Hello. This is Jane.

Response

I’m profoundly grateful to Judith Arcana for writing these vital, electrifying stories. With abortion rights in America being stripped away—state by state, clinic by clinic—we need to hear from those who’ve fought this battle before. Arcana is a Jane; her work in the pre-Roe abortion underground has provided the seeds for her fiction, stories rooted in essential history to spark action in our terrifying present.
—Leni Zumas, Author of Red Clocks

In a witty and searching voice, Arcana writes of resistance and revolutionary compassion, past, present, and future. Here is fiction rooted in the actual history of the Chicago underground abortion service known as JANE, which operated in the days before a woman’s right to the procedure was legalized. Arcana herself was one of the young “Janes” providing abortions, and her tales of women helping women—the daring and secrecy, the risks and rewards—are essential reading, a warning and an inspiration for our time.
—Kate Manning, Author of My Notorious Life, a novel

Judith Arcana’s remarkable feat in Hello. This is Jane. is to paint, tile by tile, a complex mosaic of compelling linked stories— children’s playgrounds and adult tattoo parlors, ill-advised lovers and underground abortion activists. In the mainstream and on the edges, you’ll feel the urgency of the struggle for reproductive justice as you turn these pages.
—Cindy Cooper, Founding Director of Words of Choice / The Reproductive Freedom Festival

Click here for a fine review from WomenArts!

Tiny Movies — all five movies, available one by one, here.
Letters — Introduction / more about the book / current social/political context / events / last in the series

Announcements from the Planetarium

Response

Judith Arcana’s poems [are] both familiar and refreshingly strange .... jagged elegies on “time available” and “the short version,” dazzling crows, lonely streets, and mournful seers, with a hyper-realist eye on the past.  Wisdom-riffs earned (wryly) “perhaps as compensation” counterpoint her portraits of loss: of land, water, and the “grandmothers [who]/could move like flowers” yet who, “When we came here, […] would not come.”  And then: she slips away to an urgent world of “wind, shining like the flash inside/my skull—” [to] revere and celebrate freedom ....
 — Judith Vollmer

Dear Judith Arcana,
Not only do I like your book, I love it. Could there ever be a collection more endearing?  Great wit, music, and pacing.  Vivid passionate hungers, all stitched through the nubby fabric of aging with gorgeous shining threads. We can wrap ourselves right up in these poems for courage and verve.
Sincerely yours,
Naomi Shihab Nye

 

NOTE:  When this book first came out, in April of 2017, I did a few radio interviews:  The first, in May of 2017, was with wonderful Carol Newman on her KMUN Community Radio show in Astoria, Oregon; our twenty-five minute conversation begins about five minutes after the start of the show at that link.  Two more radio interviews I enjoyed enormously because of their excellent hosts on KBOO Community Radio in Portland - one with Patsy Kullberg in June and one with Ken Jones in July.

Here From Somewhere Else

Response

Here From Somewhere Else, Judith Arcana’s gorgeous new collection, has movement at its core. Many of these poems are fueled by questions—questions that generate a powerful urgency and contribute to the book’s compelling internal momentum. A curious voice and generous heart guide us through Arcana’s geographical and emotional landscapes; I was delighted but not surprised that here, love gets the very last word.

Jennifer Richter
- author of the poetry collections Threshold and No Acute Distress

Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture

Excerpt

I remember two women from the holding tank, when the seven of us, the Janes, got put in with them. Even right now, while I’m telling you this, I can see both women clearly. It’s weird, isn’t it, what we remember? And what we don’t? The first time I tried to write this, I didn’t know who took care of the baby while I was working. Which is truly bizarre because at the time, I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby. There was the breast milk situation plus fear – I was thinking: What if they take my baby away because I’ve been arrested? And: If I do time, he won’t know me. That was in my head all day, and it was a long day; we started doing abortions about nine, got busted at three, got to the lockup around midnight.
 

