I’d planned to break bread with award-winning writer A.C. Wise during Balticon earlier this year, and I refuse to let the conversation which would have occurred over that meal be stolen from me merely because COVID-19 prevented the convention from being held in meatspace. So we both got to baking, and now you can eavesdrop as we nibble — she on chocolate zucchini bread and me on cherry pecan bread — and pretend we had the year we wanted instead of the year we got.

Wise is a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, two-time finalist for the Sunburst Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Plus she’s won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Tor.com, Shimmer, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies. Her work can also be found in two collections, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again and The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories, both published with Lethe Press. Her debut novel, Wendy, Darling, will be out from Titan Books in June 2021, and a new short story collection, The Ghost Sequences, will be published by Undertow Books next August.

We discussed how her first professionally published fiction ended up printed on a coffee can, the 24-hour challenge which led to the creation of her Lambda Award-nominated collection, which comic book character obsesses her the most, how individual stories can act as commentary on all stories, why she enjoys wielding the power of ambiguity, how workshopping with other writers can help make stories better, what The Queen’s Gambit can teach us about dealing with reader expectations, the unexpected way a flash fiction piece turned into her first novel, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation — (more…)