Dance, Fashion, and Long-lost Twins in What Disappears by Barbara Quick

Join me as I chat with Barbara Quick, author of Vivaldi's Virgins and What Disappears, both listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nYq1nLL4xv4

• Inspiration for What Disappears going back several decades to when Barbara was just 22 years old.
• Revisiting old work after it's "ripened."
• The role of idential twins in What Disappears.
• Writing a great villain in fashion designer Paul Poiret. 
• Researching the fashion components in What Disappears.
• What it was like to be a dancer in Belle Epoque Paris.
• Barbara's love of dance.
• Debut of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring  in Paris and the Riot at the Rite.
• The role played by anti-semitism in both Tsarist Russia and Paris in the novel.
• The theme of healing in What Disappears.
• Reading from What Disappears.
• Writing poetry and prose: two sides of the same coin?
• One thing Barbara Quick learned from writing novels that she didn't know before.
• What Barbara is working on now.

Press Play now & be sure to check out Vivaldi's Virgins and What Disappears on Art In Fiction: https://www.artinfiction.com/novels?q=barbara+quick

Barbara Quick's website: https://www.barbaraquick.com/ 

Music Credit
Paganology, performed by The Paul Plimley Trio; composed by Gregg Simpson

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Transcript

Hello and welcome. I’m Carol Cram, host of the Art In Fiction podcast. This episode features Barbara Quick, author of two novels on Art In Fiction, Vivaldi’s Virgins in the Music category and What Disappears in the Dance category.

Barbara Quick graduated in English and French from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first novel, Northern Edge, won the Discover: Great New Writers award. Her second novel, Vivaldi’s Virgins, has been published in 12 languages. All four of her novels are popular book-club choices, An award-winning poet, she moved last year with her violist husband from a small farm and vineyard in Sonoma County to a high green hill in Sherman, Connecticut. 

Carol Cram

Welcome to the Art and Fiction Podcast, Barbara. 

Barbara Quick

Thank you, Carol. 

Carol Cram

I last spoke with you way back in November of 2020 when you came on the podcast to talk about Vivaldi's Virgins with fellow novelists Stephanie Cowell and Patricia Morrisroe.

I'm so excited to chat with you today about your novel What Disappears, which is described as a multi-generational story of love and loss set in Tsarist Russia, Belle Époque Paris, and the world of Ballets Russes. There's a lot of scope in this novel. So, tell us about your inspiration for What Disappears.

Barbara Quick

Well, actually, the story goes back very far to when I was a girl of 22 living for almost a year in West County, Cork, Ireland. And I was trying to write a novel based on stories my grandmother told me about growing up in Russia. And the beginning of the novel was what I originally called The Russian Winter.

And I wrote about 100 pages and I sent it to The New Yorker and I actually got a really nice letter back and they said, Oh, this is nice. Let's see the rest of it. And of course there wasn't any more. Over the course of many, many years, because that was a very long time ago, I found a hook for the story and that was based on an archive of beautiful art books about Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris that somebody shared with me and so I thought what if this story of that was based on my own family.

And I conceived the story of a family, a Jewish family,  that emigrates to Paris and one of the girls being a dancer and becoming a minor dancer with the Ballet Russes and the story got more complex and I lost contact with my own beloved sister and suddenly it became a story about one sister's longing for another and this one girl became part of a set of identical twins.

So that was the beginning of the novel. It took me 40 years actually to write it. I wrote several other novels in between, but in May, 2022, it was published by Regal House and I'm really thrilled to have this novel out in the world now.

Carol Cram

Isn't it wonderful that you came back to it? You know, that's inspiring, I think, for other authors too. Go back and look in your archives, see those stories that you wrote when you were younger and bring them out and see what you can do with them.

Barbara Quick

I firmly believe, Carol, that these stories know what they are more than we know what they are and if we don't find them at first, they come back and they look for us again and they grab us and you know, they wait until we write where they ripen inside them and we write them.

