News
February 20, 2026
Radio Interview
The Show on KJZZ, Phoenix
Lauren Gilger and I had a conversation about Adobeland, the women’s land that inspired my novel, Desert Haven. Her questions were informed and respectful and it was a pleasure talking with her. You can hear the interview here: There Was Once a Separatist Lesbian Commune in the Desert Near Tucson – Hear the Story of Adobeland.
On The Air with Florenza
I had such a good time with award-winning author and radio talk show host Florenza Lee on her interview show, On the Air with Florenza. She surprised me with quirky and thought-provoking questions about my book Desert Haven that made me appreciate how much
homework she puts into her interviews. Check out her website to see the impressive list of authors she has spoken with.
You can view or listen to my interview on YouTube, Spotify, or Soundcloud. Florenza also does a short teaser of outtakes and bloopers called Intermissions. You can see why I’m responsible for the end of the world HERE.
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March 24, 2025
I wrote about the Perils of Being an Expert as a guest author on the Rattling Good Yarns Press blog. It’s about my journey from being the “storytelling lady” after founding Odyssey Storytelling 21 years ago, to morphing into the “lesbian land lady,” after I wrote Desert Haven. Check out other guest authors on the Rattling Good Yarns blog.
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September 2024
Desert Haven Review in Wild Shrew Literary Review
Thank you to Sandra Butler and the Wild Shrew Literary Review on the Sinister Wisdom website for interviewing me about writing Desert Haven. You can read it HERE.
Here’s the beginning of the interview:
Sandra Butler: What is it about landdykes that initially captured your curiosity/interest?
Penelope Starr: Perhaps it was a way to reflect the trajectory of my own life, if not in actual fact, then in spirit. My consciousness was raised by the political unrest of the 1960s, the second wave of feminism, and more visible lesbianism of the 1970s, and utopian ideals generated by authors like Marge Piercy and Starhawk. I’m inspired by women who attempt to construct new societies defined by liberation and freedom, so when I began researching women’s land and interviewing a broad range of landdykes, from extraordinary visionaries to wounded warriors to hippie dropouts, I felt a need to amplify their voices. The decision to write it as fiction gave me the freedom to explore my life experiences and imagine fictional characters who represented the wide range of women’s land dwellers.
Sandra: How did you shape the novel? MORE
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KXCI radio interview
Sunday, July 28, 2024
The amazing hosts of Broad Perspectives, Aspen Green and Kathleen Harris, interviewed me about my book, Desert Haven. It aired on Sunday, July 28 at 3 p.m. on KXCI, 91.3 Tucson’s community radio. You can hear the recording above.
Broad Perspectives Radio showcases women’s voices, views, and interviews; it’s a show by women, about women, but for everyone.
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July 7, 2024
Desert Haven in Arizona Daily Star
Desert Haven was reviewed in the Arizona Daily Star by Christine Wald-Hopkins. Since the Star has a paywall and I can’t provide a link, I am posting the whole review:
‘Desert Haven’ by Penelope Starr. Rattling Good Yarns. 221 pages. $18.95 paperback; $9.99 e-book.
One woman is stung and briefly paralyzed by a tarantula hawk, derailing her companion’s seduction plans. Another, the only straight woman in a rural, man-eschewing community, sneaks into town once weekly for quickies with random men. A third, accepting a ride on a lark to Rocky Point, finds herself unwittingly holed up with a woman she met in a bar, squatting in a luxury condo. These are three of the escapades of the 15 characters in this short story collection by Tucsonan Penelope Starr.
‘Desert Haven’ fictionally chronicles a phenomenon that grew out of feminism in the 1960s. The back-to-the-land movement — women-only communities that believed that throwing off patriarchy and societal strictures would allow women independence and autonomy. This community sits in the desert outside Tucson.
As with any utopian experiment, ideals morph and change as realities, participants, and time impinge on them. Starr successfully represents that by organizing the stories chronologically from 1977 to 2015.
Onto one woman’s acreage, women are invited to find a spot and settle in — in tents, cars, vans or trailers; even to dugout rooms. If they can’t pay the $4-a-night minimum, they can stay anyway. They have nightly potlucks and goddess-invoking celebrations together, and often migrate to other communities, informed by a loose lesbian underground.
In these intertwined stories, relationships are made and lost, characters come and go; the dynamics of the experiment reveal fissures in ground rules: are young boys allowed? How about trans women? What should happen to the land after the owner’s death?
Blurbed as appealing to readers who might have lived on women’s land, or considered it, ‘Desert Haven’ is also interesting to readers unfamiliar with lesbian ‘herstory.’
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June 27, 2024
Review of Desert Haven in Sinister Wisdom
Thanks to Sandra Butler for the wonderful review of Desert Haven for Sinister Wisdom. You can read it here.
Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal that publishes four issues each year. Published since 1976, It seeks to open, consider, and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.
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June 15, 2024
20/20 Vision: Looking Back and Looking Forward, the first annual Southern Arizona Senior Pride Storytelling Gala at The Sc
reening Room in downtown Tucson was a rip-roaring success! Six storytellers took the stage with tales that tickled and edified. I had a lot of fun curating and emceeing the show. Afterward, the tellers, volunteers, and most of the audience walked over to HighWire Lounge on this 104° spring day for cooling beverages and lots of conversation.
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May 21, 2024
Desert Haven is featured on the Rattling Good Yarns page in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s summer catalog, which is distributed to independent bookstores.
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May 9, 2024
Alan Warren, with the House of Mystery Radio Show on NBC, and I had a fun talk about Desert Haven, writing, and the weird voices in the author’s head. You can listen to it here.
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May 6, 2024
The Desert Leaf wrote a great article about the storytelling scene in Tucson, and of course, Odyssey Storytelling is a part of it all. You can read it here.
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March 4, 2024
How does one unlock the power of a single voice telling a true
story? Tony Paniagua interviewed me about the origins of Tucson’s Odyssey Storytelling, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary on March 7th at The Screening Room.
Since March 4, 2004, Odyssey has provided a valuable venue for hundreds of people to tell their stories to eager audiences.
The interview aired on Arizona Spotlight on National Public Radio, with host Mark McLemore. You can hear it here:
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January 1, 2024
Desert Haven, the novel in linked stories that I have been working on for the past 6 years, has found a publisher! I am proud to announce that Rattling Good Yarns Press is the new home of my baby. Look for the book in the Spring of 2024!
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January 2024
Article in the Senior Forum, the newsletter for Southern Arizona Senior Pride 
COMMUNITY PROFILE: PENELOPE STARR BY MEREDITH GLAUBACH
Storytelling has been a through line in Penelope Starr’s life. Senior Pride is very lucky that much of the beginning of our program was shaped by a woman who so strongly believed in the power of each of our stories.
Senior Pride was started as a program of the then-prominent LGBT Tucson organization, Wingspan, in 2004. The following year, Penelope became the second program coordinator for the new program.
She playfully called herself a “Professional Queer” during her time in this position. She led many powerful educational and social programs – some of which may even seem familiar to current Senior Pride participants. Penelope co-produced a program called “A Colorful Life,” popular events where well-known community elders shared their stories. These were recorded on video, and these oral histories take on new meaning as our community has lost many of these voices. Fortunately, Penelope donated the recordings to the Arizona Queer Archives where they are preserved.
Penelope laid the groundwork for some of the current Senior Pride programs, even though there was a gap in years between her initial efforts and the eventual implementation.
Penelope was openly out, but that was not true of the experience of all of the people she served. She received calls from seniors who said they were in their sixties but had been in the closet all their lives. They were calling because they had decided they wanted to come out, and they wanted her support. Penelope would have coffee with these individuals and talk through what their next steps in life could look like.
Penelope coordinated Senior Pride for two years. Individuals came to Wingspan for help, information and support. Penelope recruited many of them for Senior Pride, building a cadre of dedicated volunteers. When funding for Penelope’s staff position was ended, she encouraged continuation of projects, including this newsletter, the Senior Forum, which has been edited, written and published by volunteers now for 20 years.
In 2014, Wingspan was forced to close its doors, but volunteers stepped up to keep working on behalf of an underserved LGBTQI+ community of older adults. They formed Southern Arizona Senior Pride and both continued and re-vitalized the organization which, 20 years on, still exists because of the commitment, donations and grassroots energy of volunteers. Penelope says that this is the “most important work I’ve ever done and the most fun I’ve ever had”. She feels she saved lives, and the position gave her the sense that she could change the world. In the current political moment, she believes Senior Pride’s work is as vital as ever.
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December 22, 2022
A few weeks ago, I completed a weeks-long training to become a digital storytelling facilitator. Stories For Change: The Covid Years is a year-long project that aims to address inequities experienced in our community as a result of the pandemic. Led by Jen Nowicki Clark and Laura Porfirio of Creative Narrations and supported by the City of Tucson and Pima Community College, fifteen of us wrote our stories, chose images, and made editing choices to produce an individual story reflecting our diverse experiences.
The multimedia first-person stories are available for viewing on Vimeo. Mine is called Art Heals, about how I used SoulCollage® as an outlet for creativity to express my experiences and feelings during Covid. You can see Art Heals here.
