Writers are readers. We were readers long before we became writers, and reading is a habit we can’t break. It is a habit that broadens minds and introduces us to new worlds.
Or, in some cases, as in the book I am focusing on today, it takes us back to the world we thought we left behind.
I read in every genre. Memoirs were high on my mother’s reading list, so I borrowed them off her shelf and read them too. The way people think and view their life experiences fascinates me. I enjoy the contrast of the turning points in their lives, juxtaposing them with what I see as the rather mundane moments of mine.
So now, let’s get down to the book, Calico Lane.
But first, the Blurb:
How do we survive when who we are is not the person our family expects us to be?
Judy Kiehart’s Calico Lane deals with universal themes of family, acceptance, faith, and love; it is a memoir of confusion and muddled thoughts that slowly untangle as a sturdy heritage endures.
In a small Pennsylvania town, a neighborhood called The Lane is surrounded by dense woods, creeks, and rutted mining tracks. Not even the rumored child-eating spiders inside an old structure scare Judy. What frightens the ten-year-old is that someone may discover her secret.
Set in a time before sexual identity became a household phrase, Judy develops confusing emotions for an older girl, and, year after year, girl after girl, the feelings continue. Judy’s friends want to kiss the boys. No one talks about girls kissing girls. Over time she fears her emotions are not typical, and if continued, will bring shame to her family and the town’s Russian Orthodox Church. But harboring a secret is paralyzing.Armed with an affable sense of humor and her mother’s housekeeping principle, “everything in its place and a place for everything,” Judy begins a life of pretense; after all, the best way to survive being different is to hide the truth, isn’t it?
My Review:
Calico Lane is a gentle journey into the troubles and confusions of knowing you are different from your friends in a truly fundamental way. Judy’s struggle to maintain the strong family ties that sustained her early childhood and still negotiate the troubled seas of her teenage years is endearing.
The world she paints for us is both comforting and terrifying in many ways, familiar to anyone who grew up in a strict religious/cultural tradition.
We all can relate to the fear of losing your parents’ love over something you can’t change. I was born just after Judy Kiehart, and while we were raised in widely different parts of the US, many of our experiences, both in school and out of it, were similar. We both grew up in families with strong religious and cultural traditions, beneath the intense spotlight of the post-WWII focus on visible morality.
We of the lower middle class were happy, prosperous, and above all, we always looked morally good no matter what really happened behind closed doors. We faithfully attended church in our respective denominations every week and participated in all the activities that went along with it.
Family secrets were kept from the children. We were raised with the firm belief that heterosexuality was the only sexuality—you were a woman or a man and, of course, heterosexual.
If you were different, you kept that secret, or you could be jailed, brutally beaten, or even killed. You, or even your family, could lose their jobs. There was no blurring of the lines, no gender identity other than male or female, and who you were allowed to love was defined by strict laws that didn’t allow for any other way of life.
My best friend in school was gay, a secret I kept for him until he came out after the Stonewall riots. This is why I found Judy Kiehart’s memoir of growing up knowing she was attracted to girls and not boys so interesting. It brought me closer to an understanding of my friend’s struggle.
I grew up in a Lutheran family, so many of my family’s traditions differed from Judy’s Russian Orthodox background. But the outward, visible values of middle-class America that she grew up with were the same as mine.
The book flows as if she is sitting with you, sharing her story over a cup of coffee. I highly recommend this memoir to anyone who loves a good story about good people.
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About Judy Kiehart:
Judy’s writing achievements include two one-act plays that paced among the top three winners in national competitions and were staged in Colorado in 2005 and 2015. She was commissioned to write a ninety-minute program for Stage Left Theater in Salida for the 2010 winter holiday season. She describes herself as a glass-half-full, gay Christian and enjoys traveling—whether exploring faraway places or nearby towns. Judy and her wife managed a real estate appraisal business for eighteen years in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and following retirement, relocated to Olympia.
An excerpt from Calico Lane was a semifinalist in the 2021 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Competition.
You can find her at:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22166296.Judy_Kiehart
Purchase Calico Lane at:
https://Amazon.com/dp/0578340836
or at Browsers in downtown Olympia
Artist: Frans Hals (1582/1583–1666)
It deals with things like the mass of objects, the speed at which they travel, how speed and mass are converted to energy, and how mass warps the fabric of space and time.
