Welcome to an entirely unexpected episode of Eating the Fantastic. Why, one could almost call it an historic episode! In fact, I won’t almost call it historic — I will call it historic. Because it’s the only episode since this podcast began during which you’ll hear me chat with a creator while we eat a flavor of ice cream inspired by their latest book — in this case, Sarah Pinsker’s Haunt Sweet Home — created by the Baltimore ice cream experts at The Charmery.

Sarah’s no stranger to longtime listeners of the show. She was my first guest way back on Episode 1 in February 2016, my first virtual pandemic guest, during which we recorded while we each ate similar takeout in our own homes in April 2020 on Episode 120 — that was when we discussed her unintentionally prescient debut novel A Song for a New Day — and a guest once again on Episode 151 in August 2021, when she was joined by Karen Osborne and K. M. Szpara, since they’d all recently published second novels.

Here’s Sarah’s bio from the back flap of Haunt Sweet Home —

Sarah Pinsker is the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Award winning author of A Song For A New Day, We Are Satellites, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea, Lost Places, and over sixty works of short fiction. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, and in numerous anthologies and year’s bests. She is also a singer/songwriter with four albums on various independent labels. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife and two weird dogs.

The flavor launched on Friday the 13th, and we met at The Charmery yesterday for a taste of that book-inspired ice cream, where we discussed the sculpture she saw at the American Visionary Art Museum which planted a seed for Haunt Sweet Home, the origin of the ice cream collaboration, how she knew her idea was meant to be a novella and not a novel, why she prefers writing books without a contract, how multiple ideas coalesced into one, the narrative purpose of telling a story via multiple formats, how to know a character who doesn’t know themselves, why you can’t tell from the end product whether a piece of fiction was plotted or pantsed, Kelly Robson’s theory about the Han Solo/Luke Skywalker dichotomy and what it means for creating interesting characters, why she’s a fan of making promises in the early paragraphs of her stories, whether our families understand what we’re writing about when we write about families, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for ice cream at The Charmery — (more…)

I always have a fun time at Baltimore’s Charm City Spec reading series, once as a participant, often as an audience member, and sometimes as a podcaster who steals away with one of the invited readers to break bread and record an episode of Eating the Fantastic. So it was prior to that event’s last installment with horror writer William J. Donahue!

Donahue is the author of such novels as Burn Beautiful Soul (2020), Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life (2022), and most recently, Only Monsters Remain (2023). His short story collections include Brain Cradle (2003), Filthy Beast (2004) and Too Much Poison (2014). When not writing fiction, Donahue works as a full-time magazine editor and features writer. Over the past 15 years, his writing and reporting have earned nearly a dozen awards for excellence in journalism from the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

We discussed the artistic endeavor which had him performing under the name Dirty Rotten Bill, why the first three novels he wrote will never see the light of day, what he was doing with one of those heads from the film 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, why he finds playing with the apocalypse so appealing, the reason he’s neither a plotter or a pantser, but a plantser, how a vegetarian is able to do damage to human flesh in his fiction, the way our journeys were different and yet we managed to wind up at the same destination, how wrestling changed his life, why we keep writing and submitting in the face of rejection, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for dinner at Mt. Washington Pizza & Subs & Indian Cuisine — (more…)

It’s time for a fourth and final conversation from this year’s StokerCon, following previous guests Ai Jiang, Chuck Tingle, and Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam. I invite you to join me at the table with the award-winning Cynthia Pelayo for burgers and fries at Hodad’s Downtown.

Pelayo is a Bram Stoker Award-winning and International Latino Book Award-winning author and poet. She’s the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, Poems of My Night, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, Children of Chicago, Crime Scene, The Shoemaker’s Magician, as well as dozens of short stories and poems. Loteria, which was her MFA in Writing thesis at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was re-released to much praise, with Esquire calling it one of the Best Horror Books of 2023. Santa Muerte and The Missing, her young adult horror novels, were each nominated for International Latino Book Awards. 

Poems of My Night was nominated for an Elgin Award, while Into the Forest and All the Way Through was nominated for an Elgin Award and was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. Children of Chicago was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in Superior Achievement in a Novel and won an International Latino Book Award for Best Mystery. Crime Scene won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection. Her most recent novel, The Forgotten Sisters, was released in March and is a modern adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”
 
We discussed the dead body she thought she saw which sparked The Forgotten Sisters, why she changed her mind about killing every character at the end of that newest novel, how growing up in a haunted house helped turn her into a horror writer, why she evolved from a pantser into a plotter, the importance of describing decaying bodies in extreme detail, which journalistic skills transferred easily to fiction writing and which didn’t, what makes Chicago great, the reason classic fairy tales survive, how reading Agatha Christie helped her learn how to plot, the way to write successful flash fiction, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Hodad’s Downtown — (more…)

I returned home from the Glasgow Worldcon less than 48 hours ago, and am still suffering from jet lag, but I’m not so groggy I can’t share with you what was my favorite item on the program there — Jenny Rowe’s one-woman show, Tiptree: No One Else’s Damn Secret But My Own. I loved her performance, and immediately reached out to see whether I could chat with her about channeling James Tiptree, Jr., and how she distilled the life of that brilliant writer into an hour-long arc. Luckily, we were able to connect in the Crown Plaza bar.