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September 30, 2022
Writer Ethel Lee Miller‘s article, SoulCollage®: An Unexpected Tool for Stroke Recovery, was featured in the October issue of the SoulCollage newsletter. In it, she insightfully discusses the benefits she derived from a couple of SoulCollage workshops I facilitated. Ethel’s depth of investigation into her stroke recovery is truly inspirational.
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April 16, 2022
My article, “SoulCollage® for Writers and Other Creatives,” has been published in the April 2022 issue of The Netter Letter, the SoulCollage® facilitator’s newsletter. The article explores the intersection between the two creative disciplines and how they can work together It is only available to facilitators
who have joined the World of SoulCollage® online community. To learn more about SoulCollage®, click here.
This card is called The Navigator. It’s an example of working with images as a tool to unlock writing concepts and themes.
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December 24, 2021
I have been turned into a reptile by the incredibly innovative artist Laura Milkins. Thank you, Laura, for melding my image with this beautiful, endangered, extremely aquatic & secretive Mexican Gartersnake. I’m honored to be part of the series.
As a writer, storyteller, SoulCollage® facilitator, and visual artist, I have the privilege of associating with a host of creative people, and sometimes even collaborating (in this case, all I did was share a photo of me taken by Silvia Kolchens.)
Here’s a little about Laura from her website: “Laura Milkins is an interdisciplinary artist living in Tucson, AZ. Her work explores vulnerability, intimacy, and cultural norms, using a variety of media: online-interactive performance, video, drawing, painting, and live radio/podcasting. Through storytelling, her work examines the connection between technology, community and notions of identity.” You can also find her on Facebook.
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December 2, 2021
My personal essay, “Tattoo,” is in the anthology, ADULT CHILDREN, from Universal Table/Wising Up Press.
From the publisher: In this Wising Up Anthology, fifty writers explore—with zest, angst, humor, humility, anger, and love—through stories, poems, memoirs, and creative non-fiction, our constantly changing and, hopefully, maturing relationships with those we raised and those who raised us.
You can read it here, or you can order a copy of the anthology here.
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May 13, 2021
Grant Recipient, Arizona Commission on the Arts 2021 Artist Research and Development Grant. See more about this on my blog. 
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March 2021
Finalist, Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards Writing Competition. Invited to participate in the Master’s Writing Workshop.
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November 2020
SoulCollage® Facilitator Training with Mariabruna Sirabella
SoulCollage® is an expressive arts practice done individually or in community, and I’m excited to offer workshops. Founded by Seena B. Frost, the method fosters creativity and intuition, encourages self-discovery, and offers personalized guidance. You don’t have to be an artist to make SoulCollage® cards. Anyone can create and enjoy this powerful practice. 
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December 2, 2019
Interview with Tyler Barton, co-founder of Fear No Lit, for “Learning How to Read” series with lit events hosts. You can read the interview here.
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May 14, 2018
Review of The Radical Act of Community Storytelling in the Sonoran Arts Network, an online arts journal. You can read the review here.
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April 24, 2018
Interview along with Jen Nowiki Clark of Odyssey Storytelling on the Morning Blend show of KGUN9 TV. You can hear the interview here.
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January 6, 2018
Review of The Radical Act of Community Storytelling in the Arizona Daily Star. You can read the review here.
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January 4, 2018
Review of The Radical Act of Community Storytelling in the Winter 2018 issue of Storytelling Magazine, a publication of the National Storytelling Network.
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December 15, 2017
Review of The Radical Act of Community Storytelling in the December 2017 Story Circle Journal, Vol. 21, Number 4.
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December 13, 2017
Essay, “Kitchen Revolution,” Inside and Out: Women’s Truths, Women’s Stories, Story Circle Network.
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July 7, 2017
Thanks to Shannon Turner (blogger, storyteller, creative director of StoryMuse) for asking me about my tattoo over dinner one night in Kansas City, where we were both attending the National Storytelling Network’s annual conference. Of course, I told her the story and she turned it into a charming interview. You can read her post and hear the interview here: Penelope’s Stars.
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May 2, 2017
Essay, “Creating Connections, One Story at a Time,” National Storytelling Network blog. Read it here.
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March 19, 2017
Interview by Aspen Green and Kathy Harris, “Broad Perspectives”, on KXCI Community Radio, 91.3 FM Tucson, AZ
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March 17, 2017
Interview with Mark McLemore on “Arizona Spotlight,” Arizona Public Media. Listen to it here.
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February 2, 2017
Interview, “Story For Life,” Sherilyn Forrester interviewed Penelope and Molly McCloy about Odyssey Storytelling and Penelope’s new book. Read the article here.
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July 13, 2016
Interview by Steve Pender of Family Legacy Video. Listen to “The Power of Personal Storytelling,” Legacy Video Lounge Podcast – LVL 11 herenew