Helen Sheehy in Conversation with Dave Stone

We meet Willa Hardesty in 1964, while she’s burning trash in a barrel and thinking “this is hell.” Angry and frustrated, she finds some items she had long forgotten. In the ensuing chapters, Willa’s life unfolds like a tapestry, beginning in 1927 when she’s eleven about to accompany her mother on a train ride from Oklahoma to Missouri.

A family saga that captures the essence of rural America, Helen Sheehy's Just Willa spans seven decades of one woman’s life, taking us from the Dust Bowl to the Depression, from Roosevelt to Reagan. It gives us a character of indomitable spirit—the daughter of a homesteader who survives the trials of single motherhood and goes on to marry a bootlegging cowboy—who fuels and anchors her family with love and bravery. And it shows us a world filled with people and struggles both realistic and relatable—a world that is beautiful, despite its hardships.

“As clear as a prairie morning, unsparing and true, Just Willa is deeply moving yet unsentimental in the great American vein. I loved it.”

—Richard Thomas, Actor

“In Just Willa, Helen Sheehy writes about an unsung unknown woman, a tough, hard-working, driven farm woman, expert at birthing babies, survival, and when necessary, kicking ass. In this huge story of one woman’s life, Sheehy has written a page-turner. All fiction and all true.”

—Constance Congdon, Playwright and Poet

“Just Willa is just perfect. It is a vivid, sprawling family chronicle with an indomitable character at its center. Just Willa is destined to be an American classic because of its luminous prose and its sense of adventure.”

—Andre Bishop, Producing Artistic Director, Lincoln Center Theater

“Helen Sheehy’s masterful prose immerses you in Willa Hardesty’s world with such rich detail and emotional depth that you feel the dust of the Oklahoma plains and the quiet strength it takes to hold a family together. It’s a powerful reminder that even the women who shape our lives can hold truths we only come to understand with time. This book is for anyone who has ever known their mother—or thought they did.”

—Michael Sucsy, Emmy-winning Writer/Director of Grey Gardens

HELEN SHEEHY grew up on tenant farms in Oklahoma and Kansas. She’s worked as a dramaturg, written a theatre textbook, and authored biographies of three theatre pioneers: Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones (Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), Eva Le Gallienne: A Biography (Knopf, 1996), and Eleonora Duse: A Biography (Knopf, 2003). The latter two books were named New York Times notable books of the year. Sheehy taught theatre and acting at Southern Connecticut State University for more than two decades. After spending years writing non-fiction, she has turned to her earliest love, telling stories. She lives in Hamden, Connecticut. Just Willa is her first novel.

David Stone is a WSU Theatre grad from a prior century. After a brief bout with actor-ritis in New York, he moved to Philadelphia and segued into writing, directing and producing commercials and industrials. Upon being lucky enough to marry Marni Vliet, he happily moved back to Wichita in 2013. Locally, he’s been seen at Roxy’s Downtown as Crumpet the Elf in David Sedaris’ Santaland Diaries, Gabriel in Act of God, Norman in On Golden Pond, and Al in The Sunshine Boys. At Music Theatre of Wichita, he was the Grandfather in Ragtime and Mr. Goldstone in Gypsy.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Watermark Books & Café, 4701 East Douglas Avenue, Wichita, United States