Cincinnati Writer and Musician Nick Greenberg Talks Fungi Fiction

Cincinnati-based author and musician Nick Greenberg calls his genre “Foodie Fiction.” Greenberg — a classically trained musician in a variety of styles including jazz, show tunes and rock — also had a brief  career in the food industry, from which he pulls draw inspiration fro his food-based adventures, including his most recent release Buried Treasure. 

“My day job is essentially as a musician,” he says. “When I’m not sitting in front of my laptop, I usually have my bass in front of me.”

Greenberg’s Buried Treasure was first published in 2020, but was re-published in January 2026, with changes that included an updated cover. We talked with Greenberg about hometown inspiration, his creative process and his advice for aspiring writers. 

Buried Treasure and your novel The Culinary Caper are both set in Cincinnati. How does the city inspire your writing?
It’s easy for me to put myself in a neighborhood or on a street or in a certain part of town or even going to a certain restaurant. There’s always a part, like in both Culinary Caper and Buried Treasure, that occurs outside Cincinnati. In Buried Treasure, there are a bunch of scenes in Italy and there are places that I’ve been, but I can’t just fly out there to refresh my memory. So, it’s easy to set a scene in Cincinnati, and I do love it here.

What do you want readers to take away from Buried Treasure?
In Buried Treasure, our main character is struggling somewhat as a musician. He’s transitioned from life on the road to trying to make it as a studio musician, which these days has become more of solitary venture. You can sit, and I’ve done a fair amount of this, I’m sitting in my room, recording a track by myself and sending it to people I’ve never met. So, he’s trying to find his way and feels like he is not experiencing the muse he used to experience. Somehow, he discovers, or, I should say, his dog discovers truffles growing in the woods behind his house. This is not a magical element because [the book] is not fantasy, but something about that triggers his muse and he starts to find his way.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
For me, music and writing are very similar, in fact, because I do compose music. I’m a bass player but when I write music, I sit down and I play a couple of notes and I’m like, ‘oh, I like that’, and I’m sort of hearing this note come next. I don’t have a plan where the song is going to go. I don’t even know what the harmonies are going to be when I finish the melody. I just sort of follow that path. For a writer I’d say, just sit down and see where it takes you. Don’t be afraid to follow a path that seems really weird because maybe that’s going to take you somewhere fun. Maybe it won’t, and that doesn’t matter either.