1Jean Hegland, originally from Washington State, moved to Northern California in 1984 to join the English Department at Santa Rosa Junior College, where she specialized in the teaching of Creative Writing. The region's natural environment and redwood forests inspired her to write her first novel, Into the Forest. In 1996, after fears that it might never see the light of day, the novel was finally released by Calyx, an independent feminist press based in neighboring Oregon. It gradually found an audience through word-of-mouth, eventually catching the attention of Bantam in New York City. Its popularity grew further in 2015 with Patricia Rozema’s film adaptation, starring Elliot Page and Evan Rachel Wood.

2Jean Hegland went on to publish two other novels, Windfalls (2004) and Still Time (2015), exploring motherhood and illness, respectively, before Into the Forest experienced a renaissance in France in 2017. Two decades after its initial release, Éditions Gallmeister published a French translation by Josette Chicheportiche under the title Dans la forêt. The novel was, once again, a tremendous success, captivating the French public with its blend of speculative fiction, nature writing, and feminist themes. This renewed interest led to a French graphic novel adaptation by artist Lomig in 2019, extending its reach even further.

3On 15 January 2025, a sequel to Hegland’s first novel, Le Temps d'après (Here in This Next New Now) was published by Éditions Gallmeister, translated into French by Josette Chicheportiche. Devoted to Nell and Eva's son, Burl, it pursues and complicates the ecological questioning of Into the Forest.

4It might seem unusual to publish a text in translation before its original version. One reason is that the novel has not yet found a publisher in the United States, a difficulty perhaps linked to the text’s (post)gendered politics, which resonate uneasily in a climate of rising conservatism, or to the author’s bold experimentations with language. The author hopes that French readers will appreciate Le Temps d’après. A third volume is in preparation. 

5This interview was conducted online on 10 January 2025. Some sections were revised and edited after this initial meeting.

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Jean Hegland: That’s a rich, complex and very interesting series of questions. I couldn’t have written Into the Forest in the same way now. Thirty years ago, there were things I didn’t have to account for, climate change being one of the big ones. Scientists were warning us about climate change back then, and we had some distant awareness of it, but it was something that most of us assumed was going to happen a long, long time in the future. I don’t think it’s responsible in 2025 to write a book about nature that doesn’t take climate change into account. In addition, one of the driving questions of Here in This Next New Now has to do with gender, which was not addressed to the same extent in Into the Forest.

While I was writing Into the Forest, I tried to be very respectful of the issues and challenges of indigenous Americans, but there are one or two phrases in the book that I would not have included now. For example, there’s a moment when Nell remembers her childhood and how she and Eva liked to play princesses, discoverers, or Indians in the forest. Given the context, I don’t think that’s a horrible faux pas, but “playing Indians” is definitely a phrase I wouldn’t have used now. In other ways, I’ve been actually quite gratified (sometimes in sad ways) about how well that book held up through time. Unfortunately, all the distant threats I mentioned in the novel continue to threaten us now.

C.L.M.: Today you are publishing Here in This Next New Now as Le Temps d’après, with French Éditions Gallmeister, ahead of its release in the United States. It is unusual to publish a translated work before publishing it in the original language. Could you tell me more about the reasons behind this choice? Has this process of writing and translating, almost in tandem with your translator Josette Chicheportiche, informed your writing experience?

J.H.: In one way it does feel like putting the cart before the horse, for the translation to be released before a US edition. But my agent was having a hard time finding the right publisher for Here in This Next New Now in America and I’ve had such a rich, wonderful relationship with Éditions Gallmeister. Éditions Gallmeister gave Into the Forest a new life in French long after it had been published and translated into other languages, and they were very eager to publish this new book, so we decided to go ahead and release the French edition first.

