Eating Authors: One Hundred Writers' Most Memorable Meals

Eating Authors

One Hundred Writers' Most Memorable Meals

Lawrence M. Schoen

Contents

Introduction

2011

Carrie Vaughn

Dan Wells

Lauren Beukes

Daniel Abraham

Walter Jon Williams

Bud Sparhawk

Sheila Finch

Gregory Frost

Aliette de Bodard

Allen Steele

2012

Mark W. Tiedemann

Myke Cole

Howard V. Hendrix

Karl Schroeder

Gail Carriger

Laura Anne Gilman

Alastair Reynolds

Tobias S. Buckell

Tina Connolly

Walter H. Hunt

2013

David Walton

Charles E. Gannon

David Brin

Gregory Benford

Jack McDevitt

Max Gladstone

Jonathan Maberry

Liz Williams

Michael Swanwick

Faith Hunter

2014

James L. Cambias

Harry Turtledove

Joe Haldeman

Daryl Gregory

Tom Doyle

Alethea Kontis

Michael A. Ventrella

Anna Kashina

Sally Wiener Grotta

Tim W. Burke

2015

James Morrow

Sharon Lee

Natania Barron

Alan Smale

Ferrett Steinmetz

Fran Wilde

L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Daniel Polansky

Eric James Stone

Lawrence M. Schoen

2016

Charlie Jane Anders

Kevin Hearne

Fonda Lee

Jennifer Foehner Wells

Ada Palmer

Naomi Novik

Todd J. McCaffrey

Marguerite Reed

Rick Wilber

Travis Heermann

2017

Becky Chambers

Jacqueline Carey

Sarah Gailey

Malka Older

Steven Barnes

Michael Johnston

Spencer Ellsworth

Nicky Drayden

Russell Davis

Tracy Townsend

2018

Catherine Schaff-Stump

Jane Lindskold

Michael Anderle

Kate Heartfield

Craig Martelle

Peng Shepherd

Delilah S. Dawson

Derek Künsken

Josiah Bancroft

S. L. Saboviec

2019

Martin L. Shoemaker

R. R. Virdi

E.M. Foner

Maurice Broaddus

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Chen Qiufan

Barry J. Hutchison

Wil McCarthy

Terry Mixon

Julia Huni

2020

Bre Lockhart

Gini Koch

Dave Walsh

John P. Murphy

James Alan Gardner

Steven H Silver

Darcie Little Badger

Robert J. Sawyer

Alex Shvartsman

Kate Pickford

Other Stuff

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also By Lawrence M. Schoen

EATING AUTHORS:

One Hundred Writers’

Most Memorable Meals

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in part or whole, by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher.

© 2020 by Lawrence M. Schoen

The one hundred essays from one hundred different authors are taken from the weekly blog located at http://www.lawrencemschoen.com and reprinted here with the permission of those authors.

Cover art by Sabrina Watts

Book design by Lawrence M. Schoen

Author photo by Nathan Lilly

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-951391-26-3

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-951391-27-0

Published by Paper Golem LLC

Vers. 2001212

Dedicated to

Dr. Henry Chi Hang Fung,

and the doctors, nurses, and technicians of the Department of Bone Marrow Transplant and Cellular Therapies.

I’m doing pretty well. Thanks.

Introduction

I’ve been writing science fiction for a little over thirty years. Wait, that’s not true. I’ve been writing science fiction my whole life. As a pastime of my childhood and adolescence I filled hundreds of spiral bound notebooks of college ruled paper with stories, crafting lavish descriptions of characters and worlds, conflicts and needs, goals and desires, and whatever else happened to come into my brain that week. But about thirty years ago, I started sending the stories out to editors of magazines and anthologies. Wonder of wonders, a few of those editors began buying them, raw and unformed as they were.

Around that time I was in graduate school, and soon after a young professor at a small liberal arts college. I was building a career of research and teaching, and I couldn’t spare much time for writing science fiction. Even so, I managed a new story now and then, and even came up with the seeds for what is probably my most well known work, Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard. As time allowed, I kept at it. I cultivated relationships with other authors, well-established award winning pros as well as newcomers like myself who were hungry for publication and eager to learn how to do better. Having grown up as a reader, I knew about conventions though I’d rarely attended any as I’m not a fan of crowds. Then, as luck would have it, during my time at Lake Forest College, I was asked to be on a panel at a convention in Chicago. I took a day off from my professor gig and took the train into the city.

And my life exploded.

There is a world of difference between sitting shoulder to shoulder in the audience of the crowded event space of a panel and being one of four or five people seated at a table facing that mob sharing your knowledge and opinion and, it is to be hoped, your expertise. I remember feeling like I was on the edge on the edge of a cliff looking down into a vast chasm. What pushed me over was when a group of authors and editors invited me to come to dinner with them. I plunged forward into their company and I have never looked back.

