Hey, where is there?

I'm on.

I love you.

Woo.

Hey there.

Welcome to the Other People podcast.

I am Brad Lestie and I am in Los Angeles.

It's good to be with you.

I appreciate you tuning in and I hope you're doing okay wherever you happen to be right now.

My guest today is Shannon McLeod, author of a new story

collection called Nature Trail Stories. Well, I've also always been someone who's like major form

of entertainment is taking walks, so it felt more so like the pandemic made that socially

acceptable. So before I was the one asking friends to go take walks with me and it was a little odd,

but now it seems a little more commonplace. A lot of these stories, or maybe about a quarter of

these stories, a third of these stories I wrote

before the pandemic. But I think it was during the pandemic that I started to see this pattern

that, oh, I keep writing stories about characters who are walking or on nature trails. And

I first started as a joke that I'm going to write a collection of nature trail stories.

Wouldn't that be career suicide?

Like, no one would want to read that book.

So I think I put that out just as a, you know, silly tweet a couple years ago.

And then I was like, you know what?

...