Earlier this summer I had the great joy and privilege of creating a piece of work based around an interview with the disaster risk engineer Josh Macabuag. The resulting story, ‘Forces and Loads’, is now live as part of the Inventive podcast initiative from the University of Salford, which places writers together in creative collaboration with workers in STEM.
I found Joshua’s interview and the insights it gave me into his work to be instantly inspiring, and I hope I have conveyed some sense of the power of his story through my own interpretation of it. ‘Forces and Loads’ runs in Episode 2 of the second series of Inventive, and you can listen to that episode here.
I am hugely grateful to Anna Scott-Brown and Adam Fowler of Overtone Productions for their help and expertise in making the experience so enjoyable and of course to Josh himself for allowing me an insight into his world. As I say in my own portion of the interview, I found enough material here for an entire novel and ‘Forces and Loads’ is a story I might well find myself revisiting in the future.
