Author Q and A: Helen Sheehy’s 20 Year Undertaking of Just Willa
You worked on this novel for 20+ years. Throughout that process, what changed the most? Did your perspective on the story change drastically, or were you set on the path of this book from the start?
My mother died when I was thirty-six, and I realized that I knew almost nothing about her and that haunted me for years. Sometimes I pass a mirror, and she looks right back at me. It’s unnerving. And it’s funny that I look like my mother since she raised me to live in a different world from the one she knew. In 2003 after my Duse biography was published, out of curiosity, I started researching the world of northwestern Oklahoma that my mother and father lived in and were formed by—the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, farming and ranching, boxing and bootlegging. At the time the research was just for me. I didn’t think readers would care about an ordinary farm woman from Oklahoma. Around that time, I was asked to give a speech in New Haven, Connecticut about three biographies I had written. They asked me to include what I was working on. So at the end of the talk, I told them about my idea for a novel. Afterward, all their questions were about my characters Willa and Jake. It made me realize that even though Just Willa is set in Oklahoma and Kansas, all art is regional and local and immediate and comes from lived life, and that makes Willa and Jake’s story universal.
Your mother was a farmer during the Depression in the dust bowl. I imagine getting the information for this book was difficult. How did you approach asking others about their life story in preparation for this work? How did you incorporate the information from others into your mother’s story?
I did do a lot of research. I used many of the same methods I used in biography. Walking the ground my characters walked, researching their life and times, listening to the music they listened to, gathering stories from my brothers and sister and relatives. I love doing research, and I don’t find it difficult at all. Oklahoma Historical archives were extremely useful, but the most useful information I found in old newspapers – the Freedom Call, the Alva Inquirer, the Daily Oklahoman, etc. The smaller newspapers carry a lot of local news and some of that news is just who visited who and what they ate for Easter dinner. But also reports about the weather and drought and the dust bowl and farming practices. I also interviewed a wonderful retired reporter who had a whole cache of material about boxing, and had experienced many of the events I was writing about.
Despite the clear emotional depth of this story, I’m sure there are things you wish you knew
more about. If you could ask her one question if she were alive today, what would it be and why?
The process of writing and researching the book answered a lot of my questions, but I think I would ask her “So after reading Just Willa which was inspired by your life story, what did I miss?”
How did writing this novel help you understand your mother better? How has your perception of her changed through your work on this text?
I wouldn’t say my perception has changed. Frankly, the whole point of writing it was to form a clear perception of who she was. I learned so much, and my perception has deepened.
What do you think your mother would make of the trajectory of your own life?
I think my mother would be very proud of me. And I think she would feel proud of herself too. In 1989, five years after she died, I dedicated the first biography I wrote to her, because she showed me the way.
How closely is this story based on real people in your life? I know that you changed some
details and names, but how else did this book differ from your real-world experience?
Many of the facts in the books, like Willa’s father homesteading and founding Freedom, Oklahoma are true. Willa’s two marriages and the number of her children are based on my mother’s two marriages and six children, but research can only take you so far. At some point, you have to let imagination take over. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
In your eyes, do you think your mom had a sense of her own personal freedom? Do you think she was happy? How do you maintain your own happiness in context of what you’ve experienced?
Willa finds personal freedom and happiness elusive, almost a luxury, but she desires it for her children. For me a life fully lived, like Willa’s and Jake’s, and loving and being loved, being known, maybe that’s more essential than happiness. Jake, for example, wakes up every morning feeling lucky to be alive. I share that view. Living on a farm with animals you’re always close to life and death. My mother woke me up when I was four or five to come to the barn and watch my father pull a calf—literally he reached into the cow and grabbed her stuck calf. I also watched as he shot a sick hog between the eyes. Willa’s best friend dies in an accident which almost costs Willa her own life. Later, Willa suffers a devastating loss which brings her to her knees. Finding a way to live with loss, understanding that a life can end in an instant, is Willa’s challenge. It’s every human’s challenge. In my own work, I guess I’m in the business of raising the dead. I can’t bring my mother back to life, but I can create the character of Willa and try to make her live on the page.
Did the process of writing this book and learning more about your mother and her life, thinking about what her inner world was like, change you?
Writing for me, both nonfiction and fiction, is always a process of discovery leading to revelation. There’s a Nabokov quote I love, “Everything trembles on the brink of everything.” Human beings are constantly changing and learning, nothing is set. So yes. The process changed me.
Was there an aspect of this book that was most difficult to craft? Was Charlie’s death scene, for example, harder to write than the scenes of your mother in the hospital?
The actual writing, telling the stories, was not difficult to craft. As a child, I loved making up and then acting out stories. In college, I studied theatre, then taught theatre, and worked in the theatre. A few years ago I taught improvisational acting and theatre in a maximum security prison. All the tools I learned to use in the theatre—imagination, sense memory, empathy, and research—have helped me as a writer.
So I start with an image or a character and then allow the scene to unfold. I never know what’s going to happen until I write it. On the other hand, finding the right structure is difficult for me. Of course, I didn’t work on the novel nonstop for 20 years, other projects intervened, but the book did have multiple revisions, until I found the structure.
What’s your roadmap for future novels? This novel was a huge departure for you, given that your published work has focused on theater biographies. Do you think your long-term work on Just Willa will affect what you work on next?
I have published two short stories. It took me 30 years to find the right ending for one. When I told my editor, he said, “sounds about right.” I love reading novels, but I also love making up stories and having people living in my head. I learned a lot about writing a novel by writing and rewriting a novel until I was satisfied. I’ve written two other novels, both unpublished.
My novel Sparks is adapted from a long one-act play that had a staged reading and even won a best play award, but I pulled it from the producer because I couldn’t bear that my lead character Sparks was killed at the end. I wanted her to live. So I wrote a first person novel, and she frees herself from her controlling evangelical Christian mother. I actually think at this point it would make a better movie than a novel. So I’m mulling over a screenplay.
The other novel I have, which I’m still tinkering with, is a speculative fiction novel, Make the Bastards Pay, about a cabal of theatre women who want to end male violence against women once and for all. So these three novels are very different, but all three involve first my obsession with a topic, and then writing about it which leads to discovery, which leads to revelation. That’s my process.
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Just Willa is releasing on April 13th, 2025. I strongly recommend picking up a copy and exploring this story for yourself.
- Skylar Rollins, January 2025
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