“Every Bit Of Art Is Local Some Place”: Helen Sheehy On Her Enthralling Family Saga
Helen Sheehy is perhaps best known for her biographies of acclaimed theater-makers such as Eve Le Gallienne and Eleonora Duse. With Just Willa, Sheehy turns her considerable skills as a biographer to fiction, detailing the life of Willa Hardesty, a young woman born to a homesteader in Kansas during World War I. Sheehy tracks Willa’s extraordinary life as she moves from being a precocious schoolgirl to an unexpected single mother to wife of a tenant farmer and bootlegger. Willa’s life touches many of the significant events of the twentieth century, and Sheehy immerses the reader into the day-to-day life of an ordinary woman who navigates events as formidable as the Dust Bowl and the Polio epidemic. The result is a gripping family saga centered on an unforgettable character who Sheehy captures with humor and a bracing lack of sentimentality. Sheehy spoke to us about the long journey Willa’s story took to the page, the real-life inspiration for the fictional Willa, and how Sheehy’s background in theater helped bring her characters to life.
The book is so moving and I was so caught up in Willa’s story. What was your inspiration for Willa?
Basically, Willa is my mother’s fictionalized story. The inspiration came about because I had written three biographies. I knew a lot of about these famous women that I had spent seven years of my life researching and writing about. I realized that I kept coming back to something that has haunted me, and that is my mother died when I was thirty-six. When she died, it was such a shock to me that I felt like I didn’t know her. I had done all this research and had written these biographies and was looking around for another topic. I thought, “I really want to know who she was, where she came from, and why she made the choices she made. I wanted to know about her people, about her father. How do I do that? All right, I know how to write a biography, so I’m just going to start researching. I’m going to go back to Freedom, Oklahoma, and I’m going to walk the ground she walked. I’m going to talk to the people who are still available to talk to. I’m going to do interviews with my brothers, with my sister.”
But the problem arises in that the women I wrote about, they have archives. They were public figures, so there’s a lot known about them. I quickly realized that there were huge holes [in my mother’s biography]. At one point I thought maybe I’d write sort of a simple memoir history. I realized I couldn’t possibly do that unless I just lied about everything, because I don’t know the answers to a lot of the questions I was trying to figure out.
But one of the things I did is I immersed myself in the time of the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma. I read the local newspapers, which were just incredible. Local newspapers at that time had all kinds of interesting details about people’s lives—who they went to dinner with, what they did on the weekend, their travels, and the relatives who were in town. That included some members of my family and what they did. I found out a lot about my grandmother, my mother’s mother, because she wrote for the newspaper. It was an enormous resource.
I really was thinking, “Okay, this is just for me. This isn’t going to go anywhere.” I just wanted to do it for myself. But then I was asked to give a talk in New Haven about the three biographies I had written, but they also asked me to talk about what I was working on. I spent about maybe seven minutes at the end of the talk and told them about my work in researching that world set in northwestern Oklahoma, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, farming, and ranching. My dad started out as a cowboy, and then he became a boxer and a bootlegger. I started telling them about these characters that I was thinking about called Jake and Willa. It was the most amazing thing, because I had been thinking that nobody would care about this ordinary person. I thought it was just for me. But at the end of the talk there was not one question about the three women. One the most famous actresses in the world, did anybody care? (laughs) No, they wanted to hear about Willa and Jake. I was just beside myself. By that time, I had decided I would have to do this as a novel, because I could take the overall arc of the story and some of it could be factual. It would be based on real history, but so much of it I would have to make up. I realized people do care about ordinary people, and that every bit of art is local some place, right? That gave me the courage to just keep at it for twenty years.
I love that your mom’s life was more interesting to the audience than the subjects of your biographies.
But here’s what’s fascinating to me. I’ll tell you another story that illustrates this, and it led me to writing an essay called “Yearning For The Other”. So imagine me, this is my lifelong dream, to go meet my New York editor and talk about the biography of Eva Le Gallienne. This is maybe in the early 90s, maybe very late 80s. I look great. I’ve got boots. I’m very chic. I walk into her office, and she’s wearing blue jeans, a white shirt with rolled up sleeves, and silver jewelry. I looked at her and said, “Oh, if I’d known you were going to do this, I would have worn my Rodeo Queen belt.” She looked at me, and I could see it in her eyes. It was like, “You were a rodeo queen?” And I thought, “So my life, living on this isolated tenant farm in Oklahoma, thinking that I have to get out of here, I have to go east, I have to go to New York City. And here’s this woman, a sophisticated New Yorker, and what does she want? She wants to buy a farm in upstate New York where she can have a horse!” (laughs) We yearn for what we don’t have or what we don’t know. And I get it, of course. Now, I’ve sort of reversed myself. I’m trying to find a way back to the farm by riding horses, getting those smells back, and all of those things I loved being on the farm.
Willa leads such an epic life. Every aspect of the twentieth century seems to affect what Willa does. I was curious about what it took to bring those elements so convincingly to life for the reader?
When I was working on it. I didn’t think of it that way. I didn’t think of it as an epic life. It was only after I wrote it that I realized, my goodness, this touches on almost every aspect of the twentieth century. It touches their lives in a deeply personal way. One of the things that interests me in reading novels is I want to get down there in the specifics. What was their day-to-day reality when they lived through the Depression or the Dust Bowl? One of the things I explored was why did they stay? Basically Willa and Jake’s family, they’re the Okies who stayed. So how were they able to stay there and hold on?
