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Interviews

Helen Sheehy author photo

“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.