My second Eating the Fantastic conversation during StokerCon — following last episode’s chat with Arley Sorg — was with Kate Maruyama.

Kate’s is the author of Alterations and The Collective (both published in 2025), plus Bleak Houses (2023) and Harrowgate (2013). Her novella Family Solstice was named Best Fiction Book of 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine. Her short work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Analog and Asimov’s, and she’s a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, plus winner of the Uncharted Short Story Prize. She served on the working board for Women Who Submit, and is currently on the Board of Directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards.

We discussed the way her love for the Golden Age of Hollywood began, the bribes her mother paid her so she’d write (and the reason she stopped paying), why abandoned short stories make marvelous prompts, the most important thing to teach about writing, how to decide which of her two 2025 Hollywood novels you should read first, the beauty of the novella form, the reasons she cut 100 pages from one of her recent novels, the difficulties in writing for theme anthologies, the 350-page novel she turned into a short story (and what she learned from the process), plus much more.

Here’s how you can join us at DiAnoia’s Eatery — (more…)