Every Friday, Tairi shares a new story, reflections from an author's life, and behind-the-scenes glimpses into works in progress.
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Tairi Blair writes upmarket fiction that explores love, faith, family, and identity. Blending observation, gentle humor, and emotional authenticity, her stories explore the complicated choices ordinary people make when institutions, communities, and even the people they love ask them to choose between belonging and being true to themselves.
Her work spans contemporary, literary, crime, and speculative fiction, but every story shares the same heartbeat: queer lives, moral courage, and hope discovered in unexpected places.
Her debut novel, California Wheelin', is the first book in the A&Z Series, inspired by her experience serving on the leadership team of a 500-mile Girl Scout bicycle expedition across California in 1982. She is currently seeking literary representation.
Tairi is a retired professor of organizational behavior whose career focused on leadership, communication, and helping people find the courage to speak when it matters most. Those same questions now find their way into her fiction.
Tairi is active in Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, Golden Crown Literary Society, Willamette Writers, Claremont Writers’ Group, and Opus Literary Alliance. She lives on the West Coast and publishes weekly stories, essays, and behind-the-scenes glimpses into her writing life at TairiBlair.Substack.com.
When she's not writing, you'll likely find her in a writers' critique group, singing, exploring the outdoors, or listening for the stories hidden in an ordinary conversation.
Coming Soon - Seeking Representation
Tentative cover
California Wheelin’
by Tairi Blair
A two-week bicycle expedition across California. Thirty-six teenage Girl Scouts. Two women whose lives are about to change forever.
Adrien has spent months building California Wheelin' from the ground up—a 500-mile cycling expedition down the California coast, thirty-six girls from across the country, two weeks of mountains and campgrounds and everything that can go wrong. As director, she's responsible for keeping the program safe while managing staff tensions, unexpected crises, and an executive director who seems determined to see it fail.
The last thing she needs is Zander.
Composed, competent, and impossible to rattle, Zander earns the girls' trust within the first week. She has a girlfriend at home, a faith she's built her life around, and no intention of complicating either. Adrien has her own reasons to keep her distance—including a long-standing skepticism of the religion Zander takes seriously.
Five hundred miles is a long way to keep your guard up.
As the coast unreels beneath their wheels, something shifts between them that neither of them invited and neither can quite dismiss. Adrien doesn't share Zander's beliefs. Zander isn't sure if the future she planned still fits. What they're building between them has no obvious name—which makes it harder to protect, and harder to give up.
Set on the California coast in 1982, California Wheelin' is a novel about leadership, faith, and the particular courage it takes to want something you weren't supposed to want.
Book One of the A&Z Series
California