Today, award-winning author Skylar Lyralen Kaye is guesting. They’re talking about their latest release, Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky, an LGBTQ+ literary novel.
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I’ve lived now in something like 5 countries: the US, Spain, Japan, Canada and Portugal. I always wanted to write about how traveling changes you, and how it’s possible to fall in love with a place, a culture, a quality of light. I wanted language to caress the sense of time slowing down so that moments last as the sun fades and stone looks like opalescent magic.
When I started writing Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky, I had just returned to the USA from Japan. The president at the time said, “We Japanese don’t have AIDS because we don’t have homosexuals.” I wanted to take to the streets! But I was an ex pat on a teaching visa, and don’t we all know about deportation of immigrants who speak now?
In order to work for justice, I had to come home. So like me, the main character has chosen to live outside her birth country; and this influences how she sees everything in her world. Her constant leavetakings also affect those who love her. As I explored this, though, I was discovering community and a family of friends, so the initial inspiration led in a very different direction. The book isn’t about leaving; it’s about finding and holding wherever you can. It’s about the miracle of a family of choice and bonds that redeem the most painful parts of life. It’s about queer friends and allies willing to grow.
My protagonist left and went to the farthest extremes of self-reliance. Her love of travel is a love of difference. She needs the aesthetic of Europe and Asia to remind her that life can be what you choose rather than what you are born to. She needs the daily of language, culture, vision.
She believes she will bring these things with her as strengths when she is called home to protect her mother and sister. She believes she can do anything. Of course, she can’t. Of course she is swept back into the family dynamics like an undertow! I was so inspired by the idea that failure teaches as much or more than success, and that humility is the gateway to more authentic closeness. I love the phrase, Wherever you go, there you are.
So the initial inspiration of writing about the world and falling in love with place led to a story about falling in love with your friends, with the people you choose, with the ones who help you leave the people who hurt you. Maybe you have to have one in order to find the other. My protagonist certainly did.
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Title: Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky
Author and Publisher: Skylar Lyralen Kaye
Tense/POV: 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
Release Date: January 2, 2025
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.
Available at:
Amazon US | Amazon UK | B&N | Walmart | Kobo
Reviews:
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.
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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/
Follow Skylar: Facebook | Bluesky | Instagram | Substack
Maggie Blackbird 