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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