Response

Judith Arcana offers a fascinating perspective into the struggle for abortion rights in the 1970s, a story more relevant now than ever. Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture is fiction based on the true story of the arrest of the “Abortion Seven” on May 3, 1972 – and it’s an examination of the nature of memory, the spaces in history where fiction seeps in. The story’s narrator, who is making a movie about the event, raises questions of who to cast, what to include, and how to structure a film – creating at once an inventive way to write about history and a meditation on the territory between memoir and fiction, a keen rumination on the art-making process and all its attendant questions: In the end, what do we keep, and what do we cut away?
- Laura Moulton, Executive Director & Street Librarian/Street Books

Keesha and Joanie and JANE

Excerpt

I’ve got a question. I’m serious when I ask this, don’t think I’m not. I mean, I’m a medical student, and I’m straight, and I’m 26 years old, and I’ve had classes with the most poisonously anti-abortion prof at OHSU and I’ve got a grandmother who’s a far right Christian – she freaked when I did clinic defense in high school – but I have never been able to figure out where all this comes from.  Bernie stands up and keeps talking: I mean, why do they think the way they do? Why did the US anti-abortion movement happen? What’s really bothering them? I’ve studied this history, so I know that nobody else, in any other country, at any other time, ever created a homegrown anti-abortion movement on anything like this scale. And we know all their “pro-life” talk is fake – that’s not what they’re about. Their movement’s not against the death penalty, they’re not against war or police shoot-to-kill, they don’t say a word about torture, they don’t care much about poverty, they haven’t set up a system to take care of abandoned kids – she stops to take big breath here – and lots of them don’t like contraception either, so they don’t seem to want women to be able to prevent unplanned pregnancy. They don’t even seem to be working to clean up the planet; they’re not stopping that kind of destruction-of-life. So, what is it, really, that makes them hate abortion so much? I’m serious – what is it? This drives me crazy! And besides, I have to know what to tell my daughter.

Response

Despite Roe v. Wade, access to safe abortions has become tenuous in the USA. In “Keesha and Joanie and JANE,” Judith Arcana playfully speculates about what might happen if we put young radical activists at a table with their elders for some hard conversation, tactical organizing and learning from the past to make a better future. The result is complicated, funny, troubling and hopeful – and hard to put down!
- Honna Veerkamp, Media Artist and Organizer

I love the way “Keesha and Joanie and JANE” poses important questions for women in an intergenerational conversation – that connection is one of the very most important tasks we feminists need to address. Using myth, history and facts, this story cleverly points out generational differences and similarities – and the importance of contributions from women of different ages and experiences. This is good work!
- Sharon Barker, Director Emerita/Women’s Resource Center, University of Maine

As an activist, I’m struck by how the JANEBILL captures our position: the ideas, paralysis, aspirations and frustrations of trying to preserve and expand our right to safe abortion – even as access decreases …. Here’s hoping this zine sparks readers to keep finding ways to push back against those who want to take away our basic human right to control our bodies and our lives.
- Susan Yanow, Founding Executive Director, Abortion Access Project

With the eye of a poet and the grasp of an activist, Judith Arcana deftly brings past, present and future into one brilliant intergenerational encounter in “Keesha and Joanie and JANE.” In this story, workers from JANE, the real-life abortion service in pre-Roe Chicago, meet with young women in what was an imagined future and is now the present. Though replication of their actions is impossible, the Janes insist that history is ours, now, for the taking – a taking by new generations living with new realities. Arcana offers complex thinking wrapped in engaging characters and dialogue – an impressive offering to readers in pursuit of the truth of women’s lives.
- Cindy Cooper, Founder and Producer/Words of Choice: A National Prochoice Theater
(read Cindy Cooper's blog about Keesha and Joanie and JANE)

