Description:
These stories, rooted in Judith Arcana's experience as a Jane in Chicago's pre-Roe v. Wade underground abortion service, were written as the United States has moved relentlessly into constraining motherhood and denying reproductive justice.
Brief description: Judith Arcana is a Jane, a member of Chicago's pre-Roe underground abortion service, and has been writing and teaching from the roots of that experience ever since. She writes poems, stories, essays and books, including a much-loved biography of Grace Paley ("Grace Paley's Life Stories") and the poetry collections "What if your mother," "4th Period English," "The Parachute Jump Effect," "Announcements from the Planetarium," and "Here From Somewhere Else," which received the Editor's Choice Chapbook Award from Turtle Island Quarterly. She hosts a monthly poetry show on KBOO community radio in Oregon (listen online anywhere/anytime). Born and raised in the Great Lakes region, Judith has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 1995. For more about-and examples of-her work, visit JudithArcana.com.
Review Quotes:
"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
"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
"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 and The Reproductive Freedom Festival