It’s time to return to Pittsburgh for the penultimate episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded during the recent Nebula Awards weekend. If you want to experience that weekend as I did, check out my two dinners with Kelly Robson and Matthew Kressel, lunch with Alyx Dellamonica, and the chaotic but hopefully entertaining lightning-round Donut Jamboree.

And then move on to this episode’s guest, Ellen Klages, who won the Nebula Award in 2005 for her novelette, “Basement Magic.” Her novella, “Wakulla Springs” (co-authored with previous guest of the show Andy Duncan), was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards and won the World Fantasy Award in 2014.

She won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, the Lopez Award for Children’s Literature, and the New Mexico State Book Award for Young Adult Literature for her first novel, The Green Glass Sea. She has served for twenty years on the Motherboard of the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award. Her novella “Passing Strange” was one of the finalists for this year’s Nebula award.

Our venue for this episode was the relatively new Whitfield at Ace Hotel. This was certainly the most picturesque setting for a meal I experienced in Pittsburgh, because the building which housed both hotel and restaurant was a century-old former YMCA.

We discussed why it took 40 years from the time she wrote the first sentence of her Nebula Award-nominated story “Passing Strange” to finish the tale, what a truck filled with zebras taught her about the difference between storytelling and real life, how cosplaying helped give birth to her characters, what she finds so fascinating about creating historical science fiction, why revising is her favorite part of writing, the reason she’s the best auctioneer I’ve seen in my lifetime of con-going, what she teaches students is the worst mistake a writer can make, how her collaboration with Andy Duncan gave birth to an award-winning novella, whether she still feels like “a round peg in genre’s polyhedral hole” as she wrote in the afterword to her first short story collection, and much more.

Here’s how you can taste some of that Toad in a Hole with us—

1) Subscribe over at the iTunes store, where you’ll also be able to peruse all 71 previous episodes.

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3) Or simple listen using the embed below.

Here’s what Ellen and I devoured for lunch during that Nebula Awards weekend—

Toad in a Hole
farm egg, pepper jam, toast

Ellen’s Roast Beef Sandwich
horseradish, swiss, hash browns, smoked peppers

My Duck Leg Confit
hash browns escarole, grapefruit marmelade

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And I hope you’ll join me next episode, when my guest will be JY Yang, who was also a recent Nebula nominee for their novella The Black Tides of Heaven and is currently a Hugo Award nominee for that same story.

Thanks for listening!