It’s been exactly one month since I joined Michael Dirda for lunch to record an episode of Eating the Fantastic, and the way things are going in this age of social distancing, it will likely be many more months before I’ll be able to sit down at a restaurant with a guest to record another. The three episodes I’d planned to harvest for you during the final days of March all had to be cancelled. So what’s a podcast predicated on breaking bread to do when bread can no longer be broken?

What it means for this episode is that it’s time for the interviewer to become the interviewee, as you join me for lunch in my kitchen while I continue to shelter in place. Last episode, I asked listeners to send in questions for things which might not have been revealed about my life as a writer, editor, publisher, podcaster, and fan during the previous 118 episodes. I also reached out to my former guests to see if they’d like to turn the tables and ask questions instead of just answering them.

I ended up with 93 questions, which I knew was far more than I’d be able to answer in a single episode. But I printed them, folded them up, tossed them inside the head of a Roswell alien, and then pulled them out randomly one at a time and tried to answer as many as I could over the course of my meal.

I managed to get through 33 of them, including questions from Lucy A. Snyder, Maura McHugh, T. E. D. Klein, Brian Keene, Ramsey Campbell, Pat Cadigan, Ellen Klages, Matthew Kressel, Norman Prentiss, Lisa Tuttle, Nalo Hopkinson, Robert Reed, K. M. Szpara, Linda Addison, Stephen Kozeniewski , Amal El-Mohtar, Lynne Hansen, James Morrow, Erik T. Johnson, Steve Rasnic Tem, A. M. Dellamonica, Resa Nelson, Sam J. Miller, Fran Wilde, Paul Di Filippo, Cecilia Tan, Kaaron Warren, and Jeffrey Ford. (Whew!)

Over the course of my meal, I shared about my love for The Twilight Zone (and the negative effect it had on me as a beginning writer), the origins of the Scarecrow character I created for Marvel in 1975, what it was like editing a professional wrestling magazine, whether the difficulties I faced in getting my Lambda Award-nominated novel The Gift published during the ‘80s still hold true today, the embarrassing things I wishes I hadn’t done as editor and publisher of Last Wave magazine, how it felt seeing one of my comic book creations on the big screen in Captain Marvel, my opinion on the James Tiptree Jr. Award controversy, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on my socially distant lunch —

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts — where I hope you’ll be tempted to download a few of the 118 previous episodes.

2) Listen using the RSS feed of http://eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com/rss on the device of your choice.

3) Or check it out via the embed below.

Here’s what I nibbled on while social distancing —

My Sheltering in Place Lunch
A Yonah Schimmel knish, hard salami, and oven-roasted vegetables

A KIND Bar
caramel almond and sea salt

If you enjoyed this episode and want to support my mission of breaking bread with creators of the fantastic while letting you listen in, there are several ways you can help bring this podcast to the attention of potential new listeners looking for science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics ear candy —

One is to rate Eating the Fantastic on Apple Podcasts and like it on Facebook.

Also — you could tell your friends about the show by sending them a link to your favorite episode and letting them know what I’m doing here.

Finally — because of Eating the Fantastic’s unique niche — that is, on-the-road restaurant interviews, which I hope we’ll get back to soon — there are expenses beyond the usual ones for studio-based podcasts. I sometimes use ride-sharing services to carry me and my guests from convention centers to restaurants and back, or I gas up to drive them myself — and then there’s that food I used to entice those guests to wander off and share of themselves with you, food which loosens their tongues, relaxes them, and — counterintuitively, because we are after all out in public surrounded by other diners — results a much more intimate environment than if we were alone together in a sterile studio.

So I hope you’ll consider becoming a supporter of the show, and help fund this mission of mine.

You could make a small recurring monthly donation over at Patreon, where there are various perks involved depending on your level of support, such as access to a patrons-only blog, getting a shout-out on the show, stickers, postcards, and more.

Or if an ongoing level of commitment’s not for you, or if Patreon’s just not your thing, then consider tossing a couple of bucks in the tip jar instead and making a one-time donation of any size via Paypal.me.

Or you could head on over to https://ko-fi.com/eatingthefantastic and send me the funds to cover the cost of a cup of coffee.

Thanks for for listening! I hope you’ll join me again next episode when I’m joined by the only guest on the planet with whom I feel it makes poetic and metaphorical sense to have a socially distant conversation. (And if you want to know who I mean, give a listen to the final moments of this episode.)