The Friendly City Books Podcast
Author Interview - Joselyn Takacs
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Episode notes
Joselyn Takacs joins Emily in the FCB studio to celebrate her debut novel, Pearce Oysters, a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill.
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Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. She has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University.
Joselyn's debut novel, Pearce Oysters (bookshop.org)(libro.fm) is a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
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About Pearce Oysters:
A fractured family, a devastated community, and the disaster that brings them together.
Pearce Oysters, a lush, evocative, finely-drawn debut novel set on the Louisiana coastline during the historic 2010 oil spill, follows the Pearce family, local oyster farmers whose business, family, and livelihood are all on the brink of collapse.
Eye-opening, eco-fiction at its best, Pearce Oysters highlights the grit and beauty of lives lived in an overlooked corner of the American South and the interdependence of nature and man. Diving deep into the bonds of family, culture, community, class, and industry, blazing new talent Joselyn Takacs elevates the voices of her deeply sympathetic characters: Jordan, the reluctant head of his family's storied oyster business; May, his distressed, widowed mother who has her own unexpected drama; and Benny, the beatnik musician brother, who returns from New Orleans to help with the crisis.
Inspired by years of her own research, Takacs's debut novel sparkles as it shines a light on murky waters, old wounds, the power of a family clinging to survival, and their inspiring path forward.
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Host: Emily Liner
Guest Author: Joselyn Takacs
Music: Rear Projection by Hartle Road
Production Assistance: Neon Newt Media LLC
Friendly City Books Inc.