Artivist Series - Joselyn Takacs
author/Pearce Oysters
Novelist Joselyn Takacs recently published Pearce Oysters, an intimate look at how the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig back in 2010 impacted the lives of oyster fishers who make their livelihoods fishing on the very real Caminada Bay. The impact from the disaster, still the largest in history, became the impetus for Joselyn to conduct nine years of research before she completed her novel. Joselyn discusses she learned that the act of writing a novel is its own reward. She says: “A good day is a good day of writing. It’s the best feeling and should be enough to sustain this, well, career slash hobby that I have of writing fiction.” We also explore on the podcast more about farming for oysters in the Gulf of Mexico.
Video conversation with Joselyn Takacs … click here
What Joselyn talks about …
Joselyn talks about how she came to be in Louisiana in 2010, what sparked her interest in oyster farming, and how she went about writing her novel. She provides an overview of oysters farming in Louisiana. We also discuss how she went about writing her novel, from story idea, finding the best approach, and more.
Show Notes
00:00:05 Pam Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artist Series podcast at womenmindthewater.com, I'm speaking with Joselyn Takacs, a Portland, OR based author. At the age of 22, she was living in Louisiana when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. The Deepwater Horizon explosion remains the largest accidental oil spill in history. The impact from the disaster became the impetus for nine years of research that resulted in her new novel Pearce Oysters. The novel is an intimate look at how the oil spill impacted folks who make their living fishing on the very real Caminada Bay.
00:00:49 Pam Ferris-Olson The Wo(men) Mind the Water Artist Series podcast and womenmindthewater.com engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection to the ocean. Through their stories Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
Today I'm speaking with Joselyn Takacs, a writer who was stunned in 2010 by reports of the devastation from the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill. Five years later, she recorded oral histories of oyster farmers working in the region. These histories became the foundation of her story Pearce Oysters. Her novel focuses on a Louisiana family and their oyster farming business. Joselyn maintains that the Pearce family is a source of emotional education for readers sharing with them the importance of oyster farming in the complex ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico.
00:01:52 Pam Ferris-Olson Welcome, Joselyn. I am looking forward to our conversation about your writing and oyster farming. I, too, have lived in Louisiana. While there, I experienced hurricanes and serious flooding. Those experiences helped me to see that Louisiana is often impacted by events beyond the control of locals. So let's begin by talking about how you came to be in Louisiana. Joselyn, tell us a bit about yourself. What is your relationship to Louisiana? Is your family from there?
00:02:25 Joselyn Takacs I grew up in Virginia, actually, and I went to College in Virginia. After I graduated from college, I moved to Louisiana to New Orleans. I was on a road trip and I stopped in New Orleans. I lived there after college and I worked a few odd jobs. One time I was waiting tables in the French Quarter and teaching French at a summer camp. A French immersion summer camp in Uptown. And that was also at the time of the BP oil spill.
00:03:05 Pam Ferris-Olson So what is your connection to fishing and how did you become interested in oyster farming?
00:03:13 Joselyn Takacs I don't have an explicit connection to fishing but I became interested in oyster farming because I read an article during the oil spill. It was a profile in a weekly paper in New Orleans and it was about an oyster company that had been in operation for 90 years, multiple generations of family had run this company. They were closing down as oil was making its way inland from the well site. I knew nothing then about oyster farming and I just became a bit obsessed. I couldn't get it out of my mind. I didn't know that I was going to write a novel then, or even that I was going to do any more research about it. But when I graduated from my MFA and I knew I wanted to write a novel. I thought back to that interview that I read back in 2010 and thought, “I wonder what happened to that company and to that family.”
00:04:28 Pam Ferris-Olson Why did you choose to tell the story of the Pearce family, particularly as they are a dysfunctional one with issues including estrangement and addiction?
00:04:39 Joselyn Takacs You know, I think families are all complicated and all novels are stories about people who are struggling. So in the case of the Pearce family, there's some addiction. There's political rift in the family. There's a fight over an inheritance and there's a tradition of oyster farming. That all fuels their relationships and also their conflicts. I knew when I was writing the novel, because it's fiction, that I'd have to invent a family. And I think when you're writing fiction, you discover who characters are less than you decide who they're going to be. That was my experience writing the Pearce family.
00:05:36 Pam Ferris-Olson Do you have personal experiences with estrangement or addiction, or did they come from somewhere else?
00:05:46 Joselyn Takacs Experiences of my life, people I've known who've struggled with addiction and certainly estrangement.
00:05:55 Pam Ferris-Olson So can you define for me what emotional education is?
00:05:59 Joselyn Takacs I think, if I'm remembering correctly, that that was from an interview in which I was talking about oral histories. Oral histories are a wonderful way to understand an environmental disaster or any current event because they give you the felt experience of what it was like living through that. And it's not a summary. They're sort of the ins and outs of the day-to-day of living through a disaster. And so, in 2015 I received a grant to record the oral histories of oyster farmers in Louisiana before I embarked on writing this novel. And I interviewed oyster farmers from across the state. As a result I really got to understand not just what happened in the spill, but the emotional toll of living through the disaster both for your livelihood, but also for the industry.
00:07:18 Pam Ferris-Olson Well, you very clearly laid out in your novel, the emotional toll. It was interesting that there were farmers or oyster farmers who were well aware and others that just denied that it was happening and it just slowly seeped into everybody's life. And that was, I guess, my emotional education that even deniers eventually get caught up in something like the oil spill.