But what about “It?” Here, we are dealing with possession by the inanimate. We don’t need an exorcist, although a good maid service would resolve a great deal here at Casa del Jasperson. But in this case, we are referencing something owned by the inanimate:
In the case of number 4, the sentence would be stronger without it. Most of the time, the prose is made stronger when the word “that” is cut and not replaced with anything. I say most, but not all the time.
In the written narrative, the many forms of this verb are what 
“Lay” is a transitive verb that refers to putting something in a horizontal position. At the same time, “lie” is an intransitive verb that refers to being in a flat position.
To lie is an intransitive verb: it shows action, and the subject of the sentence engages in that action, but nothing is being acted upon (the verb has no direct object).
The verb that means “to recline” is “to lie,” not “to lay.” If we are talking about the act of reclining, we use “lie,” not “lay.” “When I have a headache, I lie down.”
All around us, gravity works in hidden ways. Gravity on a small scale keeps everything securely stuck to the surface of Planet Earth.
Creating memorable characters is the goal of all authors. After all, who would read a book with bland and uninteresting dialogue? Dialogue is where most information is given to the characters and the reader. However, when we are just beginning to write, many of us are confused about how to punctuate conversations. It’s not that complicated. Here are four rules to remember:
When you envision your characters in conversation, you must think about what the word natural means. People don’t only use their words to communicate. Bodies and faces tell us a great deal about a person’s mood and what they feel.
For this reason, we don’t want to inject an excess of flushing, smirking, eye-rolling, or shrugging into the story. Those actions have a specific use in conveying the mood, but anything used too frequently becomes a crutch.
First up is the particle. In grammar, a particle is a word with a specific purpose that depends on the words around it. It is a function word that is always associated with another word or phrase to impart meaning.
Today’s readers have no patience with Tolkien’s style of paragraph-long compound sentences composed of clause after clause divided by conjunctions, commas, and semicolons.
I try to limit idioms and phrasal verbs to speech, and then only to that of one character. When used in conversation, they sound natural, but even there, I go lightly. I want to show a specific character’s personality but don’t want my prose to feel cliché and overdone.
Artist: 
We are emotional creatures. When we are just starting on this path, getting an unbiased critique for something you think is the best thing you ever wrote can feel unfair.
I could have embarrassed myself and responded childishly, but that would have been foolish and self-defeating. When I really thought about it, I realized that particular plot twist had been done many times before. I thanked him for his time because I had learned something valuable from that experience.
Treat all your professional contacts with courtesy, no matter how angry you are. Allow yourself some time to cool off. Don’t have a tantrum and immediately respond with an angst-riddled rant.
Leah and Tom have no spare bedrooms until the remodel is done. So, we stayed at the Snohomish Inn, two blocks away. It’s an older place but clean.
Sunday morning began with the best avocado toast I’ve ever had. Everyone who knows me has heard how much I love that particular dish. Tom’s version is incredibly simple: a good bread, toasted and topped with mashed avocado, chopped walnuts sprinkled over the top, and a teensy drizzle of honey. It sounds odd, but wow. That was a divine, filling breakfast. The picture I took doesn’t do it justice.
And as a final twist to the craziness–we were finally getting ready for sleep in our hotel room, both of us tired but feeling good about our day. All our toiletries were in a small, dark zipper-bag.
When you are pantsing it (writing-by-the-seat-of-your-pants), themes are like your drunk uncle. They hang out at the local pub until closing time and then weave their way home through dark alleys. Sometimes, as you are leaving for work in the morning, you find them under the neighbor’s shrubs. Other times they make it home.
I often sit on my back porch and just let my thoughts roam, thinking about nothing in particular. Usually, I will end up considering the character’s quest or dilemma. I ask myself what the root cause of the issue is—if it is a crime, why is crime rampant? Is it a societal problem, such as poverty or war? If the core dilemma is unrequited love, what are the roadblocks to a resolution?
These layers offer us an incredible amount of subliminal information about that surreal world and what is going on in reality, what the Matrix truly is.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 