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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...

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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...

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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...