C.L.M.: In Into the Forest (1996), Nell and Eva, along with their newborn son, leave their family home and abandon their social identity to live in a redwood forest. Human spaces, such as the house and the garden, are tainted by male violence, forcing them to flee in order to create a sororal community. In Here in This Next New Now, the ecological thread continues through Burl, their “forest-born” son, who redefines the concept of humanity in a world of interconnectedness. However, the paradox lies in ers yearning to meet people, these “fictitious creatures” e first encounters through the stories told by ers mothers. In Into the Forest, the movement “into” nature represents both a rejection of social norms and a return to multispecies ecosystems. How did you envision this evolution for Nell and Eva, and how does it contrast with Burl’s journey in Here in This Next New Now?

J.H.: I really appreciate that insight. When the novel begins, Nell and Eva are looking forward to leaving their family home in the forest and embarking on their adult lives in contemporary American society. It takes them quite a while to realize that the forest is actually a much more nurturing place than they'd thought. The forest is also the place where they have the most chance of being safe from human, and particularly male, violence. But in Here in This Next New Now, the movement is definitely back towards society and human connection. Burl is fascinated by other people for three reasons: the first is that one of the family's principal forms of entertainment is storytelling, and all of the stories that Nell and Eva tell, whether they are fiction or what Burl calls “true fact stories,” contain human characters or characters with human attributes. Secondly, Burl is a teenager and I imagine that, hardwired into adolescent development, is a desire to move beyond even a beloved family. And finally, I thought that the situation in this novel would offer a very rich opportunity to explore human beings' profound need for community and social connection.

C.L.M.: On this topic, I’ve always wondered about the reason motivating the translation of Into the Forest as Dans la forêt. Do you know if there were discussions of alternatives back in 2017? For instance, one could imagine “Vers la forêt.”

J.H.: Back in the early 1990s, my working title for that book was In the Forest. Then my beloved mother observed that it seemed that it was a story about people moving deeper into the forest rather than simply existing in the forest in a static way. I was grateful for Mom's suggestion that I might consider using “into” instead of “in” in the title. My understanding is neither “dans” nor “vers” captures the same sense of movement that “into” does, and I think that Josette and Oliver chose to use “dans” because “dans la forêt” is a smoother sounding phrase.

C.L.M.: In this “three-person society,” as you call it in your afterword, I notice a dual movement: both novels appear to push against the boundaries of gender and species, but they do not drop entirely these concepts. For instance, it seems that Burl identifies as a boy and as a human being. How do you understand these gender and species identities? How do they resemble Western traditional definitions and to what extent do they not? And finally, do you, and I actually don’t think you do, conceive Burl’s world as post-gender or post-human?

J.H.: You're right, I wouldn’t think of Burl's world as either post-gender or post-human. When I was writing Here in This Next New Now, I was much more interested in exploring those concepts than necessarily moving beyond them. I hope that in the future, gender can become a much less significant part of our identities. And I think it's important for us to remember (and embrace) the fact that we human beings are animals. But it's also important for us to remain aware of what makes us unique, both as individuals and as a species. Rather than trying to move beyond the concepts of gender and humanity entirely, I believe we need to rethink them in ways that can better enable us to support each other and the planet.

C.L.M.: And so how would you define “maleness” from Burl’s perspective? What makes er think that e is different from ers mothers?

J.H.: Burl has a penis, e’s growing a beard, and ers chest is flat. Especially as an adolescent, e’s fascinated by what those physical aspects might mean in terms of ers developing identity. Because the three-person society e has been raised in has had no use for gender roles, e has had no models for what maleness or femaleness might look like. In fact, as a very young child, e created a set of gender-neutral pronouns that ers mothers ended up adopting. Those new pronouns weren't created out of any kind of political motivation, but instead by the fact that, in their little society, gender is a relatively meaningless concept. Consequently, Burl has grown up not being aware of any of the distinctions that Western culture has made between men and women. Even so, e's curious about what ers gender might have to suggest about who e is and who e will become.

