Anna Sheehan's "A Long, Long Sleep"

Join Dmae Roberts for an in-depth look at Oregon author Anna Sheehan and her debut novel A Long, Long Sleep. As a mix of young adult and science fiction, this impressive work is a futuristic take on the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty picking up AFTER the heroine wakes up. Dmae happened upon this local novel after a friend introduced her to her harpist friend. When she found out that Sheehan taught herself the harp to play at Society for Creative Anachronism gatherings and wrote novels as her passion, she decided to try the book herself and was won over. Hear the story of how the novel comments on mental health issues in children.  
 
In the book A Long, Long Sleep, Sheehan uses Sleeping Beauty as a launching point to tell the story of 16-year old young woman Rosalinda Fitzroy who had been put to sleep in “stasis” by her parents over a period of several decades. She awakens after a period of plagues and famines to find a whole new world of strangers and slowly uncovers her own history of abuse and neglect to carve out a new life for herself. Hear her interview accompanied by her harp music. 
 
Anna Sheehan has written seven books but this is her first published young adult novel, A Long, Long Sleep, was published by  Candlewick Press, in August of 2011. The book has also been published in Germany, France, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Hungary and the United Kingdom. 

About herself Sheehan writes: “Instead of a social life, I swam in books. I became a devoted follower of Diana Wynne Jones and Douglas Adams. I studied acting and Shakespeare with the Young Shakespeare Players of Madison, Wisconsin, and it deeply impacted my direction in life. I then discovered historical re-enactment, where I hung about in velvet, idly strumming a harp while men in plastic armor hit each other with sticks. That too was most enlightening. Despite collecting a technical degree in commercial goldsmithing I instead pursued writing as my primary means of unemployment. I moved with my family to a tiny ranch in rural Oregon, where I still live with my daughter, my mother, and assorted Irish Wolfhounds.”

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