Advertise on podcast: Art In Fiction

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Louise Fein, author of Book of Forbidden Words, listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction.  Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XGECvUgXmO0 Premise for the novel: in Tudor England and 1550s Paris, a coded manuscript holds ideas dangerous enough to get its author burned at the stake, and in 1952, a former Bletchley Park codebreaker stuck in McCarthy-era suburbia is handed that manuscript and asked to crack it.Why Louise went looking for a historical moment when a new technology spread ideas faster than anyone could control, and how the real Voynich manuscript, a 200-page illustrated book still locked away at Yale's Beinecke Library, turned out to be "such a gift to a novelist."Who wrote the Voynich? The wild imagined plants and pregnant women lounging in pools that have people convinced women wrote it, and why Louise had to invent the contents of her own version.Lysbette, Thomas More's ward: Utopia, Henry VIII's Great Matter, and the rabbit hole of what happened to nuns after the dissolution of the monasteries, plus the case for the convent being a better career move than a husband and ten kids.Charlotte Guillard, the real Paris printer: six presses, a lawsuit against the Paper Guild over terrible paper (which may be why so few of her books survive), work for Erasmus, and a heretic hunter named Antoine de Mouchy operating literally feet from her shop.Milly and the women of Bletchley Park: wartime codebreakers sent back to the kitchen and forbidden to speak about their work until 1974, and Levittown, the postwar "modern utopia" Louise visited for research.The Minute Women: a semi-underground group of 1950s housewives who claimed to be raising money for charity while hunting communists and getting librarians and teachers fired.Building a code that actually works: weeks spent on medieval cipher practices, a sundial device that holds the key, and the fact that readers can check her math in the book.Why the Voynich still hasn't been cracked, even by AI.Reading from Book of Forbidden Words: the prologue, Paris, July 1552, featuring a moonlit graveyard, the Pont Notre-Dame, and a manuscript somebody badly wants hidden.A book written before the last US election: book bans, women's rights going backwards as well as forwards, and Louise's reminder to keep using our voices.Writing three timelines without losing your mind: why Louise wrote the entire 1500s storyline first and the 1950s storyline separately, and her discovery that with three main characters, every single word matters.Advice for historical novelists: do the research, then set it aside for the first draft, because the story is what readers came for.What's next: a novel coming in fall 2027 about a chocolate maker and his wife who emigrate to Boston after the Irish famine, sparked by a chocolate-free January that went about as well as you'd expect.Read more from Louise Fein at https://www.louisefein.com/ Support the show Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is J.C. Corry, author of The Storyteller's War: Geoffrey Chaucer, Reluctant Spy, listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ATuNBbQ2na8 Premise for the novel: a genesis story for Geoffrey Chaucer. In his mid-twenties, he's drunk, unpublished, and desperate to win Pippa, and sent to Spain under cover of the wine trade while the Castilian Civil War rages.Was Chaucer really a spy? How researchers Crow and Olsen's Chaucer Life Records and Marion Turner's Chaucer: A European Life turned up a real, unexplained safe-conduct pass through Navarre in February 1366, and why "he was probably there as a spy" is the closest thing historians have to an answer.Why Chaucer, and why four novels about him: a university professor at UVic who made Middle English bearable, and the "proto-Renaissance" life Chaucer actually lived between the docks, the wine trade, and the royal court.Why the 14th century keeps pulling historical novelists back: the rise of English as a literary language, the Black Death cracking open the feudal system, the birth of Parliament, and Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which draws a line from Chaucer's world straight to our own.The real love story underneath it all: the push and pull between Pippa and Chaucer's writing that JC calls "the spine of the series," and the historical fact that the two married but spent long stretches apart, both bound to royal service.Mercenaries for hire: Sir Hugh Calveley, Sir John Hawkwood, and Bertrand du Guesclin, and how a lull in the Hundred Years' War left soldiers with nothing to do but sell themselves to the highest bidder.Writing real historical figures next to invented ones, and the balancing act between staying true to how people actually lived and spoke in 1366 and not losing a contemporary reader along the way.On-location research: retracing Chaucer's route from London to Bordeaux, Pamplona, Logroño, Burgos, and