Q&A with Stacey Gordon

  

 

 

Stacey Gordon is the author of the new novel The Pearl Farmers. She lives in Alameda, California. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Pearl Farmers?

 

A: I started my career as a journalist covering the gem and jewelry trade, and my biggest “beat” was covering the cultured pearl industry. I got to report on emerging trends and visit farms and companies across Asia and the U.S.—and I accumulated a lot of knowledge about pearls and the business that I never got to use once I moved on from that industry.

 

So, my initial idea for the book came with the thought: what if I found a way to put all that “useless knowledge” to use in a novel?

 

One of the fascinating aspects of the gem and jewelry business is that it’s still, to this day, a very family-oriented industry. Many companies and jewelry stores are run by multigenerational families, and each generation of those family businesses is grappling with how to adapt and survive as the world changes around them.

 

I wanted to explore the complex history of a family from the different points of view of the siblings who grew up in it. My idea was to show how each family member holds onto a distinct version of the family’s story, interpreting their relationships and past events differently even when they were living through the same moments together.

 

I decided the rural pearl farm and family business settings would make a perfect backdrop for that story.

 

Q: How did you create the Lockshire family, and how would you describe their family dynamics?

 

A: The Lockshires are an entirely fictional family, but I pieced them together with inspiration from my own genealogy and family dynamics, as well as small details of other families I’ve known.

 

James and Kate, the parents, were drawn partly from people I knew in the gem and jewelry industry—ambitious pioneer types who defied convention and harnessed nature itself—but also from a creative and raucous family I knew growing up, who ran multiple businesses and were also artists.

 

The sisters themselves play a little on the birth-order stereotypes: type-A and uber-responsible oldest sister Helen, misfit middle sister Anna, and eccentric wild-child Penn, the youngest.

 

The dynamics among them were my favorite parts to write in the story. The way they gossip with each other about the sister who’s not in the room; how they bicker but also crack each other up; the various ways they manifest guilt and grief; and how they can’t help being drawn back to each other when it really matters.

 

Q: The novel is set in Tennessee—how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: There was an actual American pearl farm in central Tennessee; it’s actually still there, though it’s more of a museum now than a working pearl farm. The area’s importance to the Japanese pearl industry (Tennessee River mother-of-pearl has long been used to create the shell beads used in saltwater pearl culture in Japan) is a fascinating part of the story, in real life and in my novel. So, I decided to set the book there.

 

I’m personally not from Tennessee, but I did grow up in a small town in rural Appalachia, and the Lockshires’ fictional hometown became a vital character in the novel. The sisters’ stories play out based on their relationship with the town: Helen resents it, Anna embraces it, and Penn avoids it for as long as she can.

 

At the heart of the story is how the world begins to encroach on the town and the struggle between tradition and progress—which reflects the sisters’ own journey as they decide on the future of their family and business.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I actually spent a little time exploring the real town and area in central Tennessee, including visiting the actual American pearl farm there.

 

One of the things I learned there was how involved people in the town once were in the farm’s activities—a woman told me how she’d worked at the farm as a teenager—which inspired background for the story and helped enrich the relationship between the Lockshire family and the townspeople.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am publishing a detective mystery set in Silicon Valley, the first in a series, early next year. I’m also writing a contemporary fiction novel about a group of GenX friends who met working at an arthouse movie theater and have remained intermingled in each other’s lives in  complicated ways, and I’ve just finished drafting my first romance!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: There’s a family secret that emerges in The Pearl Farmers—nothing scandalous, but its revelation changes everything about how the sisters see their family and its legacy.

 

I’ve uncovered a number of secrets in my own family in recent years, which motivated me to write about how learning the truth about the past can change so much about how we understand the way our families evolve.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb