208: Tamatha Cain- Author of Song of the Chimney Sweep

This week’s guest is Tamatha Cain (Song of the Chimney Sweep, Orange Blossom Publishing, August, 2022). We discuss Tamatha’s love of not only the musical heritage of Jacksonville but also true crime podcasts and how she was able to mash the two together in her dual time-line debut novel which tells the story of a missing woman, an interracial marriage, and a mystery played out over the airways. We also discuss Only Oona, her second book and a biography of  debutante, actress, and writer Oona Chaplin, whose absent father was the playwright Eugene O’Neill and whose husband was world-renowned Charlie Chaplin.   As the child of an Indian immigrant and her military code interceptor husband, Tamatha Cain lived in four countries and seven states. She is the winner of the 2022 Florida Book Award, the 2020 Royal Palm Literary Award, and The Experience Poetry Competition. A musician and former bandleader, she graduated with honors from the University of North Florida and has a BA in English. She writes book reviews for the Southern Literary Review and is a member of the Women's Fiction Writers Association, Women Writing the West, and Florida Writers Association. She and her husband live with their weirdly smart little dog in a hundred-year-old bungalow in North Florida. To learn more about Tamatha, click here.