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Eating Authors: Will McIntosh

1 Comment » Written on April 30th, 2012 by
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Will McIntosh

Today on Eating Authors we’re reuniting with another author that last year graced this blog with a Q&A interview. I’m referring to none other than Nebula Award Nominee and Hugo Award winner Will McIntosh.

Will’s second novel, Hitchers came out from Night Shade Books three months ago, and his short story, “Followed,” which was published in the anthology The Living Dead, is being made into a short film, directed by James Kicklighter. But don’t take my word for it, follow this link to view the trailer for it yourself.

And if that’s not enough, you should know that Will’s first novel, Soft Apocalypse has been nominated for the coveted Compton Crook Award, which is handed out next month at Balticon.

LMS: Hi, Will, welcome back. I know you’re crazy busy so I’ll just cut right to the chase (and fill in with all sorts of fancy CGI special effects later): what’s the best meal you can remember having?

WM: My best meal ever was pizza, from a restaurant in a town somewhere west of Bordeaux, France. I don’t remember the name of the restaurant or the town, only the pizza.

This was about fifteen years ago. I went to France to spend a month in Plum Village, a Zen community led by Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. It had been a dream to study with Thich Nhat Hanh, to spend some time in a place where things moved slowly, where there were no TVs, no newspapers, nothing much to do but watch the clouds drift by.

They ate simply at Plum Village as well. It was good food, incredibly healthy, consisting mainly of fresh vegetables and grains, herbal tea or water to drink. In the mornings there was fresh milk from a nearby farm. The thing was, other than the fresh milk there was absolutely no fat to be found in the food. I had no car, and we were probably twenty miles away from the nearest town, so sneaking off to a restaurant to gorge on butter-infused French cuisine wasn’t an option. By the end of the month I’d lost nearly ten pounds, and I was pretty much hungry all the time. I was accustomed to a Western diet, packed with lots of carbs and good old fat.

Hitchers

Soft Apocalypse

When the month was over and I was dropped in town, I immediately went in search of carbs and fat. I found an Italian restaurant and, using my French-English dictionary, decoded enough of the menu to order a pizza. It was an authentic Italian pizza–thin crust, lots of homemade tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, oregano, not too salty. I ate an entire pizza, washed down with a carafe of the local wine.

Then I went to the movies and lucked out they were showing a movie in English with French subtitles–The Usual Suspects. It may have been the best movie I’ve ever seen, because I was feeling almost as media-deprived as I was carb and fat deprived.

Clearly not your usual dinner and a movie kind of evening, Will. After reading your account of it, my mind is filling with all sorts of zen-like questions, such as “what is the sound of one hand eating pizza.” We may never know.

Next Monday: Another author and another meal!

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