Nájera, tasting a centuries-old liqueur, and finding the exact cloister that inspired a particularly gruesome scene with Pedro the Cruel.Writing his first battle scene: a $300 book called To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle, his father's WWII helmet with three bullet holes in it, and keeping Chaucer from disappearing inside his own war story.A reading from The Storyteller's War: Chaucer and Pippa sparring with his parents over marriage, money, and who really owns his attention, the manuscript or her.The moment JC hopes listeners walk away thinking about: the internal war Chaucer is fighting between love and ambition, running underneath the external one.What's next: The Storyteller's Reputation is with the publisher awaiting word, and book three, The Storyteller's Silence, is in research.Read more from J.C. Corry at jccorry.com Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Bonnie Blaylock, author of The Water Women, listed in the Textile Arts category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oQagNFbwEzI Premise for the novel: three generations of Sardinian women guard the ancient craft of byssus weaving, golden "sea silk" harvested from a mollusk, until a 1942 wartime secret changes what gets passed down the family line.Byssus 101, or the beard of the world's largest mollusk: how a single photo of the Pinna nobilis, a clam that grows up to four feet tall off the coast of Sardinia, sent Bonnie down the research hole that became this novel, and why the last woman still practicing the craft isn't sure she'll pass it on.Researching a place she's never been: how Google Earth, Street View, and D.H. Lawrence's century-old travelogue Sea and Sardinia stood in for a research trip that kept getting cancelled, including a would-be crossing of her own that she and her husband missed by literal hours.The mothers-and-daughters engine underneath it all: how losing her own mother at 24 and gaining her first granddaughter mid-manuscript shaped a novel about what parents hand down to their children, intentionally or not, and whether the children get to choose what they keep.Sardinia's hidden World War II history: churches built over synagogues, Mussolini's presence on the island, and the mysterious prehistoric Nuraghi ruins Bonnie used as a setting Writing a character readers love to hate: why Zaneta, the second-generation "water woman," divides readers, and Bonnie's case for giving her grace.Duty to those before us versus responsibility to those who come after, or, as Bonnie puts it, "can I say both are true?"Reading from The Water Women: an excerpt from Mira's perspective, a fishing line, a hum you can feel in your chest, and a mother trying to let her daughter become whoever she's going to become.Queen Berenice and the real rule of sea silk: the tradition, said to trace back to a queen referenced in the New Testament, that byssus can only ever be given as a gift, never sold.Why textile arts don't get their due: a conversation about "women's work" being just as worthy of serious treatment as anything hanging in a gallery.What's next: The Lookout, to be published in March 2027, based on the real first woman fire lookout in the northern California mountains and the sister who hiked up supplies to her for fourteen summers.Read more from Bonnie Blaylock at bonnieblaylock.com Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Jillian Forsberg, author of The Porcelain Menagerie, listed in the Decorative Arts category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-c1T9q46_Ys Premise for the novel: how a king's obsession with "white gold" porcelain drives two intertwined stories set decades apart. Fatima, a stolen Turkish handmaiden turned royal mistress, is put in charge of Augustus the Strong's exotic menagerie, and Johann Kändler, is the sculptor commissioned to capture that same menagerie in life-size porcelain.From a rhino to a rabbit hole: how Jillian stumbled onto the Meissen porcelain story while researching her first novel, The Rhino Keeper, after discovering that Clara, the real touring Indian rhino, once visited a porcelain factory.Augustus the Strong, elected king: how a Protestant elector converted to Catholicism and bribed, drank, and gambled his way onto the Polish throne, and built one of Europe's greatest art collections while treating people, and animals, as expendable.The treasure that survived a firebombing: why so much of Augustus's Green Vault collection escaped the WWII destruction of Dresden, hidden away because Hitler valued art as well.Johann Kändler, prisoner and genius: the real sculptor who, once inside the Meissen factory, could never really leave, and the parallel Jillian draws between his captivity and the caged animals he spent his life sculpting.Fatima's menagerie as agency: why a woman with no control over her own life, stolen as a child and handed to a king, built her power around the one thing she was allowed to love.Trading soldiers for porcelain: the true, almost unbelievable story behind