Carol Cram

Exactly, that's a wonderful image. They do, they ripen inside of us and then finally they're ready to be told. I love that a lot, that's wonderful. 

So, as you said, at the core of the novel is the story of the twins separated when they were very young. Twins are a fascinating subject. You're not a twin yourself though, are you?

Barbara Quick

I'm a Gemini.

Carol Cram

Oh, you’re a Gemini. Like my mom! 

Barbara Quick

I like to call myself a united Gemini, you know, I mean, it sort of came together. But I am fascinated by the idea of, of sisters. And twin sisters are especially interesting. I think it's interesting for a lot of people, the idea of identical twins. Where does one person start and the other begin? I don't know. So, I really was glad to explore that, and I read a lot about identical twins and there are a lot of wonderful twin studies as you know. I did a huge amount of research for this novel. 

Carol Cram

Because there really is that whole nature/nurture theme in the novel, isn't there? Because they are separated. One stays in Russia, one goes to France, and of course doesn't know. 

Barbara Quick

Right, and the one is brought up in a very close Russian Jewish family, and the other is brought up by French Catholics who are in fact anti-Semitic. So it comes as quite a shock to her when she meets her sister for the first time after they were separated at the age of nine months in a Russian orphanage.

They meet in the doorway of Anna Pavlova's dressing room in Paris. So, for one, it's a great moment of fulfillment because she's been hoping all her life to find her twin. And for the other, it's a horrible shock.

Carol Cram

I know, it's so wonderful because when you're reading the novel, especially the very beginning, you think, oh, they're going to be so excited when they get back together.

Yeah, it doesn't quite work out that way. Which is why I found that really fascinating because you kept getting my expectations up and then, nope, things go a different way than you expect it to go. So that must have been a lot of fun to plot that. 

Barbara Quick

Well, it sort of grew organically and thematically. It's sort of about being careful what you wish for because you're not going to get what you thought you were going to get. So, it's about adjusting our expectations and embracing life and what it gives us. 

Carol Cram

Exactly. The twins in the novel could be seen as different aspects of a single person, of both good and bad. Was that your intention? 

Barbara Quick

Well, yeah, I mean, in some ways, I mean, the one sister, Sonya is a really good mother. She's very loving. She's a good person. She cares about being a good person. And she's the seamstress who's working making costumes for Anna Pavlova. And her sister, Jeanette, who was born Zaneta in Russia, is kind of a bitch. She was much fun to write about. She's ambitious. She's ambitious as a dancer. She's jealous of other people's success. She's jealous of so much about Sonya. And in fact, they wind up, they were sharing the same lover. They didn't know it and the lover was very heartless in not telling them.

For him it was just a great lark. And he is the historical fashion designer, the historical king of fashion, Paul Poiret in Paris. I just adored writing that character. I enjoy writing about these narcissistic, entitled male characters, because they're such fun to write about. And this particular person, Paul Poiret, left a very detailed memoir, which is filled with his own conversation. So he quotes himself extensively. I was actually able to write his dialogue so that I think if he read it, he would say, Oh yes, that's exactly what I would have said because he did say it in many cases.

Carol Cram

He is a wonderful character. Because he is kind of the villain in a way, and yet he is quite kind too. And he does good things as well. He keeps them apart, but then he also helps some of the daughters and so it was very well-rounded person. I actually didn't realize he was real. So he did exist.

Barbara Quick

He absolutely existed. And you would recognize a lot of the fashions that he designed. I mean, he was the biggest designer of his time and there were spreads in Vogue magazine about his stuff. He was very, very popular and became very, very wealthy and died quite young quite poor because he was a tremendous spender and very extravagant. He wasn't practical at all.

He lived for art. 

Carol Cram

Well, because I was thinking as I was reading the novel that I could well have put it in the Textile Arts category on Art In Fiction. I put it in the Dance category and we'll come back to dance, but there is a lot about the fashion industry in there and about fashion design. So, what kind of research did you do for that?

