Hi, Kim Fielding here!

Vietnamese is one of my favorite cuisines. I love the seasonings—fish sauce, lemongrass, mint, ginger, basil—and the way everything tastes so fresh. In my estimation, a good banh mi is one of the world’s perfect sandwiches, and very few dishes fortify as well as a huge bowl of pho. But even though I love Vietnamese food, I wouldn’t want to eat it at every meal, because that would mean missing out on all that wonderful Indian and Mexican and Italian and Moroccan and… you get the idea. And you get my point too: variety is good.

But variety doesn’t just mean that tonight I eat Salvadorian food and tomorrow Polish. It also means that I might want to mix cuisines in a single dish. Fusion food, right? Sometimes I think calling it “fusion” sounds as if we’re trying to be trendy, but in fact humans have always mixed and matched their foods. Those wonderful banh mi resulted when people stuffed Vietnamese fillings into a French baguette. Some fusions have become cuisines in themselves, like Tex-Mex. Others sometimes surprise me in a wonderful way, like the nearby restaurant that combines Cajun and Vietnamese influences, or another restaurant near me that offers French crepes and Middle Eastern staples like falafel. A local pizza place has a Mexican pie and an Afghani one, along with gyro sandwiches.

Fusion isn’t just great in food; I also love it in music. One of my favorite bands is Dubioza Kolektiv, a Bosnian group that melds reggae, punk, hip-hop, and traditional Bosnian music. I love the US band Gogol Bordello too—punk plus Gypsy plus Eastern European with some other things thrown in.

And that brings us to another area where fusion is good: books. One genre is good, but isn’t it even more fun when we stir them together? For example, I love Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, in which he included elements of horror, fantasy, sci fi, Westerns, and medieval legends. Another of my favorites, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, combines fantasy and horror with world mythologies and the classic American road-trip novel. There are plenty of examples of genre blending in gay romance too, such as Jordan Castillo Price’s PsyCop series (paranormal and suspense with a good dash of humor) and Jesse Hajicek’s The God Eaters (dystopia, fantasy, and Western). If you read my books, you know that I enjoy writing genre fusions; I have a new one due out later this month.

So, hit me up. What are your favorite fusions, be they culinary, musical, or literary? Or maybe you prefer your fusions in film or on TV, in paintings, in dance, or somewhere else. Share!

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Kim Fielding is the bestselling author of numerous m/m romance novels, novellas, and short stories. Like Kim herself, her work is eclectic, spanning genres such as contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, and historical. Her stories are set in alternate worlds, in 15th century Bosnia, in modern-day Oregon. Her heroes are hipster architect werewolves, housekeepers, maimed giants, and conflicted graduate students. They’re usually flawed, they often encounter terrible obstacles, but they always find love.

After having migrated back and forth across the western two-thirds of the United States, Kim calls the boring part of California home. She lives there with her husband, her two daughters, and her day job as a university professor, but escapes as often as possible via car, train, plane, or boat. This may explain why her characters often seem to be in transit as well. She dreams of traveling and writing full-time.

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