I was sorry that we weren't able to preserve Burl's gender-neutral pronouns in this French translation. I’ve talked to French writers and readers who’ve told me that French speakers are currently trying to develop a more gender-neutral pronoun system, but Oliver and Josette were afraid that trying to translate Burl's pronouns into French would have made the rest of the text cumbersome enough that it would have gotten in the way of the story. I was grateful when Oliver offered me the opportunity to write an afterword explaining why I'd chosen to embark on that experiment, and why we'd decided to forego it in the French edition.

J.H.: I am honored that my work might be considered part of that tradition since I admire those writers so much. I didn’t read Parable of the Sower until after I’d written Into the Forest and several people had suggested that they saw Parable of the Sower as what was happening in Southern California while Into the Forest was taking place in Northern California.

“Science fiction” doesn't really work as a designation for Into the Forest and Here in This Next New Now because neither novel contains any science. “Cli-Fi” might work for Here in This Next New Now because it is set in a world affected by climate change. However, the story doesn't confront that issue directly--certainly not in the way that a novel like The Ministry of the Future does. As for “dystopia,” the dystopia in those novels is so far from the plot and action that I don’t think it’s a very accurate designation, either. Le Guin’s “speculative fiction” probably fits those two novels the best.

I’m kind of allergic to the notion of genre, but I suppose that most of my non-research reading could be classified as “mainstream literary fiction.” The last book I read was Richard Powers’ Playground and I’m currently reading Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.

J.H.: In Into the Forest, my interest was not in imagining the mechanics of the apocalypse but in exploring what it might look like for those two privileged, young, white American women to have an opportunity to create deeper connections to the natural world. For that reason, I hoped to suggest that the enormous governmental and social breakdowns that caused the collapse had been going on for some time while the sisters had been living in relative safety and isolation with their father in the forest. By the time the story begins, I imagined that the breakdown is essentially complete, and the few people who still exist in the world beyond the forest are lacking any kind of cohesive government or social structure.

In terms of your comments about the Sally Bell story, I really appreciate your insight that her story is more evidence of the same colonizing mentality (including ownership of natural "resources," racism, sexism, and late-stage capitalism) that are ultimately the causes of the breakdown in Into the Forest (and which, I fear, will also be responsible for the breakdown that we are currently racing toward in real life.) I chose to include Sally Bell's story in Into the Forest because it felt very important to me for Nell to realize that human beings had been living successful, full, and meaningful lives in that forest for tens of thousands of years before her parents moved there. In addition, it invited her to have to confront at least a bit of the ugly realities of colonization. Sally Bell's story can serve as a reminder of the potential brutality of humanity (and, yes, specifically, men), which also helps to justify the sisters' decision to burn their house and move into the forest.

C.L.M.: I also feel that there is the lingering presence of other canons of Anglophone literature such as Defoe, Thoreau and Twain, although they are not explicitly named. But it seems to me that Here in This Next New Now proposes another way of engaging with Western cultural traditions. Rather than the notion of distinct authorship, Burl’s voice seems to digest multiple voices that haunt this extremely polyphonic text. Beneath ers voice, we can hear echoes of ers two mothers telling er stories of the world before, and so the work is interwoven with many cultural references and cultural voices that sometimes seem more real to Burl than ers real life. How do these cultural presences mingle with Burl’s psyche and with ers interpretation of the world? What does it say about the possibilities of storytelling?

J.H.: I’m so glad you're noticing all of that. Burl’s mother, Eva, thinks the forest tells the most interesting stories, but Nell is a story-shaper and story-sharer, and she's passed her love of human stories down to Burl. Because they no longer have books to preserve the narratives for them, the stories Nell and Burl (and, sometimes, Eva) tell are inevitably shaped by their oral nature. Those narratives grow and adapt in response to the constraints of tellers' memories and the inspiration of their new experiences.

It was a challenge for me to choose which stories would be most significant for Burl in the context of the novel. I wanted stories that most readers would be familiar with, and which would also have considerable appeal and meaning for Burl. The Hobbit was a book that many people know, and it has a kind of epic quality to it that I imagined Burl would find engaging and which might also be appropriate to the thematic context of Here in This Next New Now.