Barbara Quick

Extensive. I absolutely immersed myself and it was such fun. I love doing research. I only have an undergraduate degree in English and French. I'm not a PhD in anything, but I think I could maybe petition for a PhD in a bunch of things because I've done such a deep dive with all of my novels. I love doing the research. It's a real treasure hunt. I travel to the actual places. I've learned the languages so I can read the original sources. And it's just so rewarding. I really love it. And then being able to take all this research and then imagine life as it really was for these people.

Carol Cram

I think as historical novelists, we kind of have to like researching, don't we? 

Barbara Quick

Well, and very, very honest and to not to fudge at all.  I object when people put out letters supposedly that are written by historical figures who did leave behind many letters and they're not quoting real letters. They're just making letters up and they're kind of impossible. It just upsets me. I like people to do their work, do their homework because readers are depending often on historical novels as a way to learn their history. So spreading false history is really, it's a disservice to everyone.

Carol Cram

It is, because you're right, a lot of people read historical fiction because they like the history, not just the characters. And yeah, we do have a responsibility to get those right, for sure. 

So, as I mentioned, I've listed, What Disappears in the Dance category because of its depiction of ballet during the Belle Époque, which is such a fascinating time. I'm actually thinking of setting a novel in that period as well. So, what was it like to be a dancer back then?

Barbara Quick

What was it like to be a dancer? It was hard. You were considered part of the demimonde. You weren't a respectable person. No mother would want her son to marry a dancer. Respectable men had dancers as mistresses, rarely as wives. And you know, if your patron married you, you had to stop dancing.

You were poor. You probably were subject to unwanted pregnancies, botched abortions, all sorts of injuries and it was hard. It was a hard life. So, you had to really want to do what you did. It had to be a passion and Carol, I think it's much like being a poet or being a novelist is today.

It's not an easy thing. It's hard. You have to want it. 

Carol Cram

Well, it is. But it is worthwhile, for sure. At least being a writer isn't physically hard on you, like being a dancer. 

Barbara Quick

Yeah, no, that's true. It isn't. 

Carol Cram

So you were a professional dancer back in the day. 

Barbara Quick

Not professional. Not at all. As a matter of fact, I always loved dance and I came to dance performance quite late in a kind of ridiculous way. I was running a boarding house in the Bay Area, and I had some wonderful Brazilian guests, and I was taking some Brazilian dance classes, and one of my boarders encouraged me to dance in the San Francisco Carnival Parade, and I wound up doing that six years in a row. And so I have a closet full of feathered headdresses and costumes.

But I love dance. I love the community of it. Writing as you know, it's kind of a lonely gig. So when you have fellow dancers, and I was always just a member of the chorus, I was never a principal dancer. I didn't have that training, but I do love it. I love dance. And I could because I have had some dance, I was able to write with truth about the dance world.

I was so pleased. One of my greatest supporters for this novel from the dance world is a professional ballerina named Gavin Larson, who wrote a wonderful book memoir called Being a Ballerina. And she and I have done several gigs together about her book and where she's interviewed me about my book and, you know, to get her buy in saying, Oh yes, you got it. This is the way this is how it feels. 

I felt so happy about that. So I'm very grateful. 

Carol Cram

Well it did feel very authentic. Your scenes with Jeanette and what it felt like to be a dancer and her feet. I found that fascinating. I mean, I haven't done ballet since I was about 10, so I don't have a background, but I always loved it. I totally loved it. And I love watching it. 

One of my favorite scenes, now it's late in the book, so hopefully it's not a bit of a spoiler, but it's that depiction of the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Barbara Quick

Well, it was the debut in Paris and he was practically lynched, you know, for that, and I gave a very detailed depiction of the ballet, of the debut, because it was a fascinating moment in musical history and in ballet history.