If you’ve ever met me or seen me speaking on a panel or a reading at a convention, or stumbled across a video of such online, then you know I’m big and loud, full of ego, and extremely extroverted. Having tumbled off that cliff, I wanted to meet everyone, or at least everyone I had read, and everyone those individuals could introduce me to. The only thing holding me back in those early days was finances: academia, didn’t pay all that well. But I persevered and developed strategies.

In those days, SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, would often set up a suite at conventions where members could mingle, and in the evening that suite would turn into a very low key party, in stark contrast to the parties going on elsewhere. Admittance was limited to members and their guests, and once I qualified for membership (albeit at the associate level) I implemented a plan that guaranteed I would meet everyone: I volunteered to work the bar.

It is a truism that science fiction writers like alcohol, and free alcohol is even better. You don’t need a PhD in psychology (though I have one) to imagine that writers coming to the that quiet party might form a positive first impression and overall association with the fellow on the other side of the bar who keeps refilling their glasses.

But it wasn’t all parties. I started volunteering at events, lending my volume and extroversion to charity auctions, drumming up bids for items to raise money for the SFWA Emergency Medical Fund. From there, I ended up being volunteered to serve on and eventually take over the Election Committee. This was back in the days before online ballots, which meant that for years every voting member of the organization had to write my name on the outgoing envelope containing their ballot. This has led to more than a few authors who otherwise don’t know me from Adam, encountering me at conventions, looking at my badge, and remarking Hey, how do I know your name? I quickly learned to just smile, extend a hand, and reply with something like I don’t know, but I’m glad you do.

Along the way, I wrote Barsk and discovered a subset of authors I hadn’t known existed: writers of anthropomorphic fiction. They’re a great bunch of people, and have been very welcoming, particularly to an outsider who has stumbled in and probably mangled some of their most cherished tropes. More recently, as the industry has changed, I’ve been doing more self publishing and coming to know many of the people who make up the ranks of indie authors. The point of telling you all of this is that though I don’t actually know everyone in the field, there are times when it feels like I do. Ten years ago I thought I should run with that and I started reaching out to some of the authors I’d known the longest and created the Eating Authors blog series.

In some ways, it was a simple interview. Authors often do a lot of interviews and far too many of them ask the same questions over and over again. Where do you get your ideas? What are your early influences? If you could go back to your younger self, what advice would you give? I wanted to give the readers insight into the authors they loved, but I wanted something fresh and new, so I asked only a single question. What’s your most memorable meal?

Flash forward to today, ten years later, and literally hundreds of authors have responded to this question, sometimes with a description of the most incredible repast, sometimes focusing on the event over the food, sometimes making it all about the people they were with, sometimes aware only of the location and the juxtaposition of circumstances that led them to be in that time at that place burned into their memories. And of course endless combinations of these.

I’ve only had a couple of rules in choosing my guests. Originally they had to have written a novel of speculative fiction. I later expanded that to include novellas because once again the market had changed and people were publishing standalone novellas. I make an exception to this every year when the nominees for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer are announced. I feel a debt to that award, which I was once nominated for, and I see the future of our genre there. I want to do my part to boost the signal for these authors. So I reach out and invite them to appear on the blog, whether they’ve written novels or only shorter lengths.

In January of this year, I went into the hospital to undergo treatment for cancer. My own stem cells were harvested. The best parts were saved and set aside. I was given a drug to kill off my entire immune system and then had my own stem cells transplanted back into me. The theory was that the cancer in my blood would be wiped out — along with all my red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets — and I would grow a shiny new immune system, giving me a fresh start. Unfortunately, before that could happen, I developed an infection and slipped into sepsis for several days. My memory of this time is a blur, and rather than revisit the highlights I’ll just tell you that I experienced most every symptom you can have when you’re sick, and all at the same time. But I was in a hospital and I had doctors and nurses attending me around the clock, keeping me hydrated, giving me lots of drugs. I’m told I came close to death and I remember sitting up in my hospital bed one morning afterwards and thinking that I needed to do something to pay it forward, that I’d been extremely lucky.

