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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/

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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. Find out more on her website.