This was a ballet unlike any other that had been shown before. It didn't follow any of the conventions. The ballerinas weren't pretty and feminine-looking. They were scary looking. And it was about very primitive rights and human sacrifice, really. So the audience went nuts. They were booing and hissing and people actually broke into fights. People were challenging other people to duels. Women were hitting people over the head with their umbrellas. And one of my characters, Sonya, the twin who grew up in Russia, has this traumatic memory, this flashback of the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev. And so, you know, that brings her back.

And in fact, someone in the audience is yelling dirty Jew and all sorts things are happening. It was just crazy. It's known as the Riot at the Rite. It was an absolute riot. But It's a funny thing. This isn't part of the book, but just as a part of musical history, the following year, when it was brought back to Paris, Stravinsky was carried on people's shoulders as a hero.

And there's a wonderful Radio Lab podcast about this, how people were so, when our brains are unused to certain things, they can't process it and they kind of go crazy. But once they've heard it, it becomes something that our brains can love and understand. So, that's what happened with Stravinsky's music.

Carol Cram

And you know what I love about that scene as well, is how you combined an actual historical event, the riot, with this important moment in Sonya’s life. That was extremely clever. And, you know, I think as a novelist, that's what's really fun to do, isn't it? Taking something real and then putting on something, fictional.

Barbara Quick

To take your characters and put them in that historical situation and see how they'll act, how they'll react to it.

I mean, I did grow up with stories, very abbreviated stories, from my rather taciturn Nana about the pogrom and how the local priest sheltered her family actually in the attic of the church. And I put that in the novel and they were sheltered because her mother had won the commission to make the uniforms for the parochial school girls. So the hats and coats. 

They were privileged to be protected. And yet they had this survivor's guilt about it. I think it was extremely traumatic. And many, many Jewish people lost their lives, their livelihoods, their homes. It was a really horrible event, and of course, just one of many. 

Carol Cram

Yes, because anti-Semitism plays a role both in Czarist Russia and in Paris in the novel, doesn't it?

Barbara Quick

Yes, the Dreyfus Affair in Belle Époque Paris was a tremendous thing where people were on one side or the other. And it was very interesting. And poor Jeannette, when she realizes I'm Jewish, and she was raised to believe these terrible things about Jews.

So it's a reckoning for her. But later in the novel, she and Sonya have this conversation where Sonya asks her to hold her hand in the dark and tries to explain what it means, what Jewishness means to her because she had a completely secular upbringing. It's not a religious thing. It's something. And they talk about the notion of Tikkun Olam, which is a notion about healing the world. And that's sort of thematic for me. It's what I would like to do both to heal myself and to heal the ones I love and to bring as much healing as I can while I'm in this body on this earth.

So this is a novel about healing, healing a rift, and in some funny ways, all my books are about trying to heal a rift. 

Carol Cram

It's interesting how we often do have one theme that kind of goes through all our novels. That is a wonderful theme because that is one of the things we should be doing on this earth, is helping to heal.

Would you like to do a reading from What Disappears? 

Barbara Quick

I would. This is a scene which focuses on Jeanette, the sister, the twin who was brought up outside of Paris and has become a minor dancer in the Ballet Russes who feels like she's in danger of aging out.

This is right before a performance.

While she's putting on her makeup, it seems as if she's seeing two faces, one superimposed upon the other: her own, and that of the Russian seamstress. “It's mine,” she says inside herself, wishing she could make that thief of faces simply disappear. An image of the pretty little girl in Pavlova's dressing room flashes in her mind again. She wonders how it would feel to be loved by such a child. To be the center of the world for such a child. 

After rouging her lips, she sucks on her index finger to imprint the excess color there instead of on her teeth—then wipes her finger off with a rag. 

Jeanette takes a long, hard look at herself in the mirror. She is the center of the world. 

She puts on her toe shoes, pointing and flexing each foot to make sure the ribbons are tight enough, but not too tight, securing the knot on the outside of each ankle with a gob of spit. She knows she needs to focus and needs to stretch before she goes downstairs again.

