Welcome to the third and final episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded during the 60th incarnation of Boskone, following my lunches with guests Walter Jon Williams and Annalee Newitz. My guest this time around is Theodora Goss, whose latest book, The Collected Enchantments, was released on Valentine’s Day by Mythic Delirium Books only a few days before the con began.

Theodora Goss is a World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of the short story and poetry collections In the Forest of Forgetting (2006), Songs for Ophelia (2014), and Snow White Learns Witchcraft (2019), as well as novella The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), debut novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), and sequels European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (2018) and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (2019). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Shirley Jackson Awards, and has been on the Tiptree Award Honor List.

Her short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and others, and anthologies such as Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense, Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, and Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. She has a Ph.D. in English literature from Boston University, and currently teaches writing and literature in the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program. She also taught in the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing, the Odyssey writing workshop, the Alpha writing workshop for young writers, and in writing workshops at Readercon, Boskone, and Wiscon.

We discussed the ways in which being an immigrant is like living in a fantasy world, how she knows when a poem is a poem and a story is a story, the power of the specificity of prose, what Neil Gaiman once said about writing for theme anthologies which perfectly described her own process, our surprisingly similar  experiences with editorial suggestions, why so many fantasy writers love Middlemarch, her theories about the best way to moderate panels, how she knows when a story is truly done, and much more.

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