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The twenty-two first person narratives in Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin connect through common settings, recurring characters, continuing themes, shared imagery, and intertwined plots. Aqua Vitae Café, in turn-of-the-millennium Austin, Texas, is the central connection for this short-story cycle; but the settings range from Austin to New Mexico to Guatemala and Honduras.

One of the main elements that links the characters who inhabit the cycle is food. All of the characters either work at, or patronize, the Aqua Vitae Café, for which the real-life model was Magnolia Café on South Congress (all the way down to the purple pterodactyl suspended from the main dining room ceiling). I waited tables at Magnolia Café in the late 1990s, and I absolutely fell in love with their menu.

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What is fusion food?

We made it up. The term, NOT the food from different cultures.

Ever tried Gozleme Vietnamese style?

Behind Melek were trays of syrupy baklava layered watermelon seeds instead of walnuts. It was SO HARD for Melek NOT to lick the sugar off the saran wraps covering the dessert trays. She didn’t. The ladies from Melek’s mosque had rolled out dough to turn gozleme into a Vietnamesey sort of dessert. Gozleme was one of her favourites.

In Hijabi Girl, our 10 year old Melek character is a feisty girl in a hijab who wants to start an Australian Rules girls�� football team. She sets up a fundraiser where they sell ‘fusion�� food from many of the cultures of the children in their mainstream school. With the money raised they can buy their uniforms and start their sports club. But it’s really about sharing. Tien is her new Vietnamese friend whose Dad is a chef whose business is struggling, but helps his daughter’s friends. So does Melek’s hijabi-fashionista mother who designs sports clothes.

Tasting ‘fusion�� food is genuine book research for writers. And fun. But proof- reading the names of food in our Hijabi Girl in a different language can be a challenge. And now we even have puppets which are a Vietnamese Rice Paper Roll and a Turkish Kebab! Australian Larrikin Puppeteers are performing Hijabi Girl the musical and touring post-Pandemic.

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As an author, I love food and give this love through in my books to the extent that readers blame me for 'putting on a few pounds' and'wanting coffee all the time'. I am glad that this is the feedback I receive.It means that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing as a writer. I allow the reader to experience the books.

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When writing Conspiracy of Lies, set in WWII France, food and wine played an important part in the story. I wanted to portray the difference between the glittering dinner parties of the German elite and the French people who were barely able to sustain themselves because of rationing and food being taken from France to Germany. My protagonist, Claire Bouchard, gets a taste for champagne when she is sent as journalist visit the champagne houses in the Champagne villages during the Phoney War prior to the German invasion of France. The great wine and champagne houses of France were a barometer of impending war much as they had been during WWI, and earlier wars, as the connections between French and German wine houses were very strong. On closer inspection, Claire notes that some of them are starting to hide their finest wines behind walled-up cellars. When she meets the man who will eventually become her lover, she learns even more about fine wine.

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Food can be sensual and evocative in a world where cooking defines a women’s role. In Shadows of Olive Trees, the second rise of feminism battles against defined traditions of sexual roles and gender equity. Tessa, the good daughter of Greek immigrants is torn between the restrictions of traditions of the past and the dangerous freedoms of independence.

The Greek food is comforting, delicious, voluptuous, overflowing, all encompassing, blocking Tessa’s pathway to self determination. The cooking and feasting is part of daily life:

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Day 73.

Feels like we’ve been on this planet forever. Campaigns stretch on. Friends fall with each battle, but we endure. What other choice do we have? Command says this planet has to stand or we risk losing half the galaxy. We’ve been at the sharp end of the stick since the civil war began. No one rightly knows how or why. All we’ve been told is the Inquisitor General staged a coup, had the Cardinal Seniorus killed, and General Strannan is in exile.

None of that matters to us grunts. The men and women we’re busy fighting were our friends just a few short months ago. Seven hundred occupied planets and we’re busy tearing each other apart. I guess the universe just isn’t big enough for dueling egos. At least they feed us. Granted, it’s army food and not very appetizing, but there’s no better feeling than going to sleep on a full belly.

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Food is one of the three keys to survival, but what happens when you yourself are put on the menu? In my zombie apocalypse series, Life Among the Dead, we meet an array of characters and see different ways to survive, from scavenging to homesteading. Whether they are heroes or villains they all share one trait, they need to eat. Food is not just sustenance to keep us going, it can also give us comfort, it can bring us together, it makes us feel human.

One of my favorite characters is Uncle Bruce. He uses a story about food to explain his theory of how the dead are rising.

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Georgiana Down, the main character in Down on Love, the first book in my small-town romcom series Welcome to Marsden, has a lot of stress in her life. She was downsized out of her job as a graphic artist, broke up with her emotionally abusive boyfriend, and now lives in a drab apartment with a weird roommate. Meanwhile, her sister is haranguing her to return to their tiny hometown in the Catskill Mountains in central New York State—a place she hasn’t visited, let alone lived in, in fifteen years. She has two activities in her life that relieves her stress: her successful anti-romance advice blog (Down on Love) and baking pies.

When I started writing Down on Love, there was nothing in my notes about George baking pies. (And I take a lot of notes before I start writing.) I don’t know how it came about that George’s “thing�� is baking, and only pies, but I definitely drew on my personal experience.

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It had never been my intention to give food such prominence in the Poe and Tilly books, and even when it happened, it kind of happened organically. Poe eats what he wants, when he wants, mainly sausages and black pudding and Tilly has been a vegan since she was thirteen. Having them eat a meal together, or discuss (let’s not pretend; they argue) Poe’s diet allows me to a) showcase the very different personalities of my two leads without hammering the reader over the head with it, b) inject human moments into what can occasionally be quite dark books and c) add some humour.

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Certain scents, places, and foods can remind us of our loved ones who have passed away. In Analiese Rising, Analiese and her brother go to the same coffee house they’d visited with their father for years. Their father had recently died and, whenever they’re in the area, they stop in and have a coffee together in honor of him. She remembers their first time there and how it started with her and her brother getting hot chocolates and how they graduated to coffee now that they’re in their teens.

The coffee house holds many warm memories for Analiese. The gradual change from hot chocolate to coffee reveals her growth from a child to a young adult. There was once joy in going to the coffee house with her father and brother. And now, it’s only a ritual. One they haven’t broken since he died, but one that brings a sadness and yet a warmth to her.

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