The issue of gender became very interesting to me while I was trying to decide which stories I wanted Nell and Eva to share with Burl. It struck me all over again how few women have traditionally been represented, either as authors or as central characters, in the Western Canon. In addition, in the English edition, Burl, Nell, and Eva's use of gender-neutral pronouns gives all of those traditionally male-identified characters a new life. Because Frodo's or Odysseus's genders would not be immediately obvious to er, Burl understands their actions in terms of their personalities and motivations and not simply as a result of what kind of “crotch parts” they possess.

C.L.M.: One is evidently struck by the way you handle language and speech in this new novel. Burl’s language seems to be very “fleshy,” very embedded in the world e lives in. How did you experiment with ers voice, but also with meaning in general?

J.H.: Burl’s language was a sort of blissful gift for me. I decided fairly early in my writing process that I wanted to tell Here in This Next New Now from Burl's point of view because Burl's experience is so vastly different from mine as well as from that of readers. Initially, Burl's voice was much more traditional, but I realized that I wanted the uniqueness of Burl's vision and ers upbringing to be evident in nearly every sentence that e speaks. I imagined that ers unusual idiolect would have been the product of ers innate love of language and the fact that e's only ever spoken with two other people, both of whom are predisposed to communicate with er in as full and rich a way possible.

When my husband and I were raising our three kids, we used to joke that it was a miracle they ever learned how to speak “proper” English because every time they came up with a new word for something, we didn't correct them; instead, we incorporated that new word into our own speech. As for Burl, I wanted ers language to reflect both ers intimate experience with the forest and also ers submersion in ers mothers' oral storytelling tradition. Once I made that decision, I had a wonderful time learning to speak Burlese. There were moments when I truly I felt like I was channeling er, and I hated having to give up ers way of speaking when I finished the book.

C.L.M.: Burl seems to have a very intuitive language, very bodily, in a way. I am thinking of the word “pleeing” that you use at one point, instead of “pleading.” I feel this is a good example of how Burl’s language is very “embodied.” In “pleeing,” we find the plaintive tone of ers voice, with the doubling of the /i:/ sound. You are a poet too. Did that help you connect with Burl’s language and with ers tendency to play on sonorities and rhythms?

J.H.: The sound and the rhythms of a sentence always mean a great deal to me. They reinforce or suggest certain meanings and they also offer me a lot of mouth- and ear-pleasure. I like to read sentences aloud while I'm writing, and I fuss a good deal with syntax in order to try to achieve the rhythm I want. I was delighted when Oliver Gallmeister responded to the first draft of Here in This Next New Now that I shared with him by calling Burl's language “raw and poetic” and said that it reminded him of Shakespeare.

C.L.M.: Burl’s creative language also seems to reflect ers rootedness in the forest and unique way of inhabiting the world. In Ecopoetics of Reenchantment, Bénédicte Meillon states: “recent sciences have lent veracity to the notion of a song of the earth. Going way beyond an ancient myth or a mere topos for lyrical poets to muse on, the concept of the song of the world does correspond to a biophysical reality. While ethologists have been paying greater attention to bird language or cetacean singing, and how these interact with the larger soundscapes they emerge from, string theory and quantum field physics have besides proposed a theoretical model of the universe based on laws of resonance and vibration” (2-3). Meillon then argues that ecopoetics “might reveal something of the actual capacities of humans, animals, and plants to hear and emit sounds, songs, vibration, and rhythms in harmony [w]ithin a world made of many complex multispecies enmeshments” (2-3). As a poet and as a novelist, would you say that your novels participate in this ecopoetic movement, translating the polyphony or the multispecies flesh of the world? Were you interested in writing the soundscape of the forest, or just the perspective of your narrative voices?

