This episode, which invites you to take a seat at the table with Craig Laurance Gidney, captures a meal which could have taken place during AwesomeCon — but didn’t. If you want to know why — you’ll have to join us!

Gidney’s short stories have been collected in Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories (2008), Skin Deep Magic: Short Fiction (2014), and The Nectar of Nightmares (2022), the first two of which were Lambda Literary Award finalists — as was his 2019 novel A Spectral Hue (2019). He received the Bronze Moonbeam Medal and Silver IPPY Medal for his 2013 novel Bereft. In 1996, at the start of his career, he was also awarded the Susan C. Petrey Scholarship to attend the Clarion West Writing Workshop.

From 2020-2023 he co-edited Baffling Magazine with Dave Ring, and he’s also the co-editor — with Julie C. Day & Carina Bissett — of Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology, published this month.

We discussed how meeting Samuel R. Delany led to his attending the Clarion Writing Workshop, the influence of reading decadent writers such as Verlaine and Rimbaud, why he kept trying to get published when so many of his peers stopped, the many ways flaws can often make a story more interesting, our shared love of ambiguity, the reason there must be beauty entwined with horror, why he’s a vibes guy rather than a plot guy, the time Tanith Lee bought him a pint and how that led to him coediting her tribute anthology, what he learned from his years editing a flash fiction magazine, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at the Unconventional Diner in Washington, D.C. —

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts — or wherever you choose to consume your podcasts — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 253 previous episodes.

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

3) Or simply use the embed below.

Here’s what you would have seen us nibbling had you been at the table at the Unconventional Diner —

Craig’s Crème Brûlée French Toast
vanilla cream, brioche, macerated berries

Scott’s Cajun Shrimp & Grits
chicken sausage, jambalaya sauce, peppers, pickled Okra, sunny eggs

Lemon Meringue Pie
lemon curd, sky-high meringue, candied lemon zest

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I’m afraid I can’t give you advance notice here of who you’ll be eavesdropping on two weeks from now, because that will be the first of my Balticon episodes, and I won’t be recording it until a few hours after this episode goes live. But I’m sure whichever guest ends up coming up next will be fascinating.
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Thanks for listening!