About
Helen Sheehy grew up on farms in Oklahoma and Kansas, although she's lived in Connecticut most of her life. She's worked as a dramaturg, written biographies of theatre pioneers; Margo Jones, Eva Le Gallienne, and Eleonora Duse, a number of articles and essays, and two short stories. She's taught acting in a university and in a maximum security prison. She's a member of PEN and the Authors Guild.
After spending decades writing non-fiction and writing about extraordinary women, Sheehy turned to her first love, telling stories. She spent twenty years researching and writing JUST WILLA, a sweeping work of historical fiction, that tells the heartrending story of a daughter's search to understand her mother and the lost world she inhabited in rural Oklahoma. From the Dust Bowl to the Depression, from Roosevelt to Reagan, JUST WILLA recounts the dramatic story of Willa Sharpe Hardesty and her family as they struggle to make ends meet on their hardscrabble farm in a remote corner of the American Midwest. The novel opens with the unforgettable image of a jaded and bitter Willa throwing a lit cigarette into a trash barrel and imagining the relief she will feel if the fire burns her farm and its surrounding fields to the ground. The wife of a "piss-poor tenant farmer" and the daughter of a homesteader, Willa is one of fiction's most compelling new heroines—a pregnant teenager who survives the trials of single motherhood and who goes on to marry a bootlegging cowboy, a gifted woman deprived of an education but determined to educate her own children, a devoted wife who endures the infidelity of her husband and the shattering loss of her 11-year-old son yet somehow keeps her heart intact. Willa is a fiercely independent woman—born in the town of Freedom, Oklahoma—who will do anything it takes to secure a better future for her family. JUST WILLA will be published by Cave Hollow Press.
Ordinary people in America's heartland are often overlooked, and Sheehy's second novel SPARKS is about a Kansas teen-ager, Sparks, who is angry and brave and fights to free herself from the tyranny and abuse of her radical Christian mother, who is under the influence of a charismatic political preacher. The setting is an isolated ranch in the red hills outside Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where Sparks is imprisoned both physically and spiritually. SPARKS is timeless and timely—timeless in how it lays out the struggle for an independent mind and independent life and timely in how it exposes the reality of life inside the oppressive world of the militant Christian right. SPARKS is currently under submission.