Art In Fiction

Carol M. Cram
  • 4.6 (8)
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Find out what makes great, arts-inspired fiction in a variety of genres, from mysteries to crime novels, historical fiction, thrillers, contemporary fiction, and more. Art In Fiction founder and author Carol M. Cram chats with some of the top novelists featured on Art In Fiction, a curated online database of books inspired by the arts. Discover your next great read and get valuable advice on what it takes to be a successful writer.

  1. Everything for Music in The Maestro and Her Protégé by Kate Whouley

    5d ago

    Everything for Music in The Maestro and Her Protégé by Kate Whouley

    Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Kate Whouley, author of The Maestro and Her Protégé, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fr_fJ9t9G_o Nadia Boulanger, the most influential music teacher of the 20th century: who she was, why she matters, and how Kate first encountered her by way of her terrifying theory professor when she was a music student.Inventing Hannah Schaefer, a fictional conductor who studies with the very real Boulanger, Leonard Bernstein, and Philip Glass.The demanding mentorship paradox: why Boulanger's near-dictatorial teaching style was exactly what Hannah needed, and when that kind of discipline helps versus harms.Women on the podium: why female conductors are rare even today, and what it feels like to be at the top of your game and still have to fight battles a man in the same position wouldn't.Structuring a novel like a musical composition: Overture, Reverie, Rhapsody, and Coda, and why Kate ultimately let go of strict sonata form.What women give up: Hannah's choice to be married to music, Boulanger's infamous black-edged sympathy cards sent to promising students who married, and the question Hannah faces at 58: could there be more?Grief as artistic processing: the cluster of losses Hannah suffers, how she writes pieces for the dead rather than mourning them, and why that catches up with her.Paris as a character: ten years of research trips, sobbing at Boulanger's grave in Montparnasse, and the moment Kate threw out her draft and understood the real story.From memoir to fiction and back: how writing Cottage for Sale and Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, her memoir about her mother's early-onset Alzheimer's, shaped her approach to the novel.Reading from The Maestro and Her Protégé.What Kate learned: that it's okay to follow the characters, that every word must have a reason to exist (Boulanger again), and that some books like to be written late at night.Read more about Kate Whouley on her website: https://katewhouley.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...

    45 min
  2. A New Take on WWII in Fables & Lies by Elisabeth Storrs

    Jun 7

    A New Take on WWII in Fables & Lies by Elisabeth Storrs

    Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Elisabeth Storrs, author of Fables and Lies, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lCJfOypSQr4 The genesis of Fables and Lies: how a 30-year obsession with Priam's Gold and its mysterious disappearance after the Russians took it from Berlin led Elisabeth to create Freya, a young German woman working at the Museum of Pre- and Early History in Berlin as the war closes in.Himmler's SS Ahnenerbe, the pseudo-academic research institute that weaponized archaeology to justify Nazi ideology, and how the curator of Freya's museum being a member of it transformed what began as a novel about two women into something far more complex and sinister.The real inspiration behind Indiana Jones: Himmler's belief in the occult, Atlantis, and the Holy Grail, and the expeditions he sent to Tibet and Bolivia that Spielberg later drew on.Writing from inside the Nazi regime: Elisabeth's personal hesitation about telling the story from a German point of view given her father's experience as an Australian soldier in World War II, and why she decided the story needed to be told anyway.The Brenner family as microcosm: how Freya, her morally anchored father Konrad, her MAGA-adjacent mother Elsa, and her fully indoctrinated sister Volla each represent a different response to life under the Reich.Why Freya had to start as a true believer: the challenge of creating a protagonist who is indoctrinated, the small cracks in her worldview from the opening pages, and how Darien, the Cambridge-educated outsider archaeologist, opens her eyes.Berlin as a character in the novel: Elisabeth's research trip to the city, the walking tour with a Humboldt University history student, and the discovery that the Museum of Pre- and Early History sat next door to Gestapo headquarters on what is now the Topography of Terror site.The parallels to today: how Elisabeth finished the novel before the current global rise of fascism made it feel even more relevant, and what the preconditions for Hitler's rise in Weimar Germany have in common with what we are seeing now.The carpet bombing of Berlin, the Soviet artillery siege, and the absurdity of dropping leaflets telling civilians to overthrow the regime while destroying their city around them.A reading from the opening pages of Fables and Lies: Freya cycling home through Berlin on 24 August 1939, and her first encounter with Dieter, the jazz-loving teenager whose punishment plants the first seed of doubt.What Elisabeth is working on next: a four-timeline novel tracing Priam's Gold from a Bronze Age goldsmith in Troy through Schliemann's 1873 discovery, the Russian Trophy Brigade, and Freya's granddaughter piecing it all together in the 1990s.Read more about Elisabeth Storrs on her website: https://elisabethstorrs.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...

