Interview: Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky by Skylar Lyralen Kaye
- Archaeolibrarian
- 4 hours ago
- 9 min read
Book Details:
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?
I was 12. It was a very precise moment. I was in sixth grade and Sister Frances, who we called Sister Snowstorm because she had the worst dandruff I have ever seen (stuck in her eyebrows, on her cheekbones, coating her shoulders and chest, had us write a poem. I remember her, and I remember the light falling in a panel from an overhead window, with dust motes swirling. The world came into focus and I thought, “I want to be doing this for the rest of my life.”
How many books have you written?
6. But I’ve also written plays and screenplays.
Completed:
1 novel
1 novella
2 memoirs
2 books of poetry
How long does it usually take you to write a book?
I just wrote a memoir and it took 2 years. 2-3 years unless I get really luck and it just comes out and doesn’t need a ton of work. That rarely happens.
How did you come up with the idea for your book?
I was into this book by Jay McInerney about Japan that he’d written in the second person. I had just returned to the States after teaching and living in Japan, and I wanted to write about a young world traveler. The first draft took place in Japan and Thailand, and it was really hard to cut those sections. But the book had a life of its own!
Who are your favorite authors?
Ryka Aoki, James Baldwin and Kristin Cashore at the moment. I have always been drawn to other queer writers, and I love fantasy and badass protagonists.
Where is your favorite place to write?
I love my home office. I like having a stable place, decorate with things that inspire me. I just sit down and get to it.
When you develop characters do you already know who they are before you begin writing or do you let them develop as you go?
I always know who they are, but I don’t always know what they’ll do. I have a strong felt sense of them, and I walk around imagining them speaking to each other. The only exception to this is the character of Janet, the mother in this book…she was very slippery. I think her inner life is a bit empty and that was hard to capture.
Do you aim for a set number of words/pages per day?
I really don’t. It’s mostly hard for me to stop writing, so my challenge is not to write past the point of exhaustion and to trust it will all still be there tomorrow.
Are your characters based on people you know?
Often they are. I create composites of people. But in Priest Kid, everyone is imaginary. I did a lot of research for the original story, interviewing female and gay Episcopal priests and their adult children. That led me to creating more and more devised work, in which I do interviews and then let my imagination fly. That’s now my favorite.
Do you use your experiences in your books?
I don’t know how any writer could avoid leaning into what they know about the human condition. Like in Priest Kid, I wrote about a family very different than my own, but I was really exploring leadership, and what it’s like to be isolated by being the one people come to, and yet understanding that anything else wouldn’t be ethical. I was running a theatre company at the time, and so I definitely used that experience to create the experience of the priest in my book.
Do you ever get writer’s block?
I used to get writer’s block when I first started writing, and then I had a really bad year when I didn’t write at all. It was like living inside a block of wood. But I found Dorothea Brande, Natalie Goldberg and Anne Lamott and I haven’t had writer’s block in 30 years.
Does writing energize or exhaust you?
Both. I’ve mentioned my challenge already—if I don’t make myself stop before I hit a wall of exhaustion, then I’m depleted. But otherwise I get so excited about creating a story! And then I run around and can’t shut up about it.
What has been one of your most rewarding experiences as an author?
Listening to my writing group laugh out loud at my work. I worship at the altar of funny, even though I write about difficult subjects, and that just made me totally happy.
What do your friends and family think about you being a writer?
Most of my friends are artists and they LOVE it. Very supportive. My ex of 35 years had a whole relationship with my writing and my relationship to my writing. They loved to tell the story of sitting down to dinner, and I lifted my fork, and was struck by an idea for the story I was writing. I just sat there with my fork in the air, and then I put it down and made a beeline for my office without saying a word. They knew I’d forgotten where I was. They would tell the story and say, “This is what I signed up for.” They’d laugh, and then they’d sigh. The love and the challenge of love.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
I paddle board! Talk to friends! Travel—I’ve been on the road for 8 months now. I also perform and make films and play with kids.
Do you like music or silence when your write? Do you outline or do you just write?
Silence, absolutely. And I just write. But the outline is pretty much there in my head, I just never write it down.
Do you prefer pen and paper or computer?
Computer.
Do you write as routine or do you write when you feel like it?
I write when I’m inspired, but then I’m most inspired and have more ideas than I can possibly realize.
What do you love best about your current book?
The hope of finding a family of choice and the love between siblings.
What is your next project?
Bachelorx, a Nonbinary Memoir, which is finished and with a book designer at the moment. I’m so jazzed about this one!
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/
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