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My guest today is Caroline Woods, author of The Lunar Housewife, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0nJmxXJcrQQ

• How Caroline discovered the CIA's secret program to fund and shape American literary culture during the Cold War, including its involvement in the founding of the Paris Review, and why she saw a novel in it.
• The real-life women who inspired Louise: the aspiring writers and girlfriends surrounding the men at the center of the 1950s New York literary scene, and the female journalist who eventually broke the story decades later.
• The novel within a novel structure: why Louise's book had to be science fiction, how its chapters shift as Louise's disillusionment deepens, and the freedom of writing a melodramatic '50s romance as an "implied author" who isn't Caroline.
• The Hemingway interview at the heart of the book, based on Lillian Ross's real New Yorker profile, and how Hemingway, who is portrayed here as a kind of fairy godmother to Louise, inadvertently became Caroline's writing coach for the whole novel.
• Class tension in the 1950s literary world: why Louise's working-class origins matter in a scene dominated by Harvard and Yale men, and what that gave her as a character and as someone for readers to root for.
• How the title came about -- originally The Long Leash, the CIA's own term for the program -- and why her agent's suggestion of The Lunar Housewife did so much more work for the book.
• Writing The Lunar Housewife in spring 2020, during COVID lockdown, with a four-year-old and a one-year-old, writing after bedtime every night, and why that particular moment gave the lunar colony chapters their flavor.
• Why the 1950s is having a moment in historical fiction: the scrim of conformity and domestic bliss concealing postwar darkness, the seeds of the counterculture, and women who had tasted wartime freedom and had it yanked back.
• The common thread across Caroline's novels -- The Mesmerist, For All the Moons, and The Lunar Housewife -- women who question the status quo and push against systems, often in the face of government interference in private life.
• Caroline's advice to writers: write every single day (not just on Saturdays), and write what genuinely entertains you because if you're having fun, the reader will feel it.
• Reading from the opening pages of The Lunar Housewife: the launch party for Downtown magazine's second issue.

Read more about Caroline Woods on her website: https://www.carolinewoodsauthor.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 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.