Jean Hegland
Jean Hegland's first novel, INTO THE FOREST, has been translated into eleven languages and is a frequent choice for campus- and community-wide reading programs. A film version starring Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood is scheduled for release in spring 2015. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY promises her second novel, WINDFALLS, is “a good prospect for reading groups.” Excerpts from her non-fiction work, THE LIFE WITHIN: CELEBRATION OF A PREGNANCY, have appeared in a junior high school science textbook, a college English textbook, and a guided journal for pregnant women. STILL TIME, her most recent novel, celebrates the work of William Shakespeare while taking a hopeful look at the harrowing challenges of dementia. Jean is a frequent presenter at writers' conferences and has taught creative writing for many years, both in California and abroad. She lives in the Northern Californian woods where she is always at work on another book.
“I was aghast by the betrayal those thoughts represented, by the callous creature they proved me to be.”
“All that attacks is memory, all I suffer is regret.”
“In some ways we were more remote than strangers because strangers at least have the possibility of yet unmade connections.”
“We heard the United States had a new president, that she was arranging for a loan from the Commonwealth to bail us out. We heard the White House was burning and the National Guard was fighting the Secret Service in the streets of DC. We heard there was no water left in Los Angeles, that hordes of people were trying to walk north through the drought-ridden Central Valley. We heard that the county to the east of us still had electricity and that the Third World was rallying to send us support. And then we heard that China and Russia were at war and the US had been forgotten.Although the Fundamentalists' predictions of Armageddon grew more intense, and everyone else complained with increasing bitterness about everything from the last of chewing gum to the closure of Redwood General Hospital, still, among most people there was an odd sense of buoyancy, a sort of surreptitious relief, the same feeling Eva and I used to have every few years when the river that flows through Redwood flooded, washing out roads and closing businesses for a day or two. We knew a flood was inconvenient and destructive At the same time we couldn't help but feel a peculiar sort of delight that something beyond us was large enough to destroy the inexorability of our routines.”
“So my sister dances and the dead house burns, and I scrawl these few last words by the light of its burning. I know I should toss this story, too, on those flames. But I am still too much a storyteller -or at least a storykeeper-still too much my father's daughter to burn these pages.”
“I think unconsciously I was afraid that if she asked me how I felt, my unleashed grief and rage would kill us all. In some unadmitted corner of myself I was already weeping and screaming and begging her not to leave me, not to go. If I started crying for real, only her comfort could make me stop, and if she died before she had finished comforting me, then I would be left to cry forever.”
“I never knew how much we consumed. It seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. It's no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. It's no wonder the economy collapsed, if Eva and I use so much merely to stay alive.”
“Beyond us I could see the mountains rising blue and hazy, and I knew I had only to cross them and keep on walking to catch up with all my dreams.”
“This body is yours. No one can ever take it from you, if only you will accept yourself, claim it again--your arms, your spine, your ribs, the small of your back. It's all yours. All this bounty, all this beauty, all this strength and grace is yours. This garden is yours. Take it back. Take it back.”