Part of that came through imagination, and the other part came about through digging into newspapers and the history of the period. One of the things that I learned is that my grandfather, one of the ways he hung onto his land during the Depression was by terracing it. He had read an article in the local paper by the agricultural guides and by the government that if you terraced your land, you could stop some of that water running off. And it worked. He had to invest in it. He had to take money that could have been spent probably on sending Willa to high school, but it enabled him to hold on.
And a lot of that is just finding the research. I mean, the history, Tim Egan’s book is wonderful, The Worst Hard Times. He gives a larger context. But also talking to people. I could actually talk to my mother’s older sister, who lived through some of it, and could hear some of the stories of what Black Sunday was actually like. There was a wonderful old newspaper man called James Barker. He’s gone now, but he was such a tremendous help to me. He lived through a lot of this time and wrote for the Alba Review-Courier. He was first a regular reporter and then a columnist through World War Two, through the Depression. He was a great source for details of that period.
We follow Willa through seven decades. How did you land on the scope of the novel being her whole life, rather than focusing on a specific time period?
I think I knew I wanted to do that from the beginning. This is sort of how I work as a biographer. I don’t come in with any kind of preconceived opinion. I have to first do all the research and thinking. You discover things, and that leads to realization and epiphany. You come up with the answers. For this book, my obsession really was I wanted to know my mother. Who was she? What were the choices she made? She pushed me to get an education and to have a life that was not the least bit like hers, so that made me curious. She didn’t hate the farm. I mean, it was unrelenting work, but I also knew that there’s a kind of independence and joy you can get on a farm. So it wasn’t that. For me, it was trying to figure out who she was and what did she want? To do that, as I learned in biography, you have to go through the whole life. You have to go through from birth to death, because people change. People have things that happen to them in their life where they could have gone a different direction. Certainly those things happen to Willa. There’s a lot of loss that happens to her, and how does she deal with that?
For me, that was just really a personal choice, to get that whole arc of the life. But then, of course, you have to figure out where’s the structure? I think that’s what took me so long, for twenty years, because that’s what I kept trying to figure out, what’s the structure of this? Because I had a lot of stories from my mother’s life. I had more stories than I needed, probably. (laughs) And actually Willa Cather tells us that. She says to write a good novel, you have to use up a lot of stories. You have to have as many as possible. But that was the most difficult thing.
The other thing I do, because I trained in the theater, is I improvise. I just put myself in that situation. I’m there in that character’s head. Whichever character it is, I have to act it out in my head. That takes time to do that and get all that dialogue right, but that’s the part I actually love the best.
I wanted to ask about your background in theater and how it informed your approach your writing fiction. You really put us in the heads of other characters and gives us an understanding of why they’re making certain choices that we might be begging them not to make.
I was trained at Wichita State University. And first, as most theater people, I wanted to be an actor. But one of the things you’re trained at is that you have to be able to empathize with whomever you’re playing. You have to be able to figure out what they want, and what are they willing to do to get it? I’m a great believer in “doing determines being.” William James tells us that what people do is often more important than what they say, because that tells us who they are. I use those tools that we use in the theater and that playwrights use, and also I try to figure out what do people like to wear? What do they drink, what do they eat? What is important to them? What are the props that they like to have around that means something to them? That informed the writing of the novel, just using those techniques.
It seems almost fitting that you’ve done these biographies of these amazing actresses, because Willa seems like a part that someone like Eve La Gallienne would want to play.
It’s so heartening to have you feel this way about her, because it reinforces my feeling that everybody has a life, a story, and struggles that are worth being told. I love being able to tell this story, because for me, it answered so many questions. I think that’s also what took me a long time, too, because I had to find out all the things I wanted to know to my satisfaction. If I could talk to my mother, I would love to say, “Okay, you’ve read this book, which you know is loosely based on your life. What’d I miss?” Because you can’t know everything. I know as a humble biographer that you can’t possibly know everything, but I just wanted to be able to capture some of that life force. Writing biography, as Paul Murray Kendall tells us, is the spring task of bringing to life again. You want to make that person live and breathe on the page. I can’t bring my mother back to life, but maybe I can create a living, breathing character on the page, and that will be as close as I can get.
And finally, what role has the library played in your life?
I think next to my office—where I work and write—libraries are my happiest place. It didn’t start out that way. I grew up on an isolated farm and we rarely got to town, but I read library books. I got them from my school library, and they would get them from the public library. We would get awards for how many books we read. I still have some little awards for all these books I read because I just read all the time. That was my escape. But then later, when I started working for Hartford Stage as a dramaturg, I spent a lot of time in research libraries. Then working on my biographies, I spent endless hours in libraries and archives. What is it about the air in libraries? It’s the way I feel when I go to the farm and ride a horse. When I go into that barn, my blood pressure drops. I’m calm, I’m centered. That’s how I feel when I walk into a library. Time becomes unimportant. I’m there and it’s just the best place in the world. And oh my goodness, librarians have saved me so many times. A librarian in Oklahoma found the eighth grade exam that all the eighth graders would take in Oklahoma, that Willa got 100% on in the book. which I flunked Brendan, I think you might too.
My niece Brooke is a librarian, and when I was working on this book, she was working in Alva, and out of the blue she found a little piece of material that that answers one of the mysteries in the book. I can’t tell you about it here because it gives something away, but a librarian did that. I’m looking at it right now on my bulletin board, and it just makes me smile every time I look at it. I have such affection for libraries, particularly public libraries, because I think they’re sanctuaries for a lot of people.
Tags: Helen Sheehy
