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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, 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. Find out more on her website.

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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, 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. Find out more on her website.

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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, 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. Find out more on her website.