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Where Reality Tips Into Wonder
Shinbone Lane follows a runaway teenager in 1974 San Francisco who finds refuge and a found family in a hidden street of artists, misfits, quiet magic, and a wisecracking pigeon. What first sparked the idea for Shinbone Lane as a hidden pocket of San Francisco?
When I moved from San Francisco to Sonoma County about 20 years ago, I was looking for additional freelance writing work. I answered a Craigslist ad and met a young man at a coffee shop for an interview. The ongoing work he had in mind would have required more time than I had, so it wasn’t a good fit. Still, we enjoyed talking and shared things about our backgrounds.
He was a Gen Xer; I’m a baby boomer. I told him about arriving in San Francisco in the 1970s with about $200 in my pocket. I thought I’d visit for a couple of weeks and wound up living there for almost 30 years. He said my early adventures in San Francisco sounded like a fairytale to him—something a young person couldn’t replicate so easily anymore. Housing had already become so much more expensive.
That conversation stayed with me. The idea of writing about that time sat on the back burner for years, gradually taking shape as I returned to it from time to time, until Shinbone Lane emerged.
San Francisco does have many real hidden pockets—places so beautiful they seem magical, and people so inventive and intriguing they seem magical too. I just followed my imagination where it wanted to go. As a storyteller, I’m drawn to spaces where reality tips into wonder. This is true for both my written work and for stories I tell live in performance.
Shinbone Lane almost feels alive. Did you think of the lane as a character?
Yes, I did. The area where I situated the lane is one I’m very familiar with. I lived near the corner of 29th and Sanchez streets for eighteen years, so I walked our dog up the 29th Street hill and drove up to Diamond Heights to shop routinely. That steep hill feels like a part of me now.
Shinbone Lane, an imagined side street easy to miss when driving by, became a living, breathing presence with its own rhythms and moods.
Place has always been important in my work, and Northern California continues to shape my imagination. It was a great amount of fun bringing the lane to life and letting it influence the characters who find their way there.
Found family is central to the story. Why is that theme important to you, and why was it important that the community be imperfect, messy, and sometimes conflicted?
I think almost all of us have some issues to work out with our families when we grow independent as young adults. For some, the issues are minor and family support is a constant. For others, too much trauma stands in the way of family ties being anything but harmful at the time. And there are many shades in between.
It’s a blessing that people can find each other and build a supportive base that becomes a different kind of family. How lucky we are to be able to do that for one another.
As for the community being imperfect, messy, and sometimes conflicted, that reflects both life in this world of ours and my approach to storytelling. And while I want love to be the most powerful force in the end, I don’t shy away from the complications that come with being human.
I lost both of my parents by the time I was eleven, so there’s an undercurrent of loss and darkness that finds its way into my work. At the same time, I am optimistic and delight in my connections with loved ones, as well as the beauty in the world. That tension between light and shadow, hope and hurt is something I return to often, and I hope it resonates with readers.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m at work on another magical realism novel, Ripplewood, set in an out-of-the-way town of that name in Sonoma County, California. The town was named for a forest of ripplewood trees that once existed, though now only one remains, deep in the woods. It’s the same kind of tree that appears in front of Ted’s home on Shinbone Lane, but this book is not a sequel.
The story begins with Emlyn Grady driving home. She was raised in Ripplewood and has been attending San Francisco State University for six years, changing majors along the way and still not quite finding her footing. When she receives a text from her father urging her to come home immediately because of a crisis, she drops everything—including an important meeting her boyfriend has arranged with investors interested in his startup—and heads directly to Ripplewood.
There she finds out her mother is missing, but she’s gone missing before. So what could have happened is a mystery in a town where family roots and history are imperfect, complicated, messy, conflicted and unresolved (of course). There is folklore unique to Ripplewood, but how much is real, how much is fiction and what effect it has had on the town is a topic debated without resolution by the locals. In this setting, the story begins to unfold. And like Shinbone Lane, the story’s layers reveal themselves over time.
