About Priest Kid, the Queerly Divine in Iowa
Kirkus Reviews:
Returning home for a holiday, a young woman faces stirring parallels between her difficulties with her polyamorous girlfriend and memories of growing up with her liberal Episcopalian priest mother.
In this debut novella, Sarah seems the stereotypical Stanford graduate student, a hippie from the Midwest who’s turned her issues with her mother, Alex, into the study of psychology. Reluctantly traveling to Iowa from California for Easter, she is dropped back into thorny family dynamics. The demands on her mother’s time as leader of her flock and caretaker of the community leave Sarah at best resentful of not having all of her affection and, at worst, becoming a project, another problem in the priest’s congregation to be addressed. Compounding matters is the other Alex now in Sarah’s circle, a vibrant punk-rock pillar of gender-queerness, whose commitment to polyamory has left the psych student with one more woman in her life whose love she must share. When her girlfriend surprises her by joining her for the break, Sarah’s wish to avoid introducing the two Alexes who cause her startlingly similar complications means the reopening of old wounds as well as solutions that won’t necessarily close them. The strength of Kaye’s novella—and in one instance, its weakness—is its thrift. Sarah’s first-person narration employs a self-aware but welcoming style, utilizing natural digressions to fill in the gaps of her childhood and her burgeoning relationship with her new girlfriend. These asides are never tedious; they are the ideal detours that never overstay their welcome. Their lone failing is in adequately fleshing out Sarah’s love interest—she is charismatic and cool but as rich and heartbreaking as her back story of being ejected by her Seventh-day Adventist family. …The dialogue is well-tuned; even when Sarah’s psych student insights seem a little too analytical, this awkwardness fits. The Rev. Alex is a resonant character, the liberal yet devout priest giving so much to her community that many readers will come away wanting further stories about her.
Heart-wrenching, heartwarming, charming, but most of all fun—a meeting of the most complex of relationships, plagued by the same aches.
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Author Bio:
Lyralen Kaye, fae/they, is a gender fluid award-winning screenwriter, playwright, poet, fiction writer and filmmaker. Priest Kid is based on Saint John the Divine in Iowa, Kaye’s first screenplay, which won the Stowe Writers Lab, was a finalist for the 2018 Blacklist Female Identified Writer Award, won the Meryl Streep-funded Writers Lab in 2015 was a finalist for the 2011 Roy W. Dean Award and a semi-finalist for the 2011 Pride Plays and Films award.
Lyralen’s fiction and poetry has been published in Girlfirends, Calyx, Persona, Phoebe and others. Their story ‘The Watcher” received a 1997 Pushcart Nomination in Fiction.
In Theater, Lyralen’s play, Ladders to God has also garnered awards: the 2002 Eleanor and Stanley Lipkin Prize in Playwriting, a Massachusetts Council of the Arts Finalist. They also won the 2018 San Francisco Best in Fringe and Techie Best in Fringe for their solo show, My Preferred Pronoun Is We, and was a finalist for the Hollywood Soaring Solo Artist Award.
Other awards in filmmaking and performance: 2021 NE Film Star Award, 13 Best New Media awards for the web series Assigned Female at Birth from 12//2020-1/2021, 2016 Finalist Half the World Literati for Run from Fire, 2017 Moth Story Slam Winner and Boston Story Slam Winner, 1998 Winner of the Boston Amazon Poetry Slam Finals and 2003 Finalist.Lyralen is a professional actor and director and performs regularly in theatre and film in New York and New England.
Lyralen is a professional actor and would be a professional paddle boarder if there was such a thing…they can be found out on the ocean from February to December, talking to the birds and warning the fish of hooks and lines. They would talk to the seals, but then the seals chase them!