"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,
Judith Arcana has taught and written about motherhood and reproductive justice for decades. The prose and poetry of Our Mothers' Daughters, Every Mother's Son, and What if your mother are feminist classics. The linked stories in this new collection, rooted in her 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. By necessity, these stories reach from the past into the future, offering history and hope.
Interwoven with the central theme of reproductive health and justice, tattoos & tattooing appear in these stories, another instance of choice about how we live in our bodies.
"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 provide the seeds for her fiction, stories rooted in essential history to spark action in our terrifying present." —Leni Zumas, Author of Red Clocks
