About Helen Button…winner of the Eludia Award form Hidden River Arts.

Daughter of a Collaborationist. Housekeeper to Gertrude Stein. An ordinary woman lives through extraordinary times.

In this dual timeline narrative, a young French housekeeper lives out the years of World War II near Vichy France with her famous employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. Decades later, she returns to France from the United States, finding that a fateful decision she made as a young woman echoes in the present in unexpected ways.

In the years leading to Nazi occupation, young siblings Hélène and Guillaume Bouton, reluctant newcomers to the village of Bilignin, France happen upon new friends—their eccentric neighbors Gertrude Stein, and her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas. Dubbed “Helen Button” by Stein because she is half-American, Hélène–the stepdaughter of a French Vichy officer–grows up in a tense climate of advancing war. In 1939, war begins. Hélène, now eighteen years old, returns to France from a visit to the United States. To escape her fretful alcoholic mother and oppressive household, she takes a position as a bonne femme (housekeeper) for Stein and Toklas. When a careless remark by Stein seems to doom a young Jewish boy, Isaiah, brought into safety by the Resistance, Hélène’s friendship with the couple becomes strained. Increasingly distressed by Gertrude’s unusual political affiliations, Hélène and her lover, Resistance fighter Milo Fourche, begin to spy on the writer through her work. One night near the war’s end, Milo learns the Gestapo plan a brutal attack on a nearby safe house for Jewish children. Hélène has the chance to intercept, which could save Isaiah’s life, as well. Instead, the consequences of that fateful night will take Hélène a lifetime to face down.

In Spaulding’s intricate debut novel Helen Button, she deftly weaves a dual narrative timeline echoing between dangerous Vichy France during WWII and political upheaval in modern day Paris to tell an atmospheric tale of love and loss, war and death, across multiple generations. A tour de force of extraordinary historical detail, fresh perspectives on well-known figures like Gertrude Stein, and exquisite, lyrical writing, Helen Button is a beautiful examination of fate, survival, and how harrowing moral choices in wartime can have far-reaching effects. The story of Hélène Bouton will stay with me for a long time.     —Kali White VanBaale, author of The Monsters We Make and The Good Divide

Carol Roh Spaulding is the author of Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories, winner of the 2022 Flannery O’Conner Award for Short Fiction from University of Georgia Press and 2024 recipient of the Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal for Short Fiction. Her stories and articles have won several awards including a Pushcart Prize, Notable Mention in Best American Essays 2019, the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, Ploughshares Cohen Award for Best Story of the Year, the Katherine Anne Porter Award for Short Fiction from Nimrod International, and the David Nathan Meyerson Award for fiction from Southwest Review. She is a professor at Drake University in Des Moines and lives with her husband in Granger, Iowa.

This event will be moderated by Kali White VanBaale, a Des Moines-area creative writing professor and award-winning author of novels, short stories, essays, and articles. She is the author of the novels The Monsters We Make, The Good Divide, and The Space Between.  She’s the recipient of an American Book Award, an Independent Publisher’s silver medal for general fiction, the Fred Bonnie Memorial First Novel Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for General Fiction, an Iowa Arts Council major artist grant, and the Great River Writer’s Retreat. Kali holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’s a core faculty member in the Lindenwood University MFA in Writing Program and regularly teaches writing workshops at various conferences and festivals. In addition to writing and teaching, Kali is an advocate and state lobbyist for mental healthcare reform.

Born and raised on a dairy farm in southern Iowa, she now lives and writes on a quiet acreage outside Des Moines with her family.