Rowe is an actor, improviser and writer who performs and teaches improv internationally. She wrote her solo show about James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon in 2018, was nominated for Best Female Performer at Buxton Fringe ’24, and continues to tour with the production. Her other performances include Read Not Dead (Shakespeare’s Globe) Clean by Sam Chittenden (Best Play Award, Brighton Fringe 2019), Mary Rose by J.M.Barrie (National Tour), and Somewhere in England by Mark Burgess.

A member of Impromptu Shakespeare and Brighton Fringe Comedy Award-winners, The Maydays, since 2006, she has guested on the iO Chicago mainstage with Whirled News Tonight and headlined at improv festivals across Europe. She also writes weird, dark short stories which occasionally get published in weird dark places: one is upcoming in the Map of Lost Places anthology from Apex Books in 2025.

We discussed the serendipitous way she learned James Tiptree, Jr. existed, the differing reactions to her one-woman show from SF vs. non-SF audiences, how she managed to nail Tiptree’s accent (some of which you’ll get to hear), why she ultimately decided not to begin or end the show with a gunshot, how she settled on the structure of her script (and why she decided to leave herself out of the story), the way inhabiting Tiptree affected her feelings about the controversy, why she’d have loved to meet Tiptree but not necessarily want to be her friend, the purpose of the play’s moment of audience participation, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at the Crowne Plaza bar — (more…)

Out in the real world, we’re in the midst of the Glasgow Worldcon, but here at Eating the Fantastic, it’s still Stokercon. So I invite you to take a seat at the table for my third culinary conversation captured there, following my Korean lunch with Ai Jiang and tea and scones with Chuck Tingle.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam is the author of the horror novel Grim Root, which was officially released two days after our chat. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in over 90 publications, such as Popular Science, Lightspeed, and LeVar Burton Reads. Her short story collection Where You Linger & Other Stories and her horror novella Glorious Fiends were both published in 2022.. She’s a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award. By day, she works as a Narrative Designer writing games for a mobile game company. 

We discussed how her new horror novel toys with the tropes of reality TV, the importance of balancing multiple POVs in a novel to keep them all equally interesting, our differing views on the revision process, the three years she spent writing 1,000 words per day (and why she stopped), the message she took from her two Nebula nominations, the importance of community, what she learned about herself by rereading her short stories to assemble a collection, why we both believe in ambiguous endings, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for breakfast at the Broken Yolk Cafe — (more…)

Thanks to my guest on this episode of Eating the Fantastic, love is real. Actually, love is always real on this podcast, it’s just that this time around, that message comes through even louder than ever.

My second guest coming to you from this year’s StokerCon in San Diego, California — following last episode’s Ai Jiang — is Chuck Tingle, who first came to prominence with such erotica of the fantastic as Pounded by President Bigfoot and Taken by the Gay Unicorn Biker, work which eventually led to two Hugo Award nominations. The USA Today bestselling novel Camp Damascus — his first traditionally published horror novel — was a Bram Stoker Award finalist this year, and his second horror novel, Bury Your Gays, was released earlier this month on July 9th. Both books were published by Tor Nightfire.

Here’s how he describes himself: “He is a mysterious force of energy behind sunglasses and a pink mask. He is also an anonymous author of romance, horror, and fantasy. Chuck was born in Home of Truth, Utah, and now splits time between Billings, Montana and Los Angeles, California. Chuck writes to prove love is real, because love is the most important tool we have when resisting the endless cosmic void. Not everything people say about Chuck is true, but the important parts are.”

We discussed how existing is an arrogant act against the forces of the infinite, why it’s horror rather than comedy which warms his heart, how he used social media to find a publisher for Camp Damascus (and why that technique probably won’t work for you), how to write horror about a gay conversion camp without retraumatizing in an already traumatizing world, the differences between cathartic horror and grueling horror (and why he’s more interested in the former), the intriguing comment his copyeditor made about a reference to Superman, which comics subgenre occupies the most space on his bookshelves, the five creators who’ve most influenced him (and my encounter with one of them during the ’70s), how art is more than what’s between the covers of a book or within the frame of a painting, what most people get wrong about the term “high concept,” and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for tea and scones — (more…)

With Balticon behind us, it’s time to move on StokerCon, which took place the following weekend in San Diego. I captured four conversations for you there, the first of them with Ai Jiang. And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect — for we chatted with the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony a mere two days in the future, where she was nominated in the Long Fiction category for Linghun. And even though as you’ll hear she had doubts she had a chance of winning — she won!

And that’s not the only thing she won following our conversation, for a week later, her I am AI won a Nebula Award. I am AI is also currently on the final ballot for the Hugo Award, where she’s also up for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. But that’s not all when it comes to Ai Jiang and awards. She won an Ignyte Award for her poem “We Smoke Pollution,” received a Nebula Award nomination for her short story ““Give Me English,” was part of the Strange Horizons collective nominated for a semiprozine Hugo Award, and has been nominated for a British SF Association Award and Aurora Award as well.

