SRJ: It’s so hard to believe that you weren’t living in New Orleans when you wrote the novel. The place seems so vivid.
JOS: Thank you! I went back every year. I mean, Bayou Perdu isn’t a real place, but it’s loosely based on a composite of several different towns. A lot of it came from research. The images that she sees when she goes back, they’re all images of post Katrina. They came from real things. In college in New Orleans, a girl I knew said, “I’m from Morganton City. It’s ninety minutes south of here.” I remember thinking, “South of here? There’s something south of New Orleans?” I really thought that beyond the city, there’s the river and then the Gulf of Mexico. But the further down you go, the more blurred the line between land and water gets. The way of life is so different from New Orleans. It’s all about water and living with the water. So many people don’t know that place, that way of life. It’s so precious now. Every day, a football field sized piece of land disappears and it won’t be here ten years from now. So, that was motivating, to capture this endangered place and way of life. There’s no way to reverse it. And that’s sad.
SRJ: When you were writing Between Two Skies, did you know it was going to be YA? Or was that sort of a happy accident?