    38 min
  3. The Cold War Meets the Arts in The Lunar Housewife by Caroline Woods

    May 26

    The Cold War Meets the Arts in The Lunar Housewife by Caroline Woods

    Send us Fan Mail 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, 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...

    34 min
  4. The Woman Behind the Tower in Mademoiselle Eiffel by Aimie K. Runyan

    May 20

    The Woman Behind the Tower in Mademoiselle Eiffel by Aimie K. Runyan

    Send us Fan Mail 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, 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...

    39 min
  5. Women Who Raise Their Voices in Song in The Choir by Carol M. Cram

    May 14

    Women Who Raise Their Voices in Song in The Choir by Carol M. Cram

    Send us Fan Mail 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, 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...

    15 min
  6. A Medium for the History Books in Margery and Me by Maryka Biaggio

    May 5

    A Medium for the History Books in Margery and Me by Maryka Biaggio

    Send us Fan Mail 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, 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...

    30 min
  7. How Music Won the War in Jingle Boys by Herb Williams-Dalgart

    Apr 24

    How Music Won the War in Jingle Boys by Herb Williams-Dalgart

    Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Herb Williams-Dalgart, author of Jingle Boys listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction. View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/azuaBStafaI Herb's personal origin story behind the novel: named after his grandfather who died in WWII, a man he never knew, which sparked a lifelong fascination with the era.How the role of music in wartime, harmony versus the disharmony of war, became the central thematic engine of the novel.The surprising historical truth behind the jingle-as-secret-code premise, including Herb's research into declassified military records at the New York Public Library.Writing all the jingles and song lyrics himself and what he learned about the craft of songwriting in the process.His protagonist Walter Lipkin's anxiety neurosis (stress-triggered fainting) and why a hero whose greatest enemy is his own brain felt both authentic and timely, written as it was during COVID.The recurring theme across Herb's work: finding courage in unlikely places, and why that feels both personal and hopeful.His screenwriting background (UCLA certificate) and what it gives him as a novelist: cinematic pacing, three-act structure, and crisp, character-revealing dialogue.The fascinating true story of the Steinway Victory Vertical, the olive-drab piano the US government authorized for every theater of war, and how it found its way dramatically into the novel.Reading from Jingle Boys.Herb's take on plotting versus pantsing, and why he calls himself a "paraglider."His next project: Everything the Sea Brings, Book 1 of a trilogy set in Northern Ireland, told from the dual perspectives of a lighthouse keeper's wife and a German sailor who washes ashore with secrets.Read more about Herb Williams-Dalgart on his website: https://www.herbthewriter.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...

    35 min
  8. The Power of Books in The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes by Chanel Cleeton

    Mar 3

    The Power of Books in The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes by Chanel Cleeton

    Send us Fan Mail My guest today is Chanel Cleeton, author of The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes listed in the Literature category on Art In Fiction. View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FN2q5JDLLEk Chanel's inspiration for the novel as her love letter to books and a celebration of the power of reading.Her passion for exploring more about Cuban American history and her own heritage as the child of Cuban immigrants.Use of three time periods in the novel and the role played by the Spanish-American war in 1900, particularly the cultural exchanges between the US and Cuba that took place.How the novel feels topical given the current political situation.Challenges of writing a triple time novel with three main characters.Use of suspense in the novel.Which of the three characters (Ava in 1900, Pilar in 1966 and Margo in 2024) Chanel identifies with most.Chanel's favorite book (or books)!Reading from The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes.One thing that Chanel learned from writing this novel that she didn't realize before.What Chanel is working on now.Read more about Chanel Cleeton on her website: https://www.chanelcleeton.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...

    31 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4.6
out of 5
8 Ratings

About

Find out what makes great, arts-inspired fiction in a variety of genres, from mysteries to crime novels, historical fiction, thrillers, contemporary fiction, and more. Art In Fiction founder and author Carol M. Cram chats with some of the top novelists featured on Art In Fiction, a curated online database of books inspired by the arts. Discover your next great read and get valuable advice on what it takes to be a successful writer.

Information

  • Creator
    Carol M. Cram
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    73
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Art In Fiction
  • Show Website
    Art In Fiction