If you’ve ever wanted a conversation with heroes from history, this tough-talking, lively tour-de-force of politics and art is for you! Judith Arcana brings the past, present and future together in this natural, accessible discussion of abortion and reproductive justice – the story-telling in “Keesha and Joanie and JANE” is mesmerizing. 
- Minnie Bruce Pratt, Lesbian, Writer, Anti-racist/Anti-imperialist Activist

Judith Arcana’s JANEBILL - storytelling that is simultaneously about the past, the present, and the future of abortion in the United States - is vital, funny, and stirring reading for anyone who cares about reproductive justice. In content and format, this zine is an urgent reminder that is it we who must act. 
- Rosemary Candelario, Educator/Organizer/Artist

My mother, at age 75, frets about the threats to reproductive rights, especially since her four granddaughters have no clue about the “bad old days.” I witnessed the transition to a time when women and girls in the US began having greater control over our bodies and our destinies, and share Mom’s fears. “Keesha and Joanie and JANE” is an important reminder – it’s education for us all, right now. 
- Jenice L. View, Teacher/Mother/Activist

The Parachute Jump Effect

Response

From opening doors inside of dreams to learning lessons from a mountain, from recalling the drowning of Virginia Woolf to telephoning the dead, Judith Arcana pursues both consciousness and lived experience as a seeker of beauty and skeptic of truth. At the heart of the experiences in this book are the elements — fire, water, earth, and sky — that capture the poet’s imagination and give ballast to her world. And there are implied relationships too …. as if The Parachute Jump Effect unveils the seedbed for camaraderie, for connection, for bridging the gap from the celestial to the terrestrial, and for locating the pleasures of memory and time.
- David Biespiel

To read Judith Arcana’s poems in The Parachute Jump Effect, is to feel utterly spoken to. The voice is confiding, intriguing, sometimes humorous, but laced with ominous truths, as in the first two dream poems. There’s great energy in the colloquial language: “Ok, All Right, Yes” ... enchants me with the rightness of its tone. (“You think you’ll live until you die/and hey—ok, all right, yes/you can have that one/that one’s got to come true.”) The collection is held together by its exploration of the thinking process involved in looking for life’s meaning .... [and] uses lyrical language to describe the search. At the shore the narrator is “searching/for what I can’t see as the waves come at me, opening the beach/right under my feet, capturing me/in the swirling tide-quickened sand.” And while these poems invite the reader inside the poet’s mind, they are never abstract as they wander through bakeries and kitchens, drop in on Montana and Colorado and Chicago, and reach the parachute jump that satisfyingly rounds off the book.
- Judith Barrington

4th Period English

Response

Judith Arcana’s 4th Period English is so wonderful, I feel privileged to have read it, and I wish it were part of every curriculum starting right now. Listen to the voices of Corazón, Cesar, Mikoor, Huynh Chinh, Kathy and Megan, Jamayah, their teacher Ms Solomon and her neighbor Khatereh Jafari — you’ll think you were there in George Washington High School, Anywhere, USA, surrounded by The World. And you were. This is absolutely terrific writing.
- Alicia Ostriker

These poems are amazing. Inside that strange, raw intersection where immigration and Americanism meet, Judith Arcana’s new collection brings to life a whole population in a typical American high school. Her own strong voice disappears as she seemingly channels Adelita and Vicente, Tiffany and Jason, teachers and tíos, parents and visiting profesores. The stories that emerge here are vulnerable, confused, angry, outraged, tender, and, above all, deeply human.
- Diana Rico

Judith Arcana invites us into an urgent listening exercise that leaves us yearning to befriend the real Verónicas, Tyrones and Ashleys who have inspired these poems. This polyphonic collection is a labor of love and compassion, making readers aware of the painful ways our young people struggle between the myriad borders of this world.
- Alicia Partnoy

What if your mother

She Said

Excerpt

On the phone she said, I have a friend who's got a problem, but she couldn't get to a phone so I'm calling for her. Do you know what I mean? Is this the right place?
....

She stood on the back steps outside the counselor's apartment and said, This is mi prima, my cousin, from Mexico. Can you talk Spanish to her? ¿Habla un poco? ¿Un poquito? ¡Si, gringa! We will do this.
....