Augustus swapping 600 fully armed dragoon soldiers for a shipment of Chinese porcelain pots.Finding Kändler's grave: Jillian's research trip to Meissen, and the eerie discovery that her Airbnb kitchen window looked straight down on the churchyard where he's buried.Reading from The Porcelain Menagerie: the purposefully written content warning for chapter 30, and an excerpt from Fatima's chapter 16 as she races to meet a new shipment of animals for the menagerie.Writing complicated characters: what Jillian learned about giving a villain one redemptive act and a heroine real flaws, instead of clean-cut Disney heroes and villains.What's next: two manuscripts on submission, a retelling of Daniel in the lions' den from the female lion keeper's perspective and a French Revolution novel set at the Salpêtrière asylum, plus a bridal-industry memoir, The Heirloom Finder, coming from the University of Kansas Press.Read more from Jillian Forsberg at jillianforsberg.com Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Kerry Chaput, author of The Secret Courtesan, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fkX-QqvmnQg Premise for the novel: how a marble Venetian sculpture, surfacing after 400 years and credited to a male artist, sends Mia, a modern-day arts authenticator looking for the woman she is sure had carved it.Kerry found documented women painters of the Renaissance and Baroque, but no large-scale women sculptors, and decided that gap in the record was the story worth telling.Artemisia's dusty painting: the real-life rediscovery of an Artemisia Gentileschi painting in a Hampton Court storage room, proof that misattributed women's art isn't just a plot device.Veronica Franco and the real courtesans: how the film Dangerous Beauty and its real-life subject, Renaissance Venice's premier courtesan, inspired the character of Sofia, and why courtesans had more freedom, education, and political access than "respectable" women of the era.Pitched as The Da Vinci Code with a feminist twist: the puzzles and cliffhangers built into Mia's modern timeline, and why Kerry had to finish writing Sofia's 1609 story before she could solve Mia's.Zero outline, one nice bow: Kerry's pantser process from first page to last, alternating between timelines and following "wormholes" even when they lead nowhere.The hardest research wasn't the history: why untangling art authentication, auction houses, and international law was tougher than 17th-century Venice, and how friends in the art world helped her build a plausible Sotheby's-style plot.A law against something means someone was doing it: the logic behind laws barring women from studying art and obtaining materials, and what that says about who was quietly doing both anyway.Writing women who already have a voice: why Kerry skipped the "she finds her voice" arc for Sofia, and how a story about a woman claiming power she already has changes the whole shape of the narrative.Reading from The Secret Courtesan: a 2 a.m. library scene between Mia and fellow historian Noah as her theory about the sculptor's true identity finally comes out.What's next: Kerry's ongoing Substack, Badass Women in History, and her continued fascination with the women the historical record left out.Read more from Kerry Chaput on her Substack, Badass Women in History: https://kerrychaput.substack.com/ Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Nancy Burkhalter, author of The Education of Delhomme, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RNohgRLMv4c Why Chopin needed a piano tuner: how Nancy, tuning pianos herself while listening to Chopin, realized he "had to have" one, and that's how the novel's narrator, Delhomme, was born.Blending fact and fiction: the wall-sized timeline, real history on top, novel's action below, that kept Delhomme's Paris anchored to the actual events of 1848 without letting fiction outrun fact.A poor man's bargain: why Delhomme, broke and desperate, falls prey to Vidocq, the monarchy's real-life spymaster, and agrees to spy on George Sand, the very woman he ends up competing with for Chopin's attention.Writing an unsympathetic narrator: Nancy's surprise at hearing Delhomme called an anti-hero, and why she never saw him that way, just a man doing what he had to do.Falling out of love with George Sand, then back in: how Nancy resented Sand for leaving Chopin, until a visit to Sand's home at Nohant, complete with a puppet theater Sand built for her son, turned her around, and why she gave Sand her own voice through diary entries woven into the book.Tuning by ear, writing by feel: what years as a working piano tuner taught her about touch and temperament, and how much of that craft to hand readers without losing them.The piano as character: why the instruments in the novel feel like living things, wood that expands and contracts, vulnerable to a fireplace or a spilled glass of wine, and how a tuner's instincts shaped Delhomme's reactions to Chopin's world.Finding Chopin's real tuner: a thin, out-of-print