Tell us a little about yourself.
I’m a nonbinary (gender fluid fae tomboy) queer writer and performer, currently in Portugal, though I spent most of the summer paddle boarding in Scotland, the spring paddle boarding in Ireland and the winter in Malta. I also made the web series Assigned Female at Birth and LOVE writing and directing my own work.
What would people be most surprised to know about you?
I lived with the nuns at the end of high school.
Do you have a favorite quote (either from your own books or one’s you’ve read)?
I have a couple:
From Six Feet Under (not a book, but it’s SO good): everyone, everything everywhere dies
From my book: Family sucks and lovers leave. You have to have friends.
How long have you been writing and what made you fall in love with writing?
Ah. Age reveal! I’ve been writing for at least 30+ years. I fell in writing first when I was 12, and it was the way the panel of light fell across the classroom and even the dust motes seemed to take on more life. The honing of the experience of presence and naming—I knew I wanted to do it for the rest of my life.
Did you always want to be a writer?
I knew I wanted to be an actor when I was 5. Writing came 7 years later.
What are your ambitions for your writing career?
I want to increase my impact. I want to be read more and make more money from writing. Awards are great, but only if they lead to people who need my stories actually getting to find them.
What’s your favorite part of writing?
My favorite part is when I see a new way of expressing something—when I surprise myself and discover new techniques almost by accident.
Tell us about your writing style.
My style continually evolves toward both more comic and more magical realism, always literary in that I love language and the way it can sing off the page. So I like to think it’s vividly descriptive and relying on symbolism and metaphor, but also with wry and vulnerable dialogue. Much of my work has sections that take place out of reality altogether.
What does your writing process look like?
I walk around with a story in my head, working it out, and when I have a strong sense of beginning and a general sense of arc, I bring it to the page. I work steadily through a first draft, going back occasionally when I see ways to surprise, take a break, get feedback and really play in the second and third draft.
When/where is your favorite time/place to write?
I have a home office and I write there, usually in the afternoon, often right after exercising. Unless I wake up on fire with a new idea!
Why did you choose to write LGBT romance/fiction?
I’m queer and I write almost exclusively queer content. I’m not sure it’s a choice—it’s what calls to me. Straight people are boring unless queer people are waking them up.
Do you write any other genre?
I write everything. Plays, screenplays, poetry, memoir, novels. I have started a YA trans fantasy, but everything else is expressionistic, literary, queer, even some is avante garde.
Describe a scene in your writing that has made you laugh or cry?
There’s a scene in Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky, in which the main character is saying good-bye to her younger sister. The young sister is making Erin promise they’ll see each other, even if their parents try to keep them apart. I cried every time I worked on it. They love each other so much!
Give the readers a brief summary of your latest book or WIP. What genre does it fall in?
My most recent project, almost ready to be released, is Bachelorx, a Nonbinary Memoir. It’s the story of leaving a very long queer marriage to date and have sex as an out nonbinary neurodivergent person. It’s ironic and uses the mythopoetic/magical realism!
Give us a little insight into your main characters. Who are they?
Erin, the main character, is a lesbian in her mid-twenties who lives as an ex-patriot with no ties—she even uses burner phones she dumps every time a woman gets too serious about her. The only person she’s close to is her best friend, nonbinary Sully, who always falls for older women who leave them. Erin grew up in an abusive home, which she left as soon as she could. Her blonde and conventionally pretty mother, Janet, conservative in her outlook more than her politics, stayed loyal to her abusive husband until the opening of the book, when she found the courage to boot him. But Erin’s father gets drunk and either sits outside in his car or tries to break in, so Janet asks Erin to come home and protect both her and Erin’s younger sister Beth. The beginning is about the costs of such protection, and the wild fluctuations of emotion and behavior as Erin loses control of herself in trying to serve her family. This propels her into another escape that doesn’t work. It’s the not working that transforms the story into one of redemption and connection, even if Erin doesn’t find all the change she seeks.
Will we be seeing these characters again? Is this book part of a series?
This is a single novel and won’t be a series.
Which actor would you like to see playing the lead character from your most recent book?
From Leaving Winter for a Desert Sky, Kristen Stewart!!!! She would be perfect.
What genre/s do you enjoy reading in your free time?
I love literary queer and feminist fantasy and sci fi. I adore Kristin Cashore’s work, which gets queerer all the time. I also read queer literary novels and memoir…if the writing is good, I’ll read anything that isn’t cis and male.
Have you held any interesting jobs while you worked on your books?
Yes! I worked in theater, especially hired as a consultant to do devised theater projects. As in, hired to come and interview 26 immigrant middle school students about their immigrant experience and craft their own words into something they could perform…and then direct it. I also managed an inner city tutoring program for the failing schools in Boston.
How do you relax?
I am a fanatic paddle boarder and often go out on the ocean for hours. I also do yoga, meditate, go to the movies and do improv. I love all these things SO MUCH.
What hobbies do you have outside of writing?
Playing with kids in my family or kids of my friends and traveling.
THANK YOU
A reluctant prodigal queer daughter returns to her dysfunctional alcoholic family and struggles to climb out of her familiar role of savior.
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.
Buy Links
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.
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.
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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