Why I wrote a novel about pearl farming

How my first career seeded the story I would write decades later

Whenever I begin to explain the premise of my debut novel The Pearl Farmers, people react in a few predictable ways. Some are intrigued — the topic sounds novel and interesting. Others are confused: "Pearl farming? I didn't know that was a thing." And inevitably, someone asks, "How did you decide to write about that?"

The honest answer is that the idea came to me nearly 15 years after I first became immersed in a world I'd previously known nothing about. I spent four years as a reporter covering cultured pearls — the science, the market, the business, and the politics of a very old and fast-evolving industry. When I eventually moved on, all that knowledge rattled around in my head. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that a pearl farm provided the perfect landscape for the layered family story I'd always wanted to tell.

How I ended up a pearl journalist

My senior year of college, after four years studying magazine journalism, all I wanted was a job — ideally one that involved writing rather than fetching coffee for editors. For a class on trade magazines, I wrote a research paper about a century-old food engineering industry journal and, on a whim, mailed it to the publication's editorial director. He called me weeks before graduation to thank me, and mentioned that while his magazine wasn't hiring, another title at his company was looking for an associate editor. That's how I landed at Jewelers Circular-Keystone, a 130-year-old gem and jewelry trade publication.

On my first day, my editor-in-chief, George, informed me he was making me the magazine's cultured pearl editor. I'd barely thought about pearls ever in my life, except to admire them on Holly Golightly's neck in Breakfast at Tiffany's. "But I don't know anything about that," I told him.

"It doesn't matter," George said. "All that matters is that you know how to investigate and write stories. The rest you can learn."

He was right. Over the next four years, I met everyone I could in this small, peculiar corner of a vast industry where diamonds ruled and sucked up most of the oxygen. I learned about the origins of pearl culture, pioneered by Kokichi Mikimoto along the coastline of eastern Japan. About high-luxury Tahitian and South Sea pearls, grown for size and color in the warm waters of the South Pacific. And about how radically the industry was changing just as I started to cover it, as China, long the source of inexpensive freshwater pearls, was improving quality and taking on the prestigious Japanese akoya industry for the first time in history.

Beyond the fascinating history of pearling, my storytelling brain found rich fodder in the international gem and jewelry world — built on multigenerational family companies, steeped in tradition, and teetering at the edge of radical change. The internet was demystifying a sales model constructed entirely of mystique and romance. Climate change and political forces were disrupting established ways of sourcing and producing goods. And economic conditions were bearing down on a market dependent on consumer wealth.

From reporter to novelist

Years later, after I'd left the industry and set out to write a novel, I wanted to write about a family of siblings — specifically, three sisters grappling with the weight of carrying on their parents' dream. As in many families, I knew these sisters would hold vastly different perceptions of their place in the family story, different ideas about their responsibility to keep the past alive, and as a result, strained relationships with each other.

As the Lockshire sisters came alive in my mind, I found their story's natural home: an American freshwater pearl farm in rural Tennessee. A handful of these small operations sprang up in US during the twentieth century, made possible because the Tennessee River was a major source of the mother-of-pearl shells sold to Japanese pearl farms as the nuclei implanted into mollusks to begin the culturing process. One family, already connected to the industry as shell bead suppliers, took a chance on starting their own farm — launching a tiny, niche American pearl industry and turning heads around the world.

It was the perfect setting for a fictional, multigenerational family story. It grew into one about ambitious, visionary parents who'd built something extraordinary out of almost nothing. Their three daughters were left to reckon with what they'd inherited: one who stays and keeps everything running out of obligation and guilt; one who never felt she belonged, and walks away to build her own life; and one who resents being made the farm's mascot and good-luck charm, and ultimately cuts ties with her family altogether.

The pearl as metaphor

A pearl, I learned during my reporting years, is essentially a beautiful defense mechanism. When an irritant invades a mollusk — a grain of sand, a parasite, a foreign body — the animal responds by coating it, layer by layer, in nacre. What emerges over years is luminous and valuable precisely because of the wound at its center.

That's the story of the Lockshire sisters, too. Like most novels, The Pearl Farmers isn't really about farming. It's about the invisible pull of family, the way we layer over our wounds rather than tend to them, and the stubborn, complicated love that outlasts even the longest estrangements. Each sister has built her own kind of pearl — smooth and lustrous on the surface, formed around something she's spent years trying not to touch.

I hope you'll find their story as hard to put down as I found it inspirational to write.

---

The Pearl Farmers is coming November 3, 2026. Pre-order it now!