About Jenny
Jenny Yates (she/her/hers) was born in North Carolina, but she didn’t stay there long. She’s lived in many places – Thailand, Vietnam, Germany, Ecuador, Venezuela, San Francisco, and the DC area. Now she and her wife hang out in Tallahassee, Florida.
From the time she was small, she’s always written stories and poems. Two of her books have found their way into print: Your Horoscope: A Guide to Interpretation and Quito Murder Mystery.
For 35 years, her day job was being a freelance astrologer. This meant traveling up and down the East Coast of the US, doing workshops at women’s music festivals, and meeting lots of lesbians. When she wasn’t on the road, she wrote about aspects and transits, guiding people through the crossroads in their lives.
She’s a Scorpio with Libra rising, a bookworm, a movie buff, a romantic, a pagan, and a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
Jenny Yates (she/her/hers) was born in North Carolina, but she didn’t stay there long. She’s lived in many places – Thailand, Vietnam, Germany, Ecuador, Venezuela, San Francisco, and the DC area. Now she and her wife hang out in Tallahassee, Florida.
From the time she was small, she’s always written stories and poems. Two of her books have found their way into print: Your Horoscope: A Guide to Interpretation and Quito Murder Mystery.
For 35 years, her day job was being a freelance astrologer. This meant traveling up and down the East Coast of the US, doing workshops at women’s music festivals, and meeting lots of lesbians. When she wasn’t on the road, she wrote about aspects and transits, guiding people through the crossroads in their lives.
She’s a Scorpio with Libra rising, a bookworm, a movie buff, a romantic, a pagan, and a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
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In a dying world, love takes wing.
It’s 2099, humanity is nearly gone, and the birds are already extinct. Portia walks the emptying streets of her dying town, hoping for a last glimpse of a bird. When she and her brilliant brother Ivan break into a neighbor’s house looking for tools, they find Amelia— traumatized, starving, and hiding.
As Amelia learns to trust her, friendship turns to passion, and Portia’s narrow world opens into something wider and more joyful than she believed was still possible. In a world that has outlawed religion, Amelia introduces Portia to the faith of her grandmothers, a faith of the tactile and the real. Together, the two women go looking for other survivors: seven irreverent elders who call themselves the Nigh End Breakfast and Supper Club, and two abandoned children who make them, improbably, a family.
Then a rift in time and space takes everyone Portia loves, stranding Amelia centuries in the past with Ivan and the children. Amelia begins to discover creative powers she never knew she had, and searches the dimensions for a living world where humans can love one another. Portia, held up by the stubborn humor of the old people, looks for hope wherever it can still be found.
Birdless is a love story that refuses to end where it’s supposed to.
Praise for Leaving Home at 83
“It’s a ‘zine! It’s a movie! It’s a sit-com! Actually, it’s an intimate glimpse into Sandra Butler’s personal journal as an 83-year-old queer Jewish feminist activist leaving her Bay Area home to live close to her daughters in the Red State of Arizona. The ensemble of characters at Desert Manor are hilarious, jaw-clenching, at times worthy of a Jack Russell Terrier head tilt. ‘Caught between not wanting to be a burden and wanting to be taken care of,’ Butler’s writing is tender, funny and unequivocally relatable.”
—Karen Lee Erlichman, LCSW is a psychotherapist, spiritual director, writer and mentor
“Butler’s irreverent account of pulling up roots and attempting to replant them in unfamiliar soil illuminates some of the inevitable truths of our old and getting older lives. She invites the reader to accompany her as she enters her new life with the unforgettable characters of Desert Manor. What was lost and what is eventually found is at the heart of her remarkable story. Reading her words is like sitting in a café with a witty and wise friend and savoring the openhearted truth-telling that comes from years of intimacy.”
—Naomi Newman, actor, director, playwright, co-founder of A Traveling Jewish Theater
“Sandra Butler is an extraordinary storyteller. Accompanying her as she leaves home to live near her daughters, I was swept into the unexpected complexity of this late-life transition, one she navigates with humor and hard-won self-awareness.”
—Terry Greenblatt, women’s peace and justice activist, Senior Advisor, Plowshares
“Sandra Butler addresses the unspoken realities of women’s lives with curiosity, intelligence, and an insistence on honoring these still concealed truths. Now, she has written Leaving Home at 83, chronicling a precipitous change in her life. With her keen intellect, her honesty and humor, she chronicles the losses, challenges, and freedoms of leaving home. Butler is a trustworthy guide, and I am grateful for her well-earned wisdom.”
—Jan Holmgren, president emerita, Mills College
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$18.95