It’s said water flows to the path of least resistance. But do writers? That’s but one of the topics I tackle during my Burmese lunch with the award-winning writer Emily Mitchell.

Mitchell is author of the novel The Last Summer of the World (published by W. W. Norton in 2007), which was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award, as well as two collections of short fiction, Viral (published by W. W. Norton in 2015) plus The Church of Divine Electricity (published last year by the University of Wisconsin Press not long before our conversation). That latter collection won the 2023 Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, The Sun, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the New Statesman (in the UK), Guernica, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Can Serrat International Artists Residency. She serves as fiction editor for the New England Review, and teaches at the University of Maryland.

We discussed why she felt the need to flip the first and last stories of her recent collection, the gaps which can sometimes occur between a writer’s intentions and a reader’s perceptions, the appeal of the ambiguity which comes with open-ended closure, how a writer’s career is defined as much by who chooses to publish them as by what they choose to write, why she loves working in the present tense (and why one of her stories originally published that way shifted to the past tense in her collection), what she learned about writing by being an editor, why leaving out much of what writers know about their characters improves what they choose to put in, her story which required the most drafts (and why), how writing longhand has gotten her unstuck, why it’s important to have many writing projects going at once, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at the Mandalay Restaurant Cafe — (more…)

It’s time for a trip to Baltimore Comic-Con, where I had the chance to chat with comics creator Don Simpson, whose work I’ve been reading for more than 40 years, ever since the first issue of Megaton Man in 1984.

Back at the beginning of that series, it seemed (incorrectly) as if Don’s interest was solely in satirizing the Marvel tropes of my childhood, with characters such as Stella Starlight (the See-Thru Girl) and Bing Gloom (Yarn Man) spoofing Sue Storm (the Invisible Girl) and Ben Grimm (the Thing). But he soon started focusing on the natural outgrowth of the characters rather than limiting himself to metafictionally commenting only on the comics themselves. There was some pushback on that from those who wanted him to stick to the nostalgia game, as you’ll hear us chat about a bit.

He also created the science fiction backup Border Worlds, which eventually expanded into its own comic, as well as Bizarre Heroes, plus underground comics such as Forbidden Frankenstein, that last project under the pseudonym Anton Drek. Don celebrated Megaton Man’s 40th Anniversary last year with two major projects — the 608-page The Complete Megaton Man Volume I: The 1980s  and Megaton Man: Multimensions — with more planned collections forthcoming.

Even those who haven’t been privileged to experience Don through those many comics projects might have encountered him via the illustrations he created for Al Franken’s 2003 bestseller Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

We discussed why he splurged on a special issue of Captain Marvel at the Baltimore Comic-Con, how the business practices of comics affect the artistic side, the way two early visits with artist Keith Pollard taught him he didn’t want to be a Marvel Comics penciller after all, where he feels the Silver Age ended and the Bronze Age truly began, how classic cinema and the auteur theory influenced his creative choices, the lessons he learned from the first few issues of Love & Rockets vs. the unfortunate expectations set up by the first few issues of Megaton Man, how working on DC’s anthology title Wasteland caused him to reinvent himself, what path his publishing life would have taken had Megaton Man been only a one-shot as originally planned, the career differences between Basil Wolverton and Will Eisner, why he’s able to let others play with his characters without feeling proprietary, the alternate universe in which he would have been a Crusty Bunker or one of Romita’s Raiders, how 9/11 caused him to head back to school for a PhD, why he wrote a Ms. Megaton Man prose novel, whether he already knows the final chapter to his comics universe, and much more.

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This episode has me reminiscing about why I think of comics artist John Tartaglione every day, my dreams of Paul Anka’s comic book collection and a visit from Gene Colan, my early attempts to get fired from Marvel Comics, a well-earned warning from Marv Wolfman, the puzzle of why covers to romance novels tend to feature aspirational art while comic book romance covers often lean into the problems, and more.

You can eavesdrop on all those memories via the embed below or download them at the site of your choice.

Here are a couple of images related to a couple of the topics I touched on during the episode —

Charlton Comics Lettering
a credit for A. Machine from Blue Beetle #2, Aug 1967

John Tartaglione art
from Love Tales #73, May 1957

Thanks to Andy Duncan, this episode marks an Eating the Fantastic first.

Andy’s a multiple award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer, having won three World Fantasy Awards, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, a Nebula Award, and others, plus he’s been been nominated for the Hugo, Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Awards as well. His nonfiction has also received recognition, with his essay “It Is Always Time To Think About These Things,” having received a World Fantasy Award nomination last year. His collections include Beluthahatchie and Other Stories (which came out in 2000), The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories (published in 2011), and, most recently, An Agent of Utopia (in 2018) His most recent work of fiction, “The Hodges Meteorite,” was published November 2025 in the Sunday Morning Transport.

And as for the way Andy was a catalyst for a unique episode —

I first chatted with him on the show way back in 2016 on Episode 6, when we squeezed as much as we could of his secret origin and writing process into the length of a meal.

We narrowed our focus in 2018 on Episode 85 for a discussion of his then newly released short story collection An Agent of Utopia.

But this time around, we got even more granular, doing a deep dive into a single short story — “Criswell Predicts!” — parts of which I first heard Andy read at a con in 2014, and was finally published just a few months ago in Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology. Discussing in detail how his initial idea was across more than a decade written and revised and workshopped until it finally saw print made for a fascinating conversation.

We discussed how his titles are often born decades before the stories to which they’re eventually attached, how his research into Criswell’s predictions “ethically stymied” him, why the way he creates stories isn’t a way he’d encourage anyone else to follow, the epiphany which caused him to realize a perceived bug in his story was actually a feature, what he hoped sending his story through the Sycamore Hill Writing Workshop would unlock, why he’s willing to publicly read aloud sections of stories he hasn’t completed, the essential exclamation point suggested by John Kessel, at what stage in the revision process specific details of setting get added, whether the story would have taken even longer to complete without the eventual pressure of a deadline, what about the story made it fitting for a Tanith Lee tribute anthology, the editorial acumen of Gardner Dozois, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Mythical Pizza in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia — (more…)