All the other chorus dancers are already warming up, using the garment racks as a makeshift bar. Several of them shriek when Vaslav Nijinsky leaps past their open doorway, his thigh muscles bulging in his white tights, the long curling hair of his wig and the chaste poet's blouse making him look like something in between a man and a woman. With his high cheekbones and Tatar eyes, he is the most exotic looking male Jeannette has ever seen. 

She would like to dance with him, to be lifted into the air by him, as Pavlova is in their glorious pas de deux, that seems like a dance between a man and a butterfly. Jeanette has never learned choreography like Fokine's, unmoored from the familiar tropes of ballet. The choreography for Les Sylphide is doubly hard, because the chorus dancers never stop moving and every movement is interconnected. They're supposed to move like water. Like trees in the wind. 

It's terrifying. So much that Jeannette could do with ease before is hard now. At 29, she already feels old. She knows that her jumps aren't as high. Her heart sometimes pounds so audibly that she dreads the places in the score when the orchestra plays pianissimo. Every night at home, after rehearsing for hours and hours, she plunges her feet, bruised and aching, into a bucket full of ice. 

She spends far too much of her pay on ice. Just the night before, she was woken out of a dead sleep by a pain in her left knee so intense that it kept her awake, worrying. Is it over? Am I through? 

She is nearly used up now as a dancer, alone in the world, without a pension, without a husband. She could have had a husband if she hadn't continued with such naivete to believe that Paul Poiret would eventually marry her. That it was Jeannette, and Jeannette alone, he really loved. 

She finishes her hasty warm up with a reverence, catching a last glimpse of herself in the mirror, realizing with horror that she forgot to put on her wreath of pink silk roses. Pinning it as she scurries down the metal staircase, taking the last steps, two at a time, she tries to seem invisible as she bolts past the regisseur, who is standing with his clipboard in the wings. He narrows his eyes at her and growls, “Ten francs, Dupres!”

And her rent is due!

The Prelude is at the second-to-last bar. All the other dancers are poised and ready in the twilight on stage when Jeannette runs on, lowering herself down as noiselessly as possible among the other members of the corps and the demi soloist, all of them reclining at Nijinsky's feet with Anna Pavlova posed adoringly on one side of and Tamara Karsavina on the other.

Someone whispers something nasty-sounding in Russian. Jeannette tries to slow her breathing in the four seconds left to her before the Nocturne starts and the curtain rises.

Carol Cram

Thank you so much, Barbara. You read that so well. That's a wonderful scene. That really does get to so many themes at the heart of the novel and also, you know, her fear of growing old, we can really relate to it. Also makes me glad I'm a novelist and not a dancer because we can go forever.

Barbara Quick

I know, isn't that something? I know, it's really, really true. 

Carol Cram

Yes. Oh, thank you. And actually I wanted to, because your writing is so fluid and so poetic, it leads well into my next question, which, in addition to being a novelist, you're also a poet. So how does your poetry writing help you when you're writing fiction?

Barbara Quick

My poetry writing keeps me alive as a human being. I have a Substack called A Lifeboat Made of Words and it really is my lifeboat. From the age of nine, I've been writing poetry and it has been my lifeboat made of words. It's what helps me. I mean, I don't know if my childhood was that much more traumatic than other people's childhoods. I mean, it was not fun. I was really glad to grow up and get out, but words have helped me and saved me my whole life long and they still do. 

So the poetry has been the way that I've understood life. I've always felt actually when I started writing fiction about at age 18, I realized that my fiction was about 10 years behind my poetry in emotional intelligence, which was very funny to me.

I'm still trying to catch up in a lot of ways. I feel like my poetry is the wisest thing that I write. And a lot of people really seem to like my poetry, to identify with it. I like it. It's an immediate grab. And the fiction is getting more and more so that way, which I love. But at the beginning, it was hard.

And I really didn’t believe in going to school to learn to write. I still don't believe in it, or it wasn't the right thing for me. I'm quite a monkey in some ways. I feel like I'm a good copier of other people of languages and ways of speaking of ways of writing. So I wanted to avoid writing classes because what I noticed in the one writing class, I took, briefly, was that the best, most successful students started writing the most like the teacher. I didn't want to, I wanted to find my own voice. 

