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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 In his mid-twenties, he's drunk, unpublished, and desperate to win Pippa, and sent to Spain under cover of the wine trade while the Castilian Civil War rages.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

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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 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...