Out in the real world, Super Bowl Sunday was nearly three weeks ago, but for me and Ruthanna Emrys, it’s Super Bowl Sunday right now. Because on that day last month when gladiators clashed, I headed into Washington, D.C for lunch at Chinatown Garden, a restaurant near the city’s convention center which my wife and I usually visit either before or after attending AwesomeCon.

Ruthanna Emrys is best known for the H. P. Lovecraft-inspired Innsmouth Legacy series, which so far includes the 2014 novella “The Litany of Earth,” followed up by the novels Winter Tide in 2017 and Deep Roots in 2018. Her fiction has also appeared in such magazines as Strange Horizons and Analog Science Fiction and Fact, plus anthologies such as Timelines: Stories Inspired by H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction.

We discussed the ways in which her first exposure to Lovecraft was through pop culture references rather than the original texts, the reasons for the recent rise of Lovecraft recontextualisation, how tea with Jo Walton convinced her she was right to go ahead and write her first Innsmouth Legacy novel, why she ascribes to the tenets of the burgeoning Hopepunk movement, her love of writing X-Men fanfic and her hatred of gastropods, how she recovered from a college professor’s unconstructive criticism, the time George Takei was nice to her at age 8 after she attended her first con in costume on the wrong day, and much more.

Here’s how you can listen to our conversation at Chinatown Garden —

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Here’s what we ate during our conversation (in addition to that spring roll you see her holding out toward you above) —

Szechuan Crispy Shredded Beef

Beef with Snow Peas

Our Fortune Cookies
hers above, mine below

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Next episode, I’ll be lunching with longtime fan, book dealer, convention chair, and publisher Michael J. Walsh as I continue to explore all aspects of the fantastic. Please join us!