J.H.: What a wonderful thought! I can’t begin to presume that my novels pull that off, but I love that notion of attempting to be part of that eternal global song. I’m thinking of Richard Powers saying that when he wrote The Overstory, he'd initially wanted to tell the story from the point of view of the trees, but then he discovered there were some technical problems....

I can totally relate to Powers’ desire to move beyond a particular point of view and access some much richer, more complex, and deeper realm. Since Into the Forest and Here in This Next New Now are first-person narratives, in many ways they are bound by the points of view of their narrators. But in each of those novels, the characters are invited to go beyond their little human selves and connect in deeper and more meaningful ways with the natural world.

C.L.M.: As I was reading your text, I was thinking of Jean-Claude Pinson’s notion of “Poét(h)ique.” He argues that “[a] poem is more than a verbal object offered for aesthetic pleasure or analysis. It is also a proposition of a world, a proposition as to a potential modality of inhabitation” (quoted in Meillon 17-18). Do you think Burl’s language allows for alternative modes of inhabiting the world?

J.H.: Like Ursula K. Le Guin, I think a story can function as a thought experiment. A story can examine a way of being in the world to discover more about what it might mean. We can inhabit the consciousness of a poem and even be changed by it in a similar way.

The characters in my novels come out of me, but they also inform my own next iterations of being. Their ways of seeing and being impact who I am.

C.L.M.: You focus on the notion of voice in both novels. In Into the Forest, Nell writes a first-person diary, but this format is left behind at the end of the novel, when they leave their house. On the other hand, Burl is revealed to be a campfire storyteller at the end of Here in this Next New Now. Why do you place such emphasis on the notion of voice, through first-person narrators, diaries, and campfire stories? Is it because these forms prioritize bodily responses and interconnected encounters over institutionalized discourses?

J.H.: The points of view of my other novels have been limited third-person omniscient, but I think what made me choose first-person narrators for these two books is that that perspective allowed me to shift back and forth from present to past tense in a way that felt natural to the narratives. Usually, when someone is telling a story, they’re describing what happened from a particular point in time. Their knowledge of the outcome of the events they are relating informs their attitudes and insights about those events. But I did not want the narrators of these two novels to know the outcomes of their stories in advance. Instead, I wanted Nell and Burl to be learning their fates along with their readers (or, in Burl's case, listeners).

I also hoped to capture a sense of immediacy in those two novels, and of course immediacy has to do with physicality, with specific moments embodied in time.

C.L.M.: This fits well with the title of the second novel. Here in This Next New Now incorporates four deictics– “Here,” “This,” “Now,” and “Next” –suggesting a rejection of linear temporality rooted in the past/present/ future triad in favor of the immediacy of enunciation.

J.H.: I struggled to find the right title for that novel for a long time. Sometimes when I’m trying to settle on a title, I’ll read back through the book and look for specific phrases that might suggest a larger resonance or significance, and Burl's use of "here in this next new now" in the text to identify a particular moment in time seemed like it captured some of the uniqueness of Burl's language and the immediacy of ers experience.

Le Temps d’après flows off the tongue, whereas Here in This Next New Now has a vastly different rhythm. I wanted the English title to reflect the fact that Burl's is a slightly different language, but I like the lilt and balanced rhythm of Le Temps d’après, too.

C.L.M.: What you are saying is interesting because both novels end with what I would call contemplative cliffhangers. They explore open-endedness and refuse to conclude the story. Burl’s journey ends with ers decision to leave the forest and move forward, opening up new possibilities.

J.H.: As a reader, my favorite endings are ones where it seems as if the story is complete while the lives of the characters will continue. I like feeling satisfied that the stakes of the story have been met, while also being invited to continue thinking about the characters and imagining what might happen next in their lives. That’s the kind of ending I like to try to achieve in my writing, too. One of the reasons I was reluctant to revisit the characters from Into the Forest in another novel was because I didn't want to limit what might happen to them next in readers' minds.