Her fiction has also appeared in the magazines Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, The Dark, Kaleidotrope, The Deadlands, Planet Scumm, and others, as well as in such anthologies as Fighting for the Future: Cyberpunk and Solarpunk Tales, Step Into the Light: An Anthology of Daylight Horror, and Mother: Tales of Love and Terror. Her short story collection Smol Tales From Between Worlds was published last year.

We discussed why being nominated for multiple awards may actually have made her Imposter Syndrome worse, what the Odyssey workshop taught her which helped her finish her first novel (and whether that book might be too ambitious a debut), the novels which made her want to be a writer, what makes us power on in the face of rejection, how writing is like competitive badminton, the secret to writing successful flash fiction, the book she was given which turned her from a pessimist into an optimist, what she learned from her “soul-draining” career as a ghostwriter, how an editorial suggestion turned Linghun from flash fiction into a novella, the most daunting aspects of revision, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Friend’s House Korean restaurant — (more…)

Out in the real world, Balticon is around six weeks in the rearview mirror, but here at Eating the Fantastic, it’s not yet time to check out of the hotel and head for home. You’ve had a chance to take a seat at the table with Alex Jennings and Elwin Cotman from that Baltimore event, but we still have one more meal to go — because now it’s time for an Italian lunch with Sally Wiener Grotta.

Grotta’s latest two books are Of Being Woman, a collection of feminist science fiction stories, and Daughters of Eve, a discussion workbook which uses tales of biblical matriarchs to explore the modern world. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as the North Atlantic Review, DreamForge, Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles, and others.

Her previous books include Digital Imaging for Visual Artists (co-authored with Daniel Grotta), and the novels Jo Joe, which was a Jewish Book Council Network book, and The Winter Boy, which was a Locus Magazine Recommended Read. Sally is also co-curator of the Galactic Philadelphia Salon reading series. Plus she’s also an award-winning journalist and photographer who has traveled on assignment to all seven continents.

We discussed when we first met (and can’t quite figure out whether it was a third or a quarter of a century ago), how her first storytelling impulse began because she’d fall asleep while being read stories as a child, the importance of the question “what if?,” why she often finds horror difficult to read, the early experience which allowed her to have such a good relationship with editors, the story she wrote in Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing workshop which caused that Grand Master to say “what a darling monster,” when we should submit to editorial suggestions and when we should run screaming, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Sabatino’s Italian restaurant — (more…)

It’s time to return to Balticon for another conversation with a fascinating writer, following last episode’s chat with Alex Jennings. This time around my guest is Elwin Cotman, with whom I slipped away for dinner at the nearby R&R Taqueria.

Cotman’s short story collection Dance on Saturday, published by Small Beer Press, was one of the finalists for the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. His latest short story collection, Weird Black Girls, was released two months ago as this episode goes live.

He’s also the author of three other books: the poetry collection The Wizard’s Homecoming, plus the short story collections The Jack Daniels Sessions EP and Hard Times Blues. His writing has appeared in Grist, Electric Lit, Buzzfeed, The Southwestern Review, and The Offing, plus many others venues. He’s worked as a video game consultant and writer for Square Enix. His debut novel The Age of Ignorance will be published by Scribner in 2025.

We discussed why forcing science fictional elements into non-science fictional stories can weaken them, the interdimensional cross-genre story cycle he hopes to write someday about a wrestling family, the way the novella is his natural length, why he loves Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age stories, how to create compelling metaphors and similes, the way rereading Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York helped him with the connective tissue of his own sentences, the reason Mary Gaitskill is the world’s greatest living writer, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at R&R Taqueria — (more…)

In a different world, I’d be in Pasadena right now for the Nebula Awards conference, but in this world, I’ve just survived two consecutive weekends of conventions — first Balticon, then StokerCon — and there’s such a thing as too much fun, even for an extrovert like me. So instead, I’m at home, inviting you to take a seat at the table with the first of three guests I hosted while in Baltimore — Alex Jennings.

Jennings is the winner of the 2023 Compton Crook Award for his debut novel, The Ballad of Perilous Graves. His writing has appeared in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, New Suns, and Current Affairs, and many other venues. Some of his short fiction was published in the 2012 collection Here I Come and Other Stories.

He also writes a regular speculative poetry review column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction titled “Chapter and Verse.” In 2022, he was the inaugural recipient of the Imagination Unbound Fellowship at Under the Volcano, a writing retreat held annually in Tepoztlan, Mexico. He is also an instructor of fiction and popular fiction at The University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program.

We discussed his dream which commanded him to move to New Orleans (plus his brother’s dream which supported that decision), how writing his debut novel transformed him into the kind of person he needed to be in order to write his debut novel, how Octavia Butler invited him into the field, which artist he wishes would draw the comic book adaptation of his novel The Ballad of Perilous Graves, what China Miéville taught him at Clarion about the deadly nature of “second order cliches,” how joy is revolutionary in and of itself, the way his experience as a standup comedian helps him help you care about the multiple POVs of his novel, which issue of Uncanny X-Men was the first comic book he ever read, the nature of his quasi-mystical approach to writing, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Thai Arroy — (more…)