Victoria Redel wrote the most gorgeous queer novel based upon two renowned women painters from 17th Century Amsterdam about whom very little is known. So she conjured both their personnel and professional lives as they take on the male-dominated, elitist art world of the Dutch Golden Age. I loved speaking with Victoria about this and more!

“I felt very free to invent and imagine these two artists into being. If Maria and Gerta could come back and talk to me, maybe I’ve gotten everything wrong. But maybe so did people who wrote the seven facts about them. I could have taken these two women and changed their names to other Dutch names. But I chose not to. I was interested in writing a novel about identity, transformation and the making of an artist’s life and consciousness. I chose to play with what is the nature of truth, and what is the nature of history.”