In Maine, oyster farming is not done in the colder months. However, some oyster farmers turn to kelp farming to boost their income. I'm curious to know if the work of oyster farming in the Gulf of Mexico is done on a 52 year (host laughs). 52 year? That would be a long time. [Is oyster farming in Louisiana] done on a 52 week a year basis. Or is it seasonal job?
00:08:16 Joselyn Takacs It is year round and will particularly for families that have their own reefs and lease their own reefs from the state of Louisiana. They have oyster beds in various states of production at all times; so sometimes they're harvesting oysters for the market. Sometimes they're planting seed. By seed, we just mean baby oysters. And it depends on when the oyster spawn is happening as to whether they're harvesting or planting seed or prepping for their next.
00:09:02 Pam Ferris-Olson So the oyster reefs are actually like farming. They have to seed them. The oysters have to grow, and then they're harvested as opposed to a wild reef where they're self propagating.
00:09:16 Joselyn Takacs Actually both. It depends on where the reef is located. There are reefs in Louisiana that are self-sustaining and there are other reefs that are, for instance, closer to the Gulf of Mexico where the the water is too salty for the reefs to self-seed, but oyster farmers can plant seeds on those reefs, wait till the oysters are market size and then haul out the market size oysters.
00:09:50 Pam Ferris-Olson Interesting. So did you let any oyster farmers review your manuscript? I'm curious to hear how they reacted to the way you told their story.
00:10:00 Joselyn Takacs I'm curious too. I have sent them all copies of the book. But the book's only been out for a month now, and I, you know, I'm looking forward to hearing what they think. At my event in New Orleans, one of the oyster farmers that I interviewed was there and brought his oysters and donated his oysters to the attendees at the event. At a great little bookstore called Baldwin and Co. He answered some questions about his experience during the spill. But as for whether or not they've read it yet, they haven't told me. But I was lucky when I was writing the novel because I had so much material to draw from in the hours and hours of interviews that I did with oyster farmers.
00:11:01 Pam Ferris-Olson So the Pearce Oyster book represents extended writing project for you. What have you learned about yourself from this nine year writing project?
00:11:12 Joselyn Takacs You know, it took me so long to write this book because I had to do so much research. But also because it was my first novel and I was learning how to write a novel along the way and making mistakes and revising and finding out what the story was. I don't plot things out before I write. I've never been that kind of writer. And I think one of the things that I had learned and forget and have to learn over and over again is just that the writing itself has to be its own reward. A good day is a good day of writing. It’s the best feeling and should be enough to sustain this, well, career slash hobby that I have of writing fiction.
00:12:10 Pam Ferris-Olson What is the mistake when you say you made many mistakes? Can you give an example of a mistake that a novelist makes?
00:12:19 Joselyn Takacs Sure. Well, I mean for instance, I thought in the beginning that maybe the novel needed to start on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. And that I needed to start with the explosion there. And so I did all of this reading about oil rigs, which are really interesting. You know, they've got movie theaters on them. They've got gyms. They're, you know, they're built for people to to live on them for long deployments and they become sort of a home away from home for people. And the chapters that I wrote, I just had to throw away because they weren't central to the family story, and they were disorienting from the family story. I think if you started with the oil rig, you might expect you're getting a different kind of story than the one that you end up getting. But I just you know, there was no blueprint to follow. So you just have to make mistakes along the way and and learn what the story is.
00:13:27 Pam Ferris-Olson Do you think that you will continue to focus on environmental disasters or is your writing going in a new direction?
00:13:35 Joselyn Takacs I mean, it's a passion of mine. Environmentalism and inspiring people to care about this fragile world that we're a part of. So yes, but not exclusively the next project. I'm working on is a screenplay, and it doesn't have an environmentalist bent, but I'm. I'm sure it'll come back in future work.
00:14:06 Pam Ferris-Olson So the screenplay isn't based on the Pearce Oyster book? So is there anything else you'd like to tell listeners before we end our conversation?
00:14:20 Joselyn Takacs You know, I think this is a novel about an oil spill. Surely. But it's more than that. It's about a family living through an environmental disaster and how environmental disasters change us. So it's my hope that people come to care about the Pearce family. And by extension, care about the ecosystem on which they depend.
00:14:48 Pam Ferris-Olson Are any of the oyster farmers that were devastated by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, have they come back to farming?
00:14:59 Joselyn Takacs Yes, most of the oyster farmers that I spoke with in 2015 are still farming. Not all of them, but the oil spill with the devastating blow to the industry and took years, much longer than anyone had thought it would take to bounce back from.
00:15:24 Pam Ferris-Olson But it's hopeful that they did recover?
00:15:28 Joselyn Takacs Yes, it is absolutely wonderful that they've recovered. And you know, oyster farmers love what they do. They told me over and over again in the interviews that they get to see things every day in their work that most people will never see. You know, the sun rises they see on the water, the pride of producing an oyster that people like and people can identify by name. That's it. It gives them a great sort of life satisfaction to be able to do that. So I'm relieved that the industry carries on.
00:16:15 24 Pam Ferris-Olson Thank you, Joselyn. Thank you for being on our podcast and thank you for telling the story about some very hard working individuals in the Gulf of, I want to say Maine, but no Gulf of Mexico. I'm always interested to talk with fellow storytellers and hear how they go about sharing stories.
00:16:39 I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Joselyn Takacs, an author with a new novel Pearce Oysters. It’s an intimate look at how the largest oil spill in history impacted the lives of folks who made their livelihoods fishing the coast of Louisiana.
00:16:57 Joselyn is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com, Museum on Main Street, and YouTube. An audio-only version of this podcast is available on womenminethewater.com, on iTunes, and Spotify. Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for the use of her song Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.