book written by the daughter of Chopin's actual piano tuner, discovered by chance in a University of Washington library.Vidocq, the spy who wrote himself: how the real historical spymaster, found in a reference book called Spies, handed Nancy a ready-made thriller plot, con-man origins and all, that she couldn't have invented herself.What's next: a novel about Franz Mesmer and his quest for medical legitimacy, and a subplot inspired by Nancy's own grandmother's history with mental illness.Reading from The Education of Delhomme: the Jardin des Tuileries scene where Delhomme meets George Sand for the first time and stews in jealousy as Chopin describes a ruined Bösendorfer and his plan to give Sand a prized ring.What Nancy learned: how a two-year manuscript completion class taught her to find the goal of every scene, why she still doesn't outline, and her advice to track down living historical experts, since "they love it" when a novelist calls.Read more about Nancy Burkhalter on her website: https://www.nancyburkhalter.com/ Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Lynn Cullen, author of When We Were Brilliant, listed in the Photography and Film categories on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/86MVn-3LjhY Eve Arnold, the only woman Marilyn Monroe ever let photograph her: who she was, why Lynn had never heard of her either, and the shock of discovering that among all of Marilyn's photographers, there were no other women.Using Eve's own coffee table book on Marilyn as the novel's framework: six photo shoots over ten years, with scenes built around individual photographs, including the famous mirror shot.The ghost of Marilyn: standing on the actual Seven Year Itch subway grate in New York on a windless night when Lynn's coat suddenly swirled up around her, and how that moment made her feel responsible for getting Marilyn right.Why Marilyn sought Eve out, never the reverse: Lynn's hypothesis that Marilyn trusted Eve and wanted Norma Jean to get some credit, showing up for Eve's camera looking nothing like the bombshell the world knew.Reclaiming Marilyn from the victim narrative: a self-made, intelligent woman with real agency whom the studios fought because she had power, and why the "Hollywood made you and broke you" line from Candle in the Wind is exactly what Eve set out to correct.The verdict of Eve's grandson Michael Arnold: "You so captured my grandmother," and how Lynn ended up at the National Portrait Gallery's Marilyn centenary exhibition with him.The accidental second person: how a "mistake" at page 60, with Eve addressing Marilyn as "you," revealed the book as Eve's love letter and apology, despite Lynn resisting it at first.Photography as relationship: what Lynn learned about portrait photography, what a subject gives each photographer, and why Eve never had a subject like Marilyn again.The perennial choice women face: Eve's struggle as a working mother traveling the world as a top photographer.Setting the record straight on Marilyn's death at 36: an accidental overdose by a woman who had gone furniture shopping that day and had plans for plays and movies.Reading from When We Were Brilliant: the chaotic beach scene where Eve first meets Marilyn, a Botticelli Venus in a white bikini and army boots descending a cliff into a feeding frenzy of gawkers.What Lynn learned: to let the novel speak, even when the story demands a choice you resisted, and that eight books in, you still need beginner's mind.Read more about Lynn Cullen on her website: https://lynncullen.com/ Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Kate Whouley, author of The Maestro and Her Protégé, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fr_fJ9t9G_o Nadia Boulanger, the most influential music teacher of the 20th century: who she was, why she matters, and how Kate first encountered her by way of her terrifying theory professor when she was a music student.Inventing Hannah Schaefer, a fictional conductor who studies with the very real Boulanger, Leonard Bernstein, and Philip Glass.The demanding mentorship paradox: why Boulanger's near-dictatorial teaching style was exactly what Hannah needed, and when that kind of discipline helps versus harms.Women on the podium: why female conductors are rare even today, and what it feels like to be at the top of your game and still have to fight battles a man in the same position wouldn't.Structuring a novel like a musical composition: Overture, Reverie, Rhapsody, and Coda, and why Kate ultimately let go of strict sonata form.What women give up: Hannah's choice to be married to music, Boulanger's infamous black-edged sympathy cards sent to promising students who married, and the question Hannah faces at 58: could there be more?Grief as artistic processing: the cluster of losses Hannah suffers, how she writes pieces for the dead rather than mourning them, and why that catches up with her.Paris as a character: ten years of research trips, sobbing at Boulanger's grave in Montparnasse, and the