George Saunders on chicken, writing rituals, and maîtres d’.

The Booker Prize-winning author on chicken, writing rituals and his affinity with maîtres d’.

As a teen, you helped your father at his Chicken Unlimited restaurant in Chicago.

I was the delivery boy, and drove this tricked-out Chevy van. Our restaurant served as a gathering place for lonely people who had nowhere else to go – an old man dying of cancer, a manic woman who used to chain-smoke and chain-drink Pepsis, who later jumped into the Chicago River and was saved, against her will, by a guy passing by. So, great training for a writer in the mad variety of life, but also in the practice of having tender feelings for people who, at first, you might dismiss.

Did the job kill your appetite for chicken?

I still like it. But I sometimes think back with horror at the sheer number of calories I ate. I was also trying to be a bodybuilder and was very skinny, so my mission became “bulk up”, while working at a fast-food restaurant where everything, including the soft drinks, gets deep-fried. It was not hard.

You once worked as a field geophysicist in Indonesia. Did you enjoy the local food?

I’d get sent into the field, deep into the Sumatran jungle. We’d send in a “rintis” crew, who would cut very narrow paths into the woods. Our guys would catch trout from pristine streams, spice them with local spices and bury them in a firepit for the day. I have never tasted anything that wonderful. It was like eating beautifully flavoured air.

You have compared being an author to being a maître d’ at a restaurant. Why?

Well, as a writer, you have a chance

– a responsibility – to make a beautiful experience for your reader by any means necessary. You are in a service role that allows for infinite creativity.

Your story, “Two-Minute Note to the Future”, was printed on paper bags by fast-food chain Chipotle. How did that feel?

It got more response than anything else I’d published – for example, from old friends who had no idea I was a writer. So that was nice. For my next project, I am going to publish a story literally on a series of McDonald’s hamburger buns.

Is consuming caffeine a writing ritual?

I am a coffee man, yes. That’s about my only habit. I heard the lovely writer Lynda Barry talk once about patterns of interruption that artists enact, and I’ve since noticed that, when I get on a good run in a story, I will only (lapsed Catholic that I am) let myself go so far. Then I go upstairs and get a pretzel rod or a graham cracker and, just by doing that, my elation will die back down enough for me to go back to work.

What’s the most unconventional place you’ve had a meal?

I did a story for GQ a few years ago, where I lived incognito in a homeless camp for about a week. Churches would come and pass out food for the people in the camp. At one of these meals, I had gotten so tired of pretending to be a homeless guy, I confessed to one of the church mums that I was a writer working for GQ. She looked at me sceptically (part of my approach was not to bathe or change clothes that whole time) and then sympathetically. “No, seriously,” I said. She began to edge away. I had that moment of really feeling what it was like to be down and out – I was auto-assumed to be crazy and dangerous, and the more I tried to explain myself, the crazier and more dangerous I appeared. And the only way to put her at peace was to take my dry hamburger on my plastic plate and vanish back into the crowd.