For the penultimate Eating the Fantastic episode of 2019, we head to the Baltimore Book Festival, a fun, free annual happening held near the city’s Inner Harbour. In previous years, I’ve invited you to take a seat at the table during that event with the likes of writers Sam J. Miller and Nalo Hopkinson.

My guest this time around is Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, who was a winner of the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award earlier this year for her work as a Guest Editor of Uncanny Magazine’s Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction Special Issue. She was also a 2019 Hugo Award finalist for Best Fan Writer. Her fiction has appeared in such magazines as Fireside and Uncanny, as well the anthologies Ghost in the Cogs and Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling. She’s written non-fiction for The Boston Globe, Barnes & Noble, Tor.com, and other venues. She is a feminist scholar and disability rights activist (which I knew), but also a burlesque historian (which I did not know).

We lunched at La Tavola, where I’d previously joined Marv Wolfman during the 2017 Baltimore Comic-Con. We discussed her roller coaster of emotions the night she won a Hugo Award earlier this year during the Dublin Worldcon, how that editorial gig increased her empathy, the way writing roleplaying games and being a Sherlock Holmes nerd taught her about world-building and led to her first professional fiction sales, the dinosaur-themed Twitter feed that gave birth to her most recently published short story, the novel she’s working on which she describes as The Conjuring meets The Stand, her expertise in obscenity law and fascination with the history of burlesque, why she felt the Bird Box novel handled blindness better than the movie, her background in competitive improv and the way that helped her within science fiction, advice on how not to let Internet trolls get you down, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation —

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Here’s what we ate during our meal at La Tavola —

Pumpkin Soup

Gnocchi

Saltimbocca

Cannoli

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Please come back in two weeks when my guest will be Bob Proehl, author of The Nobody People and A Hundred Thousand Worlds, which was a Booklist Best Book of the Year. I hope you’ll join us.