So, for new writers, I really feel like learning to hear that voice inside of you, getting quiet enough to hear that voice is really, really important. Keep a notebook by your bed and wake up and write with that freshness of whatever is in your heart, whatever has come to you in your dreams.

That's where the essence of your writer self resides, not in a writing workshop. You know, I mean, I suppose it could be fun for people, but listening hard and being brave enough to hear the voices, it's a little like being schizophrenic, but not being crazy because I hear voices when I've written my novels.

I've always felt like I'm almost remembering them. I'm remembering the characters and I hear their voices and they're telling their stories and I'm just writing them down. 

Carol Cram

Yes. And I think that whole poetic imagination and just that poetic sensibility, as you say, really does ground you, I think, as an author.

I am not a poet and sometimes I think I really should give myself that freedom to just write poetry and rather than always trying to think in terms of story. They're kind of two sides of the same coin, aren't they? 

Barbara Quick

Well, and a lot of my poetry, all of my poetry is, it's very accessible and a lot of my poems do tell stories in one way or another. So it's a very distilled way of telling a story, but yeah, two sides of the same coin is a good way to put it. And it actually amazes me how I know a lot of wonderful poets and it amazes me why more of them don't also write fiction. 

The fiction I love the most is where every word counts, every word adds to it. It's flavorful and beautiful and, you know, not flowery, but it has to be. It's the inevitable word. I want every word to be the right word. Just as in a poem, you can't afford to have extra words. You can't afford to have words that don't belong there. So I want the most distilled version that I can get that will also be the most evocative and transporting.

Carol Cram

And you do it very well in this novel and your other one that I've read. 

One of my goals with The Art in Fiction Podcast is to inspire other authors. What's one thing you've learned from writing your novels that you didn't know before? 

Barbara Quick

Well, what has surprised me in writing my novels is I've learned about myself through the fictional characters.

Until I wrote, Vivaldi's Virgins, I didn't understand that the orphan scenario was very much a part of who I am. I'm not actually an orphan, but emotionally I felt like an orphan while I was growing up. And I didn't discover this until I wrote a novel about an orphan. Anna Maria Dal Violin, you know, this 18th century violinist who studied with Vivaldi, searching for her mother, longing for her mother.

And then, lo and behold, in the orphan scenario comes up again, actually in novel number three, A Golden Web and in What Disappears. So it was something I needed to understand. And I found historical stories as a sort of back door into this. Maybe it was just too painful to look at it in my own life.

And so I was able to look at it through my fiction. My characters have taught me. 

Carol Cram

Isn't that remarkable how they can do that? That's the sort of the compelling thing that brings us back to this over and over again to the screen every day is what are they going to do next?

Barbara Quick

Right. That's really true. And it has to be that whatever they do is actually inevitable. And it often surprises me. I mean, often they do things that, whoa, I didn't expect that at all. So when I started The Russian Winter, which became What Disappears, 40 years later, I never expected it to be about Sundered Twins. I didn't know. I didn't know it would be about a dancer and a seamstress. But of course, both those things were part of my life too. I sewed a lot of clothing and made costumes, Halloween costumes, for my son. And I danced a lot. 

Carol Cram

And one more question about writing. Tell us about your process. Do you start with research or do you do it as you write or you add it in later? What's your approach? 

Barbara Quick

Well, actually, all three. In my very first novel, I just had a life experience of spending two field seasons, two summers, in Arctic Alaska, kept journals. I was writing poetry, kind of bad poetry, but then, I wanted to spend more imaginative time in that amazing landscape. So I thought, I'll write a novel. Well, so it took me 10 years, 13 drafts to write that novel, but you know, I love that novel, Northern Edge. With Vivaldi's Virgins, I heard this random factoid that there was one of the Italian composers whose name started with a V. I didn't even remember at the time, who it was, was also a priest who taught at a cloistered institution in Venice. Wow, that's amazing. And he was the only man who ever saw the faces of the girls and women. And I thought, well, surely somebody has written a novel set there. No one had. I mean, at this point, I think five other people have since my novel was published.