There’s something about facing your own mortality that leads to introspection, and I’d been doing a lot of that lately — first because of having incurable cancer, and then getting septic while trying to treat that cancer. I was sixty years old and it seemed to me I’d enjoyed an extraordinary life thus far, and I wondered what I could do to pay it forward. It occurred to me that ten years of my weekly Eating Authors blog posts created a fine opportunity. I began going back through the archive of authors’ meals, which by this point ranged from some of the biggest names in the field who had done me a personal favor of appearing on the blog to first time self-published novelists who got some much appreciated and unexpected publicity. I picked one hundred of these meals and reached out to the authors, telling them my plans for the book and asking for permission to reprint the essays from my website. The result is the book you’re reading now, but we’re not quite done. We haven’t come to the pay it forward part. As the book was taking shape, I put together my first-ever Kickstarter campaign to cover the expenses of producing the book. My goal wasn’t to sell a gazillion copies of the book and score a huge profit. That hardly seemed fair, particularly since I didn’t write most of the content and I wasn’t paying any of my guest authors. Instead, during the Kickstarter, I made it clear that 100% of profits from the sale of the book would go to charity, specifically half to the SFWA Emergency Medical Fund and the other half to cancer research.

If a copy of this book that you’re reading came as a reward for supporting the Kickstarter campaign, thank you for making it a reality. Otherwise, I imagine you bought it from an online vender or traditional bookstore. Please know that the money you paid is going to help authors in need and to fight cancer. Thank you for helping me to pay it forward. I’ve tried to include a wide selection of meals and authors for your delight. Even with a hundred of them it was difficult to choose, but I think you’ll be pleased. Bon appetit.

Lawrence M. Schoen

December 2020

2011

Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn’s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, and over twenty novels and upwards of ¹⁰⁰ short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award.  Her most recent work includes a Kitty spin-off collection, The Immortal Conquistador, and a pair of novellas about Robin Hood’s children, The Ghosts of Sherwood and The Heirs of Locksley. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and  a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop.  An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado.

I’ve had so many memorable meals I could talk about I hardly know which one to pick. But I do need to back up and explain something: for me, these meals are memorable not because of the food. Rather, I remember the location, the occasion, and the people I was with. I’m not much of a foodie — I’m one of those people that everyone hates, the skinny person who actually does forget to eat sometimes. Often for me eating isn’t a pleasure, it’s the thing I have to do to make sure I take in enough calories to keep functioning. Long story, I can talk about that another time. So while I sometimes have a problematic relationship with eating, I love meals, especially meals that are events.

Okay, I think I’ve narrowed it down to one:

About two years ago, I was traveling with two friends through the south of France. We spent a couple of days in the walled medieval city of Carcassonne. A couple of magical days, because in a chilly November we pretty much had the fortress to ourselves and spent the evenings wandering around the walls and ramparts, thinking about the Crusades and Dungeon and Dragons adventures. (Those slate tile roofs absolutely needed thieves running across them.) We found a little restaurant that looked and felt as medieval as the rest of the city: rustic wood furniture, exposed beams on a very low ceiling, whitewashed plaster walls, tapestries and wrought iron decoration. The best part: the owner cooked our meals over an open fire in the fireplace, right there in the dining room. We shared a bottle of wine, ate fresh roasted sausage and potatoes, and then wandered back to the hostel nestled in a medieval city that hasn’t changed in centuries. Perfect, really.

Dan Wells

Dan Wells is the New York Times bestselling author of the post-apocalyptic teen series Partials, the middle grade Zero Chronicles, the supernatural thriller series I Am Not A Serial Killer, and more. He cohosts the Hugo-winning podcast Writing Excuses, and edited the anthology Altered Perceptions to raise awareness of mental illness. Dan lives in Utah with his wife, ⁶ children, and more than ⁴⁵⁰ boardgames.

When I graduated high school and moved out of my parents’ house, I lived in Mexico for two years, as a missionary for my church. I lived in the state of Chihuahua, which means dry and sandy place in Aztec; it’s a great description of the area, but I have no idea how it was eventually applied to a weird little dog breed. Anyway. The climate is very similar to that of the Western US, especially my home state of Utah, and that made it the perfect environment for growing green chiles. As anyone who’s ever been to New Mexico will tell you, deserts grow really good chiles.

When most White Americans think of chiles they think of jalapeños, and maybe habaneros or serranos if they watch a lot of Food Network; they think of hot peppers, and yes, a lot of chiles are hot, but a lot of them are very mild and have a very different flavor. One of my favorites is called the chilaca chile, which is very similar to the Anaheim chile: about six inches long, skinny and green, and with fairly mild spiciness. Before we even get to the description of my favorite meal, let this be known: the smell of roasting chiles is the best smell in the entire world. They should use it in air fresheners, scented candles, and perfume, and I would buy it ALL. So my favorite meal begins at a friend’s house--a woman who essentially adopted me as her gringo grandson--and it begins with the smell of roasting chilaca chiles. I was in heaven before the food was even cooked.