When we told her she should pay whatever she could afford, she was quiet a minute and then said, I think I can get nine dollars.
....

After the cervical injection, she said, How did you learn all this? Did you read a book? Is there a book?
....

She looked at the clear plastic sheet on the mattress, the speculum and the syringe. Then she laughed and said, You ladies somethin, doin this up in here; you somethin, all right.

Response

She Said "operates on the emotional and political sides of the brain at once" - James Tracy

Grace Paley's Life Stories

Excerpt

Grace Paley believes that we are all creatures of our time, born and formed in history. Her stories always carry the past within their present, even as both turn amazingly into the future. Every story, she has said, is at least two stories, and her own often include more than two plots, more than two sets of characters, more than two “central” themes. This is one of the ways in which her work is most true and most autobiographical, for the stories of our lives never do separate and line up neatly into diagrammable, chronological plots. Instead, our stories weave in and out erratically, absorbing and eclipsing each other in turn, moving back and forth through history, which contains them all....

Out of the PTA and into the streets, she had developed into a charismatic speaker and organizer. Like the voices of her fictional narrators, her own voice is compelling. In the gritty charm of its Bronx cadence and pronunciation, Grace’s voice is easy to understand, compellingly sincere, simple and intimate, revelatory and explanatory without being directive; her public style is no less personal than her immediate presence. A live model of the feminist axiom – the personal is political – Grace Paley often catalyzes and embodies the thoughts and feelings of her audience as she speaks....

When she thinks about having become 'a literary person,' Grace agrees that the transformation took place over a long period and was almost imperceptible. She rarely speaks of the long time it took for her to define herself as a writer, but she willingly generalizes from her own experience to comment on how difficult it is for women to be taken seriously – even in the midst of success. In 1984 … Grace addressed this issue [at a conference, and is quoted as] “saying that her stories were considered nice, little unimportant stories about domestic situations. As if to prove her point, an article in the Chicago Tribune about th[at] conference referred to her as an ‘intellectual version of Erma Bombeck.’ [and don’t even think about what that foolish phrase implies about the estimable Ms. Bombeck]...."

Response

When told that the University of Illinois Press had taken it out of print, Grace Paley exclaimed: “Oh! People love that book!”

If you want to know how Grace Paley came to be a tireless political activist and renowned writer — and how she united these callings so completely — read GRACE PALEY’S LIFE STORIES.  Judith Arcana interviewed Paley and her family during the 1980s, with Paley in the thick of the complex life she made look so simple.  The result of Arcana’s work is a book unlike any other I know -- not a big brick of biography, nor an opaque literary study.  The words in the title, Life Stories, are exactly right: This book is the story of the life from which Grace Paley made her extraordinary stories.   ...... Carol Sklenicka, author of Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life + Much Love: The Life and Work of Alice Adams  

We must keep GRACE PALEY'S LIFE STORIES always available.  Grace is still an exemplar to writers who would tell good stories, and to citizens who would save the world.  ....... Maxine Hong Kingston 

Judith Arcana’s biography of Grace Paley interweaves biography, social history and literary criticism to create an astute and endearing portrait of a woman who lived large in both literature and political activism.  ....... Patricia Kullberg, author of Girl in the River + On the Ragged Edge of Medicine

Tackles the question we all secretly have about our writers: how much is literature and how much is their lives? This witty, insightful book is full of Paley's quirky charm, tenacious integrity, and exuberant activism .... a delight for … fans of Paley and new readers intrigued by the connection between peace, justice, and art. …… Minnie Bruce Pratt

I first met Grace at a book release party in New York.  It was a swanky affair in the Theater District; Grace arrived wearing a strange assortment of clothes, her shoes caked with mud, as if she had walked out of her Vermont garden and into the restaurant. She was smiling her big smile and reaching out to touch her friends, oblivious of the “see and be seen” atmosphere.  GRACE PALEY’S LIFE STORIES captures that spirit as it tells the story of the years she was writing her three remarkable fiction collections. This is a very important book about one of our most important writers.   ….. Ruth Gundle, Publisher, The Eighth Mountain Press

