BLOG TOUR: Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky by Skylar Lyralen Kaye (Excerpt + Q&A with Author)

BLOG TOUR

Book Title: Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky

Author and Publisher: Skylar Lyralen Kaye

Cover Artist: 100 Covers

Release Date: January 2, 2025

Third person/Past tense/Single POV

Genres: Literary Queer Fiction

Tropes: Recovery, family dysfunction, queer friendships

Themes: Mother/daughter, homecoming, recovery

Length: 68 000 words/234 pages

Heat Rating: 3 flames

It is a standalone book and does not end on a cliffhanger.

Goodreads

Buy Links

Amazon US | Amazon UK

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A reluctant prodigal queer daughter returns to her dysfunctional alcoholic family and struggles to climb out of her familiar role of savior.

Blurb

Erin has spent the last six years abroad, teaching English in Spain, France, Japan. Now, she’s back home in Maine for Christmas, for the first time in years. Her abusive father, Thomas, made it clear that Erin, a lesbian, was not welcome in the house, but her mother, Janet, recently ended the marriage, then invited Erin to come home for the holiday. “Just us three girls,” says Janet, including Erin’s younger sister, sixth grader Beth—though Thomas tends to show up at night drunk and sit in his car in front of the house. Erin bickers with Janet even as she helps her mother get on her feet—setting her up a bank account, making her a resume to apply for jobs—but when it becomes clear her father is trying to reconcile, Erin—who isn’t ready to forgive—leaves for Mexico. She takes a bus to Arizona, where her drinking and her guilt over abandoning Beth get the better of her. She stops in Tucson to attend some Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. With the help of her no-nonsense sponsor, Maggie, Erin attempts to make sense of her life up to this point, beginning with the tumult of her parents’ marriage. As Janet plans to come down to Tucson to visit her, Erin must consider the possibility that she didn’t have one abusive parent, but two. Kaye captures Erin’s complex emotional journey with elegant, salt-of-the-earth economy. “They have a saying about people who keep running away,” Janet tells Erin at one point. “Things catch up with you sooner or later.” While many aspects of Erin’s situation and her reactions to it—substance abuse, sabotaged love, solo travel, motorcycles—may strike the reader as slightly predictable, Kaye fashions her in such a way that she feels like an individual rather than a cliche. It’s a breezy read despite the dark subject matter, and the reader quickly gets swept up in Erin’s redemptive saga.

KIRKUS REVIEWS
Our verdict: Get it!
A raw, emotional novel of recovery and familial reckoning.
A reluctant prodigal daughter returns to her dysfunctional family in Kaye’s debut literary novel.
It’s a breezy read despite the dark subject matter, and the reader quickly gets swept up in Erin’s redemptive saga.

MELIZA BANALES, Lambda Award Finalist

Skylar Lyralen Kaye’s “Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky” is a striking and rebellious coming of age story. With every pit stop, AA meeting, and second chance Kaye’s raw portrayal of Erin—a complex survivor turned adventurer— offers a snapshot of a young Queer finding her way through trauma and leaving room for hope, even in the most unexpected places.

TINA D’ELIA, Award-winning poet and Solo Performer
Riveting and timely! In Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky Erin, a young world traveler returns home, where ghosts, family, and unexpected arrivals challenge her in ways to which any reader can relate. Erin travels through lovers’ beds, desert skies, and looming memories in this novel of relationship cliffhangers.

Excerpt

Erin stood in the school hallway, shaken out of the six years of her life in Spain, France, and Japan by her mother’s voice. She could feel the moment like a snapshot, a stilled image before everything shifted away from her toward an end she couldn’t see. Until now, Erin had told herself it was easy to endure her mother’s hostility on her yearly visits, easy to stay with friends and sneak to see her sister, and easy, always, to leap again onto the wide sweep of road she’d taken to get away from home. In the beginning of December, the secretary at the language institute in Madrid where Erin taught English had come into an empty classroom and handed her a message. She stood dumbfounded at first, blonde eyelashes shading her pale blue eyes, almost too shocked to recognize her mother’s name. She had looked at the secretary’s dark skin, into her darker eyes, before turning to the classroom window. Fumes from the cars blew up from the street; the gray Madrid sky shifted so a brief glimpse of light slipped through as if by mistake. She opened the note. It said to call whenever she could. Now.

The secretary waited. Erin extended her lower lip and exhaled, blowing up the bangs that hung over her forehead. She spoke in her native American. “Shit,” she said. “What does she want?” She stuffed the note in the pocket of her Oxford shirt and spun so fast her long red gold braid flew over her shoulder with a soft thud.Halfway out the door she stopped and turned around. The white blue of her attention washed over the secretary, bathed her and held her up as Erin smiled an apology, her face changing from bone-hard to a gentle mirth, as if she and the

shared a secret, as if they were the only people in the world. The secretary had smiled back. People usually did.

Erin walked around with the message in the pockets of different shirts for almost a week. She’d didn’t want to zoom on her iPad; her mother didn’t know she had one. She’d dumped her last burner—too many women calling after one-night stands—so she could truthfully email her mother and say she didn’t have a phone and didn’t plan to get one. After all, she didn’t plan. She usually just procrastinated for a week or two between burners. She’d avoided her mother’s calls as she did those of the stalker women. The sound of her mother’s voice sent stitches of cold threading through her stomach. She didn’t want to call back.

Q&A with Skylar Lyralen Kaye, fae/they

Introduce yourself and your writing

Hello! I’m a non-binary social justice creator, writing about gender, identity, trauma, family (chosen and origin). My work is literary, redemptive, and often experimental. I love being queer and writing queer content!

How long have you been an author?

I published for the first time in 1990, so I guess that’s the start.

Tell us about your new release. What inspired you to write it?

Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky—I started writing it 30 years ago! I had just returned from teaching English in Japan, and the early drafts were very much about traveling and being wild…but as the book evolved, it honed in on the experience of chosen family, of people who show up and love you without warning. So now traveling is the back story and the narrative drive is about the tension between wanting your origin family to be a safe place and knowing it never will be.

How did you decide on the title?

Titles are so hard! The final title was my third or fourth. I originally wanted Anywhere but Here. Turns out that title has been used by a lot of people. So I started brainstorming with my people and googling—I wanted something about traveling and also about landing. And when I settled on this, it turned out when you google it, you just get my book. And that is so important.

What are you working on at present? Would you like to share a snippet?

I’m working on a nonbinary memoir about leaving a 35 year queer asexual marriage to go on the internet and date. It explores gender, neurodivergent identity, sexual awakening and loss. Here’s a snippet:

In front of the old arcade with the chipped paint gone gray, I unload my board and walk it to the grass near the beach. The woman at the rental place explains rates as my phone dings. Who gets out of the gray SUV pulling in over the dirt and stones? One of my failed dates from polyamory. Almost exactly a year earlier, we’d met on Zoom. Maybe the sexiest human I had ever seen, he identified as nonbinary at the time and got on video in a white sleeveless shirt that revealed a lot of cleavage, plus full lips, ombre blonde hair, brown eyes, a rasp in his deep voice, Puerto Rican accent. SEXY. Twenty-five years younger, he talked non-stop during our one and only polyamorous zoom date call. Sometimes he did things off camera when I tried to speak. He lit up a blunt before I managed to get off Zoom. Which it took me an hour to do.

I WAS LIKE, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?

So, definitely a no.

Not even a question.

A HUGE NO! THOUGH HOT AS FUCKING HELL!

Neither of us reached out again. Until, apparently, now.

He gets out of the car, every bit as sexy, still cis woman passing, in a black onesy with lacy long sleeves. He’s tall. Muscular. Showing cleavage. He smiles with his whole face, a heart-opening genuine welcome, then pulls me into a big hug.

WHAT THE FUCK?!

“We know each other,” I tell him. “We met on Zoom.”

What is the hardest part of writing any book?

For me the hardest part is deciding what feedback to incorporate. Every writing needs to get feedback to really improve, every writer needs and editor. But when you disagree, it’s hard to stay with your own vision without second guessing. I spend a lot of time making sure I’m true to myself.

What novels do you adore/re-read?

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. I finished it and immediately started reading it again. I have read everything by her I can get my hands on. I love the trans content and also the exploration of the Hawaiian vernacular in her early work.

I also re-read everything by Kristin Cashore as well as the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Series.

Which other writers do you follow?

My favorite writer of all time is James Baldwin, so I have collected his works. The poetic elegance of his prose combined with the deep wisdom and insight about race and queerness in America is unparalleled.

Are any of your characters based on you or people you know?

My characters are always composites of people I know combined with my imagination. I root in what I understand of the psychology of people I have loved, and then I do a kind of “what if.” It’s interesting. I’ve done a fair amount of devised writing in theatre and film, in which I interview people in order to tell their stories. Usually they want to be disguised in some way…and I find this is my best source of character.

Do you have a favourite character and/or book you’ve written? Who, what and why?

I love Sully in my current novel—nonbinary, trans masc and so loving! And yet, my novella, Priest Kid (based on Saint John the Divine in Iowa, a screenplay) has two characters named Alex: Young Alex, gender nonconforming and poly, and Reverend Alex, a liberal Episcopal priest and the mother of Young Alex’s girlfriend. The two Alexes are my favorite characters. They are so opposite and so much the same! I love their integrity and their nonconformity. Their strength and humor.

UntiI I wrote my memoir, Priest Kid was my favorite project. It has no villains—it’s about good people, queer and allies, trying to overcome their biases to love each other. Young Alex was raised Seventh Day Adventist and is religion-phobic. Reverend Alex is a priest whose daughter wants her lover to give up being poly.

Now I think my memoir is my favorite because I combine the mythopoetic with humor and inner monologue in different voices.

Do characters and stories just pop into your head, or do you take your time thinking about and planning them?

Usually I’m driven by something in life toward a story—the passage of gay marriage, a year of separation and loss. The story pops into my head, but then I basically write it all in my mind, listen to the character voices, and don’t go to the page until I have a good idea of the arc and narrative question.

Do you get emails asking why characters didn’t get together and whether you’re going to write more about them?

I have received a lot of emails about Priest Kid, which I have said I will follow with Rebel on the Seventh Day (Young Alex’s story). People want to know what happens to all the characters.

About the Author

Skylar Lyralen Kaye, fae/they is a queer social justice and award-winning writer as well as a lifelong activist. They have a BA in English from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College. They were nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Fiction in 1997 and were a finalist for the 2005 Massachusetts Cultural Council of the Arts Awards in Playwriting. They have published in literary journals such as Calyx, Persona, Phoebe, Girlfriends, Happy Magazine and the anthology Out of the Ordinary, Children of LGT Parents as well as winning the Boston Amazon Poetry slam finals and performing on the slam team. Their foray into filmmaking brought awards that include the 2021 NE Film Star Award as well as 12 film festival awards for the web series Assigned Female at Birth. In theater, they won 2018 Best in Fringe at the San Francisco Fringe for the one person show My Preferred Pronoun Is We, in 2017 the Moth Story Slam and 2018 the Boston Story Slam. Some other awards include: the 2015 Meryl Streep Writers Lab for Screenwriters and the 2002 Stanley and Eleanor Lipkin Prize in Playwriting. Kaye’s memoir, Bachelorx, will be released in 2026 For a complete list of awards and credits please visit https://lyralenkaye.com/

Author Links

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