After the chiles were roasted, my friend turned them into my favorite food in the world: chiles rellenos. A chile relleno is a pretty simple concept: you cut open a chile, fill it with cheese, dip it in egg, and fry it. In many parts of central and southern Mexico, and therefore in most Mexican restaurants in the US, chiles rellenos are served with a red sauce, but in the northern desert where I lived they’re served plain, with just chile, cheese, and egg, and of course beans and flour tortillas. Flour tortillas are a distinctly northern thing, native to Chihuahua; in other parts of the country, corn tortillas are more common, and corn tortillas are great, but in Chihuahua the flour and the beans combine so well with the chile relleno that it’s just transcendent. It’s my favorite way to eat them.

When the chiles were ready, my friend brought them out on a wide platter, piled high and covered with a towel to keep them warm; the egg on the outside was golden, just on the edge of crisp while still being soft enough to melt in your mouth. The beans were fresh, mashed by hand; the flour tortillas were homemade and hot off the griddle. We poured ourselves glasses of ice-cold horchata, a kind of rice milk with cinnamon and vanilla, and dug into the pile like we were starving. Bite after bite, chile after chile, we ate and ate and ate until we thought we were going to burst. The best bite of a chile relleno is the last one, when you’ve eaten most of it away and you pick it up by the stem, biting off the last bits of chile and egg and sucking out the final bits of cheese; the base of the stem is soft and creamy, and it mingles with the cheese and holy crap I’m making myself hungry just thinking about it.

Every chile relleno I’ve ever eaten since that day is but a pale attempt to recapture the glory of that food. I’ve since taught myself how to make chiles rellenos of my own, and I do a semi-tolerable job–at the very least, it fills my house with the scent of roasting chiles. Another fun development since that heavenly meal is that I’m now lactose intolerant, which makes chiles rellenos a truly inadvisable thing for me to eat. But you know what? I’d gladly suffer any pain to have that meal again. It is without question the best meal I’ve ever eaten.

Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes is a South African author and screenwriter best known for her high concept novels, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer and the survivor who turns the hunt around, and Zoo City, a phantasmagorical noir set in Johannesburg which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her work is published in 24 languages and is in development for film and TV. In her former life, before full-time fiction, she worked as a journalist interviewing teen vampires, high court justices, and Miss HIV+ beauty queens among other fascinating humans. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa with her daughter and two troublesome cats. 

‘Best ever’ questions always throw me. It’s hard to quantify experiences absolutely. The rugby ball-shaped jackfruit I haggled over in the market of Stone Town, that lasted us six days’ worth of breakfasts in our ramshackle guesthouse in the heart of the city, serenaded by the call to prayer and the thrum of streetlife as we cut into the fruit that tastes like melony banana.

Or the insane goodness of the emergency chocolate crepe near the Pompidou Centre when I was pregnant and my daughter growing inside me made me hysterically ravenous at strange times.

Or the simple cheese roll I had after a day abseiling into caves squeaky with bats in Kalk Bay on assignment for a magazine story on spelunking that tasted like the best thing ever.

It’s impossible to choose just one. So I’m going to write about the most recent best food experience I’ve had, in Grey Street in Durban.

I was in the city for the Time of the Writer festival and my journalist friend, Nechama Brodie, absolutely insisted that I had to meet an architect she’d just interviewed, Richard Stretton and his wife, Angela Shaw. It was a blind date. They came along to a reading I was doing and we went for a drink afterwards and hit it off to the extent that I saw them every day for the duration of the festival.

Most of the time, we were eating; finger snacks at a boutique art hotel, pasta at the hip new Italian restaurant in town, stew at an impromptu dinner party at their home, but the best meal was the Saturday, when Angela took us to the area known as the Casbah, where most nice middle class locals don’t venture, let alone tourists. Boy, are they missing out.

I’d spent time in Joburg’s inner city and the pariah suburb of Hillbrow, researching my novel, Zoo City, so I had some idea what to expect. That the inner city defies easy categorization and lazy preconceptions. It’s bustling, occasionally hustling and it could be dangerous if you went blundering into dodgy areas at night, but it’s not a hotbed of crime and human scum; it’s a place where ordinary people live and work and do their shopping.

We bought kids’ dresses in bright shesheshwe patterns from street vendors with temporary stalls set up next to Zulu women braaing mealies* on DIY stoves on the pavement, we wandered through sprawling markets and open-air cobbled arcades packed with Internet cafés, stores selling ornate saris, Indian merchants selling blankets and coats and other goods for lobola** and ancient tailors working ancient sewing machines in shops that were 100 years old.

And finally we stopped for lunch. Richard and Angela hunted in vain for the restaurant they used to come to and we decided to take a chance on a dubious-looking hole-in-the-wall on the main drag of Queen street, whose name none of us can now remember. It had plastic-coated seating and curtains round the booths and a star motif and one wimpy desk fan churning in vain against the Durban humidity.

Richard took charge and ordered half the menu — all North Indian dishes — from dhal curry to lamb korma, lamb kebabs and palak paneer, served with naan