“She’s a wonderful writer,” Jean Mills, the owner of Blue Heron Books in High Falls, said.

Mills was talking about Susan Rukeyser, the featured author at the bookstore’s June 20 Pride event. Rukeyser read from her novel The Worst Kind of Girl, which she wrote based on her own experience with age and sexuality.

“It's about coming out in midlife,” Mills explained. “There's a lot everybody can relate to with that, especially during Pride Month.”

Rukeyser’s novel centers on 50-year-old Paula, who’s loosely based on Rukeyser – both author and protagonist moved away from a comfortable life in Connecticut after her husband’s death to run an old motel in the California desert while trying to write her first novel.

Along the way, Paula falls in love with a woman named Sky “after a lifetime of men.”

“I was just a 50-year-old woman with a past full of men who fell in love with a woman,” Rukeyser read from her novel. “Bisexual seemed old-fashioned, like people were one thing or another, but I had long since stopped believing that anything was black or white. Everything was shades of gray or hues on the spectrum.”

Rukeyser told the Journal that writing the novel was her way of processing the experience that forced her to ask “what is the reason that I am now 50 and discovering something so big about myself?”

In addition to Connecticut and California, Rukeyser lived in Kingston in the late 1990s and wanted to find bookstores in the area to promote her new novel. Blue Heron Books, Rukeyser said, was a natural fit as a woman-owned bookstore with an emphasis on fighting censorship.

“It’s a book that’s about a woman and the ordinary traumas that you go through and how those keep us from being ourselves. And also, how no matter what, we always end up being the worst according to somebody,” Rukeyser told the Journal.

Rukeyser also has a collection of short works, Bad Words: Feminist, Queer & Otherwise Radical, which had its genesis in an open mic event that Rukeyser founded in Joshua Tree, California. Rukeyser self-published Bad Words because “I really just didn’t want to follow any rules. I wanted to be topical and controversial and political.”

Several other writers shared their work at the event. Jana Martin, who wrote the short story collection Russian Lover & Other Stories; Tina Barry, who wrote the poetry and prose collection I Tell Henrietta, and Nina Shengold, author of the memoir Reservoir Year: A Walker’s Book of Days, all read from their work.

Each author explored themes of womanhood, identity, and trauma in their writing, discussing topics such as being called “young lady” in older age, complicated relationships, and abortion.

“We have to speak that much more loudly and directly,” Rukeyser said. “I think it’s very important that women, queer people, talk directly about their experiences, stop letting other people tell nonsense stories about them. So, it’s very deliberate that these are the books that are being published now."