I just wish I could be more like Grace Paley. ….. Ursula K. Le Guin

Such extensive research is unmatched in Paley scholarship; Arcana's focus on the political crucible of Paley's consciousness is rare in contemporary literary criticism. …… Google Books

................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Here are a few minutes of Ken Jones' interview with me on KBOO Community Radio in Portland; he asked about Grace when we were talking about my new poetry book in July of 2017 - listen here (use the second audio strip). Or, with this one, listen to us talk about the crowdfunding campaign to help the publisher bring out the new edition.

Lilly Rivlin's 74 minute video documentary about Grace is described here.

With this audio strip, you can listen to CircleA Radio's hour-long show honoring Grace a few months after her death in 2007; I talked with them in the studio. The show includes several clips of her, reading & talking on different occasions.

Every Mother's Son

Excerpt

Mothers … raising male children … confront … the pattern which has produced nonurturant, emotionally unresponsive, highly competitive and materially oriented males … given to verbal and physical violence, to the domination and frequent abuse of children and women …. We’ve been trapped with our sons, imprisoned in false ways of being … by a culture whose very language turns mother into mocking profanity, son into demeaning insult. But if sons can recognize that there is no danger to them inherent in the mother, discarding the layers of masculinity that cover their humanity, and if mothers will undertake the painful struggle to restore our integrity as women, then mothers and sons can begin to break the constraints of fear and anger between us.

Response

A shocking book, in a cleansing, salutary way – I loved it. Against the fashionable tendency to regard women and men as planetary opposites, Judith Arcana reaffirms the ancient bond between sons and their mothers, reminding us of what the human species can accomplish if we own it together.
– Martha Roth

This book is truly a major work of feminist analysis.
– Joseph Pleck

Arcana compassionately takes mothers and sons together, guiding us carefully toward the hope we will not use our power against each other.
– Carol Kleiman

A provocative read … compelling, fascinating.
– Chartist (UK)

Our Mothers' Daughters

Excerpt

… all of us must confront the reality of our mothers, as the women they are, and as they live in us – even if they are thousands of miles away or dead. Whether we come to the truth of our mothers through our politics, the guidance of therapy, or the revelations of dreams, we need that truth to break down both the generally false concept of “mother” in this society, and whatever specifically false stance we hold relative to our own mothers. For mothers and daughters to relate to each other in truth – even sporadically – is a terrible struggle for both women.
 

Response

It blew my mind … Judith Arcana’s book suggests to us the possibility of ceasing to blame our mothers for making us the people we are … Already this precious little book, much thumbed and pored over, has passed amongst my friends and acquaintances.
- Honey (UK)

Beautifully written ... a welcome addition for any woman's bookshelf. Whether you read it as a mother, a daughter, or both - it might help you understand life a little better than before.
- Woman's World (UK)

[This is]… a rare and valuable book, telling and illuminating. She manages to evoke memories, capture yearnings and represent profound pleasures and griefs that many women share. Most important, she reminds us of the mother-daughter-mother circle in the lives of women, newly poignant in the light of the present women’s movement.
- Mary Howell

A first rate account. The paradox of family life is that we all know about it existentially, yet we know nothing of the common threads that make family life so important, so enriching, and so terrible. Judith Arcana has given us a real gift in offering her perspective on family socialization, developed from both personal insight and systematic research.    
- Arlene Kaplan Daniels

[Judith Arcana's Our Mothers' Daughters was] written with a generosity of spirit and healthy curiosity.    
- Jane Marcus

[This book is] … humanistic, it doesn’t seek to blame … it asks you to see your mother as a woman of her time who did the best with what she had.    
- John Doh (“genericbloke” online)