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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

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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...