I’m interested in how place, memory, and inherited stories shape us, and how we decide what to carry forward. I’m still in the process of writing and discovering the full shape of the book, which is one of the things I love most about the work. I hope to finish the book this year and publish it in 2027.
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San Francisco, 1974. Sixteen-year-old runaway Maddy is escaping the blame for a crime she didn’t commit. Miles from home, she is taken under the wing of the elderly Clara and her neighbor Ted, and soon finds a place among the kaleidoscope of personalities on the oddly named Shinbone Lane.
Ted’s three-story Italianate Victorian house overflows with travelers, free spirits, and artists. His backyard is a haven for all who are willing to see its magic. But burdened dancer Eloise Watkins can’t tolerate the transient “riffraff” in her neighborhood. Their frivolity flies in the face of her grief over friendship lost and her daughter who’s missing. And nobody — nobody— understands.
But like all who tread on it, Shinbone Lane has secrets of its own. And like all secrets, they lie uneasily in the dark, until the truth emerges to lay the past to rest.
At the intersection of magic and reality lies Shinbone Lane and its lively cast of characters who intertwine in the mesmerizing brew of life.
Click ‘buy now’ to step into Shinbone Lane today!
Shinbone Lane
Shinbone Lane is a work of magical realism set in 1970s San Francisco, following sixteen-year-old runaway Maddy as she stumbles into a pocket of the city that feels almost hidden from time. Taken in by warm-hearted Clara and her neighbor Ted at 346 Shinbone Lane, Maddy finds herself surrounded by artists, misfits, and dreamers, watched over by Captain, a vividly colored, opinionated pigeon with a spring for a foot. As she settles into this found family, the lane’s history starts to surface: a bitter neighbor whose daughter vanished, a house that seems to reconfigure itself, a ripple tree that hums and shimmers, and secrets that tie the past and present together until they converge at the annual Shinbone Fair, where healing and reckoning arrive side by side.
Reading it, I kept feeling like the lane itself was the main character. The magical realism sits lightly on the story, but it is everywhere, from the impossible backyard at 346 to the soft chiming of the ripple tree’s heart-shaped leaves and the way Captain quietly nudges people toward wiser choices. Laura McHale Holland writes San Francisco with such affection that I could almost smell the mix of diesel, ocean air, and bakery sweets, especially when the scent of those famous Star Bakery scones with their butterscotch maple glaze drifts up the hill. The choice to juggle many points of view, not just Maddy’s but also people like Clara, Lark, Eloise, and others, gives the book that classic ensemble feel you often get in community-centered magical realism.
What stuck with me most were the emotional currents under the whimsy. This is magical realism, but the magic never erases how hard it is to be human. You feel Maddy’s hunger for safety after months on the road, Lark’s bruised self-image as she compares herself to every woman who passes beneath her window, and Eloise’s grief curdling into control and cruelty as she clings to the idea that her missing daughter must be close by. The book does not shy away from darker turns, including violence and betrayal, or from the way people can exploit each other while insisting they are acting out of love. At the same time, there is a steady thread of resilience that feels very much in line with women’s fiction: characters keep getting knocked down, then choosing, sometimes shakily, to reach for connection again. I appreciated that the magic, whether it is a talking pigeon or a mysterious flute sending shimmering mist across the hillside, mostly amplifies what is already in the characters instead of fixing their problems for them.
By the end, I felt like I had been invited to a long, slightly chaotic block party where people sing show tunes off key, argue about renaming the street, fall in and out of love, and still manage to show up for one another when it really counts. The book sits comfortably in the genre of magical realism with a strong blend of historical and women’s fiction, and I think it will land best with readers who enjoy character-driven stories, found family, and a city setting that feels almost like a living spell. If you are up for wandering a strange little lane in 1974 San Francisco, listening to a wisecracking pigeon and a singing old house while a group of wounded people figure out how to be kinder to themselves and each other, Shinbone Lane is a very satisfying place to spend some time.
Pages: 324 | ASIN : B0F5N6Y2X4