moment Kate threw out her draft and understood the real story.From memoir to fiction and back: how writing Cottage for Sale and Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, her memoir about her mother's early-onset Alzheimer's, shaped her approach to the novel.Reading from The Maestro and Her Protégé.What Kate learned: that it's okay to follow the characters, that every word must have a reason to exist (Boulanger again), and that some books like to be written late at night.Read more about Kate Whouley on her website: https://katewhouley.com/ Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Elisabeth Storrs, author of Fables and Lies, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lCJfOypSQr4 The genesis of Fables and Lies: how a 30-year obsession with Priam's Gold and its mysterious disappearance after the Russians took it from Berlin led Elisabeth to create Freya, a young German woman working at the Museum of Pre- and Early History in Berlin as the war closes in.Himmler's SS Ahnenerbe, the pseudo-academic research institute that weaponized archaeology to justify Nazi ideology, and how the curator of Freya's museum being a member of it transformed what began as a novel about two women into something far more complex and sinister.The real inspiration behind Indiana Jones: Himmler's belief in the occult, Atlantis, and the Holy Grail, and the expeditions he sent to Tibet and Bolivia that Spielberg later drew on.Writing from inside the Nazi regime: Elisabeth's personal hesitation about telling the story from a German point of view given her father's experience as an Australian soldier in World War II, and why she decided the story needed to be told anyway.The Brenner family as microcosm: how Freya, her morally anchored father Konrad, her MAGA-adjacent mother Elsa, and her fully indoctrinated sister Volla each represent a different response to life under the Reich.Why Freya had to start as a true believer: the challenge of creating a protagonist who is indoctrinated, the small cracks in her worldview from the opening pages, and how Darien, the Cambridge-educated outsider archaeologist, opens her eyes.Berlin as a character in the novel: Elisabeth's research trip to the city, the walking tour with a Humboldt University history student, and the discovery that the Museum of Pre- and Early History sat next door to Gestapo headquarters on what is now the Topography of Terror site.The parallels to today: how Elisabeth finished the novel before the current global rise of fascism made it feel even more relevant, and what the preconditions for Hitler's rise in Weimar Germany have in common with what we are seeing now.The carpet bombing of Berlin, the Soviet artillery siege, and the absurdity of dropping leaflets telling civilians to overthrow the regime while destroying their city around them.A reading from the opening pages of Fables and Lies: Freya cycling home through Berlin on 24 August 1939, and her first encounter with Dieter, the jazz-loving teenager whose punishment plants the first seed of doubt.What Elisabeth is working on next: a four-timeline novel tracing Priam's Gold from a Bronze Age goldsmith in Troy through Schliemann's 1873 discovery, the Russian Trophy Brigade, and Freya's granddaughter piecing it all together in the 1990s.Read more about Elisabeth Storrs on her website: https://elisabethstorrs.com/ Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Caroline Woods, author of The Lunar Housewife, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0nJmxXJcrQQ How Caroline discovered the CIA's secret program to fund and shape American literary culture during the Cold War, including its involvement in the founding of the Paris Review, and why she saw a novel in it.The real-life women who inspired Louise: the aspiring writers and girlfriends surrounding the men at the center of the 1950s New York literary scene, and the female journalist who eventually broke the story decades later.The novel within a novel structure: why Louise's book had to be science fiction, how its chapters shift as Louise's disillusionment deepens, and the freedom of writing a melodramatic '50s romance as an "implied author" who isn't Caroline.The Hemingway interview at the heart of the book, based on Lillian Ross's real New Yorker profile, and how Hemingway, who is portrayed here as a kind of fairy godmother to Louise, inadvertently became Caroline's writing coach for the whole novel.Class tension in the 1950s literary world: why Louise's working-class origins matter in a scene dominated by Harvard and Yale men, and what that gave her as a character and as someone for readers to root for.How the title came about -- originally The Long Leash, the CIA's own term for the program -- and why her agent's suggestion of The Lunar Housewife did so much more work for the book.Writing The Lunar Housewife in spring 2020, during COVID lockdown, with a four-year-old and a one-year-old, writing after bedtime every night, and why that particular moment gave the lunar