{"id":28217,"date":"2021-11-12T10:22:34","date_gmt":"2021-11-12T15:22:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=28217"},"modified":"2021-11-12T10:52:00","modified_gmt":"2021-11-12T15:52:00","slug":"suzanne-palmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2021\/11\/12\/suzanne-palmer\/","title":{"rendered":"Take a break for baklava with Suzanne Palmer in Episode 158 of Eating the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Six years ago, I started inviting you to tag along with me for culinary conversations during conventions, though the events of 2020 forced me to switch things up so the chatting and chewing often occurred with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles between me and my guests.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019re slowly moving on to whatever our new normal will turn out to be, which means this episode, you\u2019ll get to come with me as I attend my first true convention in nearly two years — last month\u2019s Capclave<\/a> in Rockville, Maryland. I was able to harvest two con conversations for you there, something I haven\u2019t been able to do in far too long — the first, this episode\u2019s lunch at Mykonos Grill<\/a> with Suzanne Palmer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Suzanne Palmer is a multi-award-winning science fiction writer. Her novelette “The Secret Life of Bots” won a Hugo Award in 2018, as well as the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award, plus her story “Waterlines” won the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She\u2019s published three novels with DAW Books about an interstellar repo man \u2014 her debut novel Finder<\/em> in 2019, followed by Driving the Deep<\/em> (2020) and The Scavenger Door<\/em> (2021). <\/p>\n

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Her love of narrative science fiction extends beyond the written word, for when she was obtaining her Bachelors degree of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, her thesis exhibition consisted of an entire museum of artifacts from a fictional world, including clothing, coins, furniture, manuscripts \u2014 and an 8′ tall horned creature covered with fur. I found that part of her background, unknown to me until I started preparing for my conversation, fascinating, since as longtime listeners know from my interview with the team at Submersive Productions<\/a> in Episode 86, I love immersive theater.<\/p>\n

We discussed her recurrent dreams of accidentally impaling someone with her Hugo Award trophy during the ceremony, the Ray Bradbury story she copied out of a library book by hand word for word as a child, the differences between The Hobbit<\/em> and The Lord of the Rings<\/em> (and why some readers have difficulties with the latter), the way a friend’s urgings she do NaNoWriMo caused her to take her writing more seriously, the spark that gave birth to her interstellar repo man Fergus Ferguson, how the pandemic affected the writing of her latest novel, and much more.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s how you can take a seat at the table with us — <\/p>\n

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts<\/a> — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 157 previous episodes.<\/p>\n

2) Use the RSS feed of http:\/\/eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com\/rss<\/a> on the device of your choice.<\/p>\n

3) Or simply listen via the embed below.<\/p>\n