Kiesa Kay

TORNADO ALLEY shares the healing journey of Kiesa Kay, poet and playwright. She grew up by a lake in Tornado Alley. The natural beauty of that lake combined with the kindness of her cousins and others to help her survive the terrible times. She grew up to be an adventurer who travelled to France and learned to find joy in the world.

Carolina Beaumont has lost everything -- her sweet suburban life, her ritzy house and gorgeous car, her identity as a wife and mother -- so she leaps up from the wreckage to embrace an old dream. In an intentional community, she finds a fire-swinging man, an idealistic young woman, and the me she used to be. Anything can happen in the Cicada Year, a time of change and awakening.

Mud puddles, frogs, and mulberries made memories for the Henderson cousins in these poems set in Gardner Lake, Kansas.

In Rebecca Boone: Love Makes a Home, Rebecca Boone, age 72, shares her own homespun wisdom and meaningful memories as she chops wood, cooks stew, and does her mending on a winter evening in 1811. The trail-blazing midwife didn't get the luxury of a home she could keep, but her adventures made up for what went missing. She walked through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky before she found her final rest in Missouri. She gave birth to ten biological children and helped raise six more. In this play, which features old time fiddling, Rebecca recalls how her husband, legendary American frontiersman Daniel Boone, spent as many as two years at a time lost in the woods. The courageous hunter also managed to lose all the family's money and land about as fast as he earned it, and it was up to Rebecca to take care of the family and teach them all to hunt and forage so they would have food and shelter, too. She had little bitterness and no guile. Blessed with a supportive family and an indomitable spirit, Rebecca revels in an evening alone as she recalls her most intriguing secrets.