colony chapters their flavor.Why the 1950s is having a moment in historical fiction: the scrim of conformity and domestic bliss concealing postwar darkness, the seeds of the counterculture, and women who had tasted wartime freedom and had it yanked back.The common thread across Caroline's novels -- The Mesmerist, For All the Moons, and The Lunar Housewife -- women who question the status quo and push against systems, often in the face of government interference in private life.Caroline's advice to writers: write every single day (not just on Saturdays), and write what genuinely entertains you because if you're having fun, the reader will feel it.Reading from the opening pages of The Lunar Housewife: the launch party for Downtown magazine's second issue.Read more about Caroline Woods on her website: https://www.carolinewoodsauthor.com/ Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Aimie K. Runyan, author of Mademoiselle Eiffel, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction. View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_JcFmRQ4PcQ Why Aimie chose to write about Claire Eiffel rather than her more famous father, and the surprising role Claire played in running Gustave's household, social life, and business from the age of 14.The wax figure of Claire at the top of the Eiffel Tower, alongside Gustave and Thomas Edison, and the historical meeting it commemorates.How clothing functions as armor and identity in the novel, particularly Claire's corset as a symbol of constraint reframed as protection in a world not built for ambitious women.The invisible female labor at the heart of the story, and what Claire sacrificed, including her art and her choice of husband, to secure her place at her father's side.The opposition to the Eiffel Tower from artists, architects, and Gustave's own friend Garnier, and what the contrast between the Opéra Garnier and the tower reveals about two competing visions of modernity.Aimie's research trips to Paris and the Musée d'Orsay archives, where the Eiffel family correspondence, party menus, and letters from admirers have been preserved since 1981.What Aimie gained by returning to the archives after the story was already written.The Panama Canal scandal, Gustave's complicated legacy, and why writing through Claire's adoring lens required Aimie to be deliberately even-handed with a man who was "no more of a villain than your average rich man used to getting his own way."The oldest daughter narrative and why Claire's story resonates today, including a frank conversation about the undervaluing of women's labor and the difference between "emotional labor" and plain old mental load.Aimie's advice to writers on research: travel if you can, use Google Earth if you can't, never hesitate to contact museum curators, and know that one good research trip can fuel three books.Reading from the scene in Portugal where 14-year-old Claire organizes a workers' dinner and earns her first public acknowledgment from her father.Read more about Aimie K. Runyan on her website: https://www.aimiekrunyan.com/ Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail This week on The Art In Fiction Podcast, I'm doing something a little different: a solo episode about my new novel, The Choir, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction.  View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SHb4USfSeE0 The family mystery at the heart of the novel: a great-great-grandmother who left her husband with six children in Victorian England and went on to have seven more children with another man, all documented on Ancestry.com.How a chance discovery about Victorian choral competitions and their cash prizes gave Eliza, the novel's protagonist, her escape route and the plot its engine.The role of Carol's mother, a lifelong learner who helped with research before she passed, and her grandmother Granny, who died at 98 and whose reluctance to "get above herself" shaped the novel's themes of class.Research trips to Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, where Carol heard the deafening looms firsthand, and to the Birmingham Back-to-Backs, the National Trust's preserved court of working-class Victorian housing.How choir membership was transformative for working-class women in the 1890s; in a world where women had no political voice and no authority at home, a choir gave them a voice that was literally heard.Ruth Henton, Eliza's childhood friend who escaped to the London stage and ends up performing Yum-Yum in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, and how her glamorous but precarious world eventually collides with Eliza's.The real historical figure Mary Wakefield, who launched the competitive music festival movement in England and makes a cameo in the novel.Why The Choir is Carol's most personal novel: her great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother both have roles, and the novel is her way of giving back the stories of working-class women whose lives rarely make it into the historical record.Reading from The Choir:Read more about Carol M. Cram and The Choir at www.carolcram.com Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Maryka Biaggio, author of Marjory and Me, listed in the Spiritualism category on Art In Fiction.  