Most of the time when I invite you to tag along as I chat and chew, it’s because I’m at a convention and I’m hoping to replicate for you some of the joy I discovered back at the beginning of my con life — how sneaking away from those cons with friends was as much fun as the cons themselves. And with my con season about to rev up again, there’ll be plenty of episodes like that soon to come your way.

But this time around, I took advantage of a trip to Manhattan earlier this month to catch a theatrical adaptation by the Elevator Repair service of James’s Joyce’s Ulysses at the Public Theater to squeeze in lunch with one of the best editors and best people I know — Liz Gorinsky.

Liz has been a seven-time nominee for the Hugo Award in the Best Editor: Long Form category, an honor won in 2017. Liz also won one of George R. R. Martin’s Alfie Awards in the same category in 2015. After a lengthy career at Tor Books where Liz edited such novelists as Annalee Newitz and Jeff VanderMeer and acquired short fiction for the company’s online component, Liz founded Erewhon Books in 2018, and acted as president and publisher. Liz stepped down from that role in 2022 to pursue personal projects. Liz is also an ardent LARP-ist — which might not even be a word — and fan of immersive theater, so our conversation veered into those topics as well.

We discussed whether either of us would have turned out as you know us without having grown up in New York, the early ambitions to be a comic book editor, the legendary comic book couple who were childhood neighbors, whether or not there’s any difference between editing fiction and non-fiction, how to gracefully navigate the convention community, the first edit letter which made Liz nervous, what makes Liz realize a manuscript shows potential, how to cleanse your palate when reading slush to be sure what you think is good really is good, self-defining success as a writer, what told Liz it was time to take on the publisher role, the appeal of immersive theater, why LARPing isn’t acting, what we might have told James Joyce if we were editing Ulysses, the many reasons whatever you’re doing you should be doing for love, and much more.

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My guest this episode is someone you know even though you don’t know you know him — because, among many others things, Chris Kalb, artist, art director, and pulp magazine maven, designed the podcast icon for Eating the Fantastic, so you met him when you clicked on that flying saucer hoovering up a donut, burger, and chicken leg with its tractor beam. He’s also designed covers for two of my short story collections — the horror collection These Words are Haunted, and my recent science fiction one, 101 Things to Do Before You’re Downloaded.

But Chris is a lot more than the projects he was willing to tackle for me. He’s a Charles M. Schulz Award-winning cartoonist and designer whose work has appeared in books and magazines, on TV and online, and in educational content for the last 35 years. His illustrations have appeared in such books such as ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy and Other Misheard Lyrics, Cooking Rocks: Rachael Ray 30-Minute Meals for Kids, and He Loved Me, He Loves Me Not. That last title, written by comedienne Lynn Harris, spawned the relationship super-hero Breakup Girl, whose subsequent internet advice column and web-comic (one of the first!) were adapted for TV by Oxygen when they launched in 2000.

From 2001-2008, Chris was the designer of the Syfy Channel magazine during the station’s peak period. For the last 13 years, Chris has been using all of his combined talents in storytelling, art, design and coding to craft innovative classroom experiences for Amplify Education, a pioneer in digital curriculum.

Chris has also been a life-long fan of pulp characters such Doc Savage, The Spider, Operator #5, and G-8 and His Battle Aces. Beginning in 2007, he has been able to give back to pulp fandom as the art director and publisher of Age of Aces Books, reprinting the very best in aviation pulp fiction from titles like Daredevil Aces, Sky Birds, Wings, and Flying Aces.

We discussed the comic book company and superheroes he and his brother created when they were just kids, why he once thought Chris Ware was his nemesis, the Batman comic which influenced him the most, how his father caused him to fall in love with Doc Savage, the secret origin of his romantic advice superheroine Breakup Girl, the sophistication  of pulp era writing, one theory as to why Doc Savage never made it as a successful comic book series, the college comic strip which won him a Charles M. Schulz Award, the problem the slabbing of pulps has caused within the collecting community, the pulp premium so rare none may have survived, and much more.

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