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...