C.L.M.: I’ve been reflecting on the “song of the earth” we discussed earlier and considering Burl’s definition of storytelling. For Burl, ers stories seem to be naturalized, intertwined with the flow of a river and the passage of time, as though they are part of the natural rhythms of life. At one point, e says “What this story might hold I don’t know yet, since I am taleing [sic] it as I live it, swifting it beyond our Forest and this known now in hopes to find a lodge in some far mind” (Hegland, 2024 3). And later e explains: “Stories never end, you know that as well as me. Like time or water or what Nell called matter, tales flow ever on, shifting and branching and twisting, turning constant to something new. There is always something that happens next, always a new chapter or another sideline, always something more to tale about what’s already been. Some way or another, stories will outlive us all. […] But that’s a tale for a different fire” (252-253). How does Burl’s definition of storytelling shape your perspective on the role of stories in connecting us to time, nature, and the evolving ways we understand ourselves and the world?

J.H.: Stories are integral to who we are and how we understand ourselves. They help us make sense of the world. In the case of the richest stories, their meaning changes depending on when and where we read them. King Lear meant something different to me when I was 20 years old than it does now.

I recently read that many disparate ancient cultures, from the Indigenous Australians to the ancient Greeks, share a very similar story about the constellation we call the Pleiades. People have long wondered why that constellation is also referred to as the Seven Sisters even though there are only six stars visible to the naked eye. It turns out that some anthropologists are now speculating that a version of that story was first created 100,000 years ago, before the people who became Australians and Europeans left Africa, back when there were actually seven stars visible in that constellation. It delights me to think it might be the case that that story has been alive and traveling the world for 100,000 years.

C.L.M.: I see, you mean that even written forms of cultural artifacts have unstable meanings. I think this instability or potentiality of meaning is present in your works. I was reflecting on what we were saying about language. A specific moment came to mind where language seems to fail or stop. I was thinking of Eli’s and Nell’s final moments in the story. Eli says “Tell Nell.” And Nell later says “Tell Eli.” Nothing else. As a reader, I wondered what “it” could mean, exactly. But I don’t think that’s the right question. It’s something bigger on the nature of poetic language, right? Do you think this represents a failure of language? Or maybe it’s the opposite, something like the excess of poetic language? The way it goes beyond just words.

J.H.: That’s a great question and insight. I think every reader will interpret that moment differently. It’s open-ended enough that I wouldn’t presume to say, “This is what it means.” For me, though, it suggests both the limits of language–language can’t fully capture everything–and also that language is an incredible means of connection. In their dying moments, Nell and Eli are thinking of each other. That suggests a lot about what they meant to each other, and what they might have come to share if they had lived. I'd like to think their final words also suggest that language can convey something deeply human, even when it’s incomplete.

C.L.M.: Yes, I think you are right. It doesn’t stay explicit or give us a full grammatical statement, but that’s what makes it poetic. It opens up different emotions, bodily responses, even existential angst. It also shows they’ve been thinking about each other for years, which adds a tragic element. So maybe “failure of language” isn’t the right term. It’s more like the fullness of language, how it transcends its boundaries to express something profound.

J.H.: Exactly. Language can never capture the entirety of an experience. But it can offer its own deeply meaningful experience, and in that moment, I'd like to think that it does.

C.L.M.: In Here in This Next New Now, Burl rejects, or at least goes beyond, ers mothers’ traumas. E seeks humanity in the remains of the old world, outside of the forest. How do you see this tension between memory and renewal embodied by the younger generations?

J.H.: I mean, that’s just a perennial dance between the generations, isn’t it? I think in Burl’s case, e’s not rejecting ers mothers’ traumas, but neither is e taking them on as ers own. I think that’s partly thanks to ers mothers, who’ve tried to protect er from their own suffering.

All of the other characters that Burl meets have also had their own traumas, but despite their initial bitterness, they, too, turn out to be large-hearted. I am quite hopeful that they’ll continue to find ways to heal, even as they encounter new problems as well.

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