Olivia Wolfgang-Smith Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

A conversation with Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, author of GLASSWORKS

Can you talk a little bit about the real glassworks that inspired you to write the novel?

Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka were a father-and-son team of Czech glass artisans who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making costume jewelry, laboratory equipment, glass eyes, and (most famously) incredibly detailed botanical and marine invertebrate models. You're just as likely to run across the Blaschkas in a science museum as in an art museum—the best-known collection of their work is the Glass Flowers exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. There's a persistent caginess to any explanation of the Blaschkas' techniques, how exactly these models came to be. When asked about the source of their skill, Leopold's advice was to "get a good great-grandfather who loved glass"—a glib aside, minimizing their mythic talent as well as five generations of family legacy. Though I can't relate to the particular circumstances, in general this impulse resonated with me: some things feel too important to address in any form but a joke. Glassworks ended up being a fictional biography not of the Blaschkas but of the glass models themselves, which felt so alive and compelling and winkingly mysterious that they ...