But then I did a very deep dive. I learned Italian so I could spend time in Venice and immerse myself in the archives and sneak into all sorts of wonderful places where all sorts of wonderful stuff was stored that I could explore and hold in my hands these actual manuscripts signed by Vivaldi and where Anna Maria could, where changes were made in the music and there was no white out so she took music paper and penned the new notes on and she actually sewed the new musical notes.

And I held this in my hand. I mean, I felt so close to her. I was doing research all along because new things would come to light. And a novel until it's published, it's not really done. But it was a wonderful deep dive and writing about a 14th century anatomist who had to cross dress in order to do her work so she wouldn't be burned as a witch with A Golden Web. That was. a wonderful thing. I did a huge amount of research with that. In fact, Scientific American featured it in a podcast because, you know, it was interesting scientific history, history of science. And with What Disappears I did a deep dive in the Belle Epoque, the world of fashion, the world of dance, the world of art.

So all of it doing the research first, but usually I found a character. Sometimes I'll just see a painting that'll show something, an old painting or find a book and you never know. It's like there are these little doorways in the universe. It's almost like a game. Oh, this looks like a door that might open and you press on it or you try the doorknob, it opens and you find this amazing world there.

And it becomes your world and you're able to bring that world to the world. 

Carol Cram

Isn't it wonderful? It's such a great process. Do you want to share what you're working on now?

Barbara Quick

Sure. I just acquired a wonderful new literary agent. I'm so excited. I'm living in the New York east coast area. Now I'm in Connecticut and I have a New York agent and she is going to find a publisher for a novel that I wrote several years ago that takes place in Hungary right before the changeover to a multi-party democracy.

It's kind of a retelling of a Greek myth. I won't say which myth yet. But I'm very excited about that one. And it's wonderful to see that it will see the light of day. And I've also been serializing a novel, a very different sort of novel, sort of a comic episodic novel called Boarding House Reach, which is about the two years when I ran an international boarding house, actually, when I started Brazilian dancing in the Bay Area in the East Bay. And I've been publishing that on my Substack as a serialized novel, taking a page out of Dickens to do that. It's a good thing to do. And I have a full-length book of poems I'm hoping we'll find a publisher for soon.

I have one chapbook that's published and another coming out in 2025. So I'm always working. And then I have another novel called Saving Puccini, which I hope will be published soon too.

Carol Cram

Oh, that that's an Art In Fiction novel. You're certainly busy. I've inspired. 

Barbara Quick

Oh, good. Well, I feel like I better hurry up, you know, because I'm getting old and, you know, you want to get it out there, whatever you have inside you to give, you want to get it out there into the world. And it's a hard time in the world of writing, but it's also a time when there are many ways to get your work out there.

And I really like encouraging people who have that urge to write, do it now, do it as well as you possibly can. 

Carol Cram

Yes. Get it out. Because you're always going to learn and you're always going to get better. 

Barbara Quick

So just no one else can write your book. No one. It's just only you can do it. It's sort of like, you know, honoring the gods that gave you whatever gifts you have gifts, honor those gods, do your work.

Carol Cram

Well, thank you so much, Barbara. It's been wonderful chatting with you.

Barbara Quick

Such a pleasure, Carol. I love your podcast. I love what you're doing. And it was really an honor to be on your show again. 

Carol Cram

I’ve been speaking with Barbara Quick author of four novels, including Vivaldi’s Virgins listed in the Music category and What Disappears listed in the Dance category on Art In Fiction at www.artinfiction.com.

Be sure to check the show notes for a link to Barbara’s website at www.barbaraquick.com. You’ll also find a link to a 20% discount on a subscription to Pro Writing Aid, a fantastic editing tool for writers. 

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