Savor sweet and sour beets with Liz Gorinsky as we discuss 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 her 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 <em>Ulysses</em>, the many reasons whatever you're doing you should be doing for love, and much more.
Polish off pierogi with Chris Kalb as we discuss the comic book company and superheroes he and his brother created when they were just kids, why he once thought Chris Ware was his nemesis, the <em>Batman</em> comic which influenced him the most, how his father caused him to fall in love with Doc Savage, the secret origin of his romantic advice superheroine Breakup Girl, the sophistication of pulp era writing, one theory as to why Doc Savage never made it as a successful comic book series, the college comic strip which won him a Charles M. Schulz Award, the problem the slabbing of pulps has caused within the collecting community, the pulp premium so rare none may have survived, and much more.
Share green tea leaf salad with Emily Mitchell as we discuss why she felt the need to flip the first and last stories of her recent collection, the gaps which can sometimes occur between a writer's intentions and a reader's perceptions, the appeal of the ambiguity which comes with open-ended closure, how a writer's career is defined as much by who chooses to publish them as by what they choose to write, why she loves working in the present tense (and why one of her stories originally published that way shifted to the past tense in her collection), what she learned about writing by being an editor, why leaving out much of what writers know about their characters improves what they choose to put in, her story which required the most drafts (and why), how writing longhand has gotten her unstuck, why it's important to have many writing projects going at once, and much more.