OTHER: the 2024 speculative fiction anthology, which can be found at Amazon.