Calico Lane: Coming Out and Going Home
In her memoir, Calico Lane is the Northeastern Pennsylvania neighborhood of Judith (Judy) Kiehart. In 1953, and for the first seven years of Judy’s life, she lives with her parents in her grandmother’s home surrounded by loving, yet formidable Russian-Czechoslovakian aunts and uncles. Shortly following the family’s move to Calico Lane, precocious ten-year-old Judy suspects she is different from other girls. She explains early crushes away with, “It must be that I want an older sister.”
Judy meets ‘the other side of her family’ and witnesses the sharp contrasts between her grandmothers and extended families. A Russian Orthodox Church at the center of Calico Lane–a mining settlement in the late 1800s–consists of a devote immigrant population where old-timers gossip and where children run free. Judy quickly learns what the family and church will tolerate and accept.
Childhood games of spying and keeping secrets helps Judy discover that the best way to survive being different is to hide the truth. Homosexual lifestyles in the sixties and seventies attracted negative attention. Fear of discovery and defying the “Don’t Make Shame” family mantra drives Judy into compartmentalizing her life to the point of living a lie and fooling only herself. She believes that the way to be like everyone else will be possible if she leaves Calico Lane and never looks back.
With guidance from Auntie Heley–a favorite aunt, and the woman who becomes a life-long confidente-Judy survives her teen years despite many girl crushes. A friendship with other young women results in a two-year relationship with Valerie, and Judy now faces making life-changing decisions.
Valerie’s sudden death profoundly impacts Judy. She questions God, faith, and her family’s stronghold on her life and, through the aftershock of Valerie’s death, Judy deals with guilt and blame. Decades-long struggles with truth and memory weigh heavy on her during marriage, motherhood, and her never-ending desire to be normal–like everyone else.
Set in a time before sexual identity became a household phrase, of all the transformations Judy made in her life, she could not change her true self or deep connections to Calico Lane.
Bio
Jermyn, Pennsylvania is home, though I’ve lived in Colorado most of my life and now reside in Olympia, Washington. I began writing with passion late in life. I adapted two of my short stories into One-Act Plays and placed among the top three in two national competitions. Stage Left Theater in Salida, Colorado, staged both plays and commissioned me to write a 90-minute holiday program for production in 2010.
Calico Lane is my first full-length novel. An excerpt from Calico Lane was a semifinalist in the 2021 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Competition.
Hey Judy, I still miss seeing you at work! I think about you often and am glad you are happy and where you need to be.
Is “devote” immigrant population supposed to be “devout” meaning religious??? Just askin’? Love the picture!!!! It’s soooo YOU!!
This is what you were meant to do…. a life lived to tell a story you always wanted to write…… so happy for you!!
As a cousin , friend and fellow survivor of being raised up and out of Calico Lane, this read will certainly reveal the many layers of living a three part act of being one of societies LGBTQ victim , ,survivor and finally thrivor! Brava Judy !
I know all the hard work that went into this and am standing and applauding at what you’ve achieved.
It was my good fortune to be in the writing group that helped birth this extraordinary life story and a delight to see it get it due.
Has Calico Lane been published & available for sale? We miss you two!
Having recently finished Calico Ln. I went back to some of the short stories. With a better understanding of the relationship between the characters I reread Blue, extremely poignant. Thank you for sharing your life, struggles, pain but especially thank you for expressing it in the gentle loving matter that you did. I rejoice in your victories and current happiness.
For me, your recollection of growing up in Jermyn was cathartic. You reminded me that behind pain can be joy if we only look for it.
I look forward to more stories.
Hi Judy,
So exciting to see you were a featured NAMW member. I read everything on your website and eagerly await the book. How can I get a copy?
I’m so proud to be your friend!
I have been able to read some of the blurbs Judy has put on her website, I can’t wait to buy the whole thing! I have no doubt it will be a well told recollection where Judy’s kindness and spark shines through.
I also got a sneak peak at Calico Lane and could not put it down! Having had a similar childhood, it was a walk down memory lane in some respects. Judy writes with her heart which draws one into the book and shows her warm, loving personality. She is indeed brave to have shared her story. A memorable memoir, to be sure!
I got a sneak peek at this memoir! It is marvelous! Judy reports on challenging times with aplomb and grace. We can feel a mix of the loving and wonderful with that which is bittersweet or devastating. This is a brave memoir with insights to why people and times are the way they are. It’s also an enjoyable retelling of a life that could have been flattened but wasn’t. Judy’s blossoming makes the reader want to cheer. It’s a great read.
Judy Kiehart’s memoir transported me to Calico Lane and made me not want to leave. The Lane is as much a character in her book as the human ones she so deftly renders. This coming-of-age tale will rivet readers, not only because the author combines heartbreak with humor, but because she tells her story with love.
The excerpts I have read of Judy’s memoir have delved into the emotional tangle of family relationships: the expectations, demands, rules of right or wrong, choices made in the name of duty and love.
Introspection is dealt with realistically and the reader comes to know Judy as a unique, funny, loving individual.
I look forward to the publication of Calico Lane. This story is bound to entertain and enlighten and needs to be told.
This is amazing! I’m excited to read more. This is an important story to tell and will have great impacts on those who read it. Lots of love!
I found joy in Judy’s excerpts from her memoir on her website. Having spent a lot of time in the North East, I can practically hear my own relatives’ accents in her writing. I’m looking forward to reading her full memoir!
Even though I had a very different (maybe conventional for the region?) life there, I can identify with Judy’s struggle to be comfortable with her true to herself. Hoping to read her whole story soon.
Wow. So many things to say about this modest blurb. First congratulations for tackling the creative journey of turning those experiences into the form of a story. Memoir writing is not only a chronicle of our lives, but the creative expression of those lives, and as such, gives us all so many new, exciting, intimate and empathetic ways to relate to each other.
In addition you mention the concept of “coming out” – that expression has a very specific meaning, especially from “back in your day” when the implication of hiding in the closet contains so much shame and tragedy. Thank God we’ve moved beyond that and you (and we) are reaping the humanizing uplifting benefits of that cultural evolution. But in a broader sense, the Memoir Revolution is about a much broader “coming out” in which so many of us are using the art of Story to come out of the closet of hidden individuality – there are still so many frontiers of personal acceptance that we still need to cross, and memoirs are providing the bridge. As I said there are so many things to consider in this book blurb, so I’ll just add one more. You’ve chronicled a particular segment of a generation of immigrants, the great migrations of the 20th century, and then the great attempts to homogenize and blend – it’s all here in your book. (The fancy anthropological term for this is “autoethnography”)
Thanks Judy for honoring and rising to the challenge of turning your life into a shared experience we can all learn from and in the process, hopefully grow a little wiser, one memoir at a time.
What a great story. Growing up in a tight knit ethnic community offers the comfort and love and familiarity of the family and neighborhood. However you are under a microscope and being “different” can be frightening to a young girl. Judy lives, loves, and excels leaning into all that was good about her past while moving forward into the future and being true to herself. Let’s get book in print already! I want a copy !
Hi Judy,
I’m reading your wonderful memoir. I grew up in Scranton and now live in Seattle and am 5 years older than you. It’s fun reading about the towns and times of my childhood. Your writing is delicious.
My partner, Barb, will be reading it as soon as I’m done. I’ll explain all about the illustrious Globe Store, where once a year we would get a treat.
Thanks for a lesbian’s view of our birthplace.