View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xK3aC6WBKr8 How Maryka discovered the true story of Margery Crandon, Boston socialite, celebrated medium, and the woman who took on Harry Houdini.The bold structural choice to narrate Margery's story through Walter, Margery's dead brother.How Walter's folksy voice arrived as a moment of pure creative magic, and why Maryka describes writing as 90% struggle and 10% magic.The 1920s spiritualism craze: how the Great War and 1919 flu epidemic left grieving families desperate to contact the dead.Maryka's deliberate choice to keep the central question (is Walter real or a ruse?) permanently ambiguous.The challenges of writing real figures including Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and WB Yeats while staying true to their documented beliefs.Houdini's obsessive crusade against spiritualism, including Congressional hearings so raucous the police had to be called in.How Maryka's background as a clinical psychologist informs her deeply individual character development.Maryka's research toolkit: authoritative nonfiction, Aeon timeline software, Newspapers.com, and period novels.Reading from the opening of Margery and Me.One thing Maryka learned from writing Margery and Me.Her writing process and advice about researching.Maryka's next novel, co-written with Vanitha Sankaram, and inspired by Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and subversive medieval poetry.Read more about Maryka Biaggio: https://marykabiaggio.com/ Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Herb Williams-Dalgart, author of Jingle Boys listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction. View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/azuaBStafaI Herb's personal origin story behind the novel: named after his grandfather who died in WWII, a man he never knew, which sparked a lifelong fascination with the era.How the role of music in wartime, harmony versus the disharmony of war, became the central thematic engine of the novel.The surprising historical truth behind the jingle-as-secret-code premise, including Herb's research into declassified military records at the New York Public Library.Writing all the jingles and song lyrics himself and what he learned about the craft of songwriting in the process.His protagonist Walter Lipkin's anxiety neurosis (stress-triggered fainting) and why a hero whose greatest enemy is his own brain felt both authentic and timely, written as it was during COVID.The recurring theme across Herb's work: finding courage in unlikely places, and why that feels both personal and hopeful.His screenwriting background (UCLA certificate) and what it gives him as a novelist: cinematic pacing, three-act structure, and crisp, character-revealing dialogue.The fascinating true story of the Steinway Victory Vertical, the olive-drab piano the US government authorized for every theater of war, and how it found its way dramatically into the novel.Reading from Jingle Boys.Herb's take on plotting versus pantsing, and why he calls himself a "paraglider."His next project: Everything the Sea Brings, Book 1 of a trilogy set in Northern Ireland, told from the dual perspectives of a lighthouse keeper's wife and a German sailor who washes ashore with secrets.Read more about Herb Williams-Dalgart on his website: https://www.herbthewriter.com Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Chanel Cleeton, author of The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction. View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FN2q5JDLLEk Chanel's inspiration for the novel as her love letter to books and a celebration of the power of reading.Her passion for exploring more about Cuban American history and her own heritage as the child of Cuban immigrants.Use of three time periods in the novel and the role played by the Spanish-American war in 1900, particularly the cultural exchanges between the US and Cuba that took place.How the novel feels topical given the current political situation.Challenges of writing a triple time novel with three main characters.Use of suspense in the novel.Which of the three characters (Ava in 1900, Pilar in 1966 and Margo in 2024) Chanel identifies with most.Chanel's favorite book (or books)!Reading from The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes.One thing that Chanel learned from writing this novel that she didn't realize before.What Chanel is working on now.Read more about Chanel Cleeton on her website: https://www.chanelcleeton.com/ Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists.  Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction. Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other. Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...