My guest this episode is Shannon Robinson, whose short story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, was released last year. Robinson’s work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Water-Stone Review, Nimrod, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2011 she was the Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

Other honors include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Sewanee Scholarship, and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland Arts Council. Currently, she teaches creative writing and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her husband and son.

We discussed how best to deal with rejection, the way our opinions about print vs. electronic publication have changed over the courses of our careers, when an untrustworthy narrator can be a feature, not a bug, the many ways readers can be misreaders of stories, how she realized she’d reached short story critical mass and it was time to assemble a collection, the way the genres in which we write are often defined by those who publish us rather than the words on the page, what she tells her students is the only rule in writing, our contrasting experiences with simultaneous submissions, the ways in which she’ll apply everything she’s learned in writing short stories to her upcoming novel, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Tamber’s restaurant in Baltimore —

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Here’s what you would have seen us nibbling had you been with us at Tamber’s —

Shannon’s Baked Potato with Sour Cream

Scott’s Garlic Naan

Rice

Scott’s Lamb Korma

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Coming up two weeks from now — my lunch with with Robert Greenberger, a writer and editor of more than 100 books and anthologies, many within the DC, Marvel, and Star Trek franchises — and who like me attended the first Star Trek convention in 1972. I was 16, he was 13, and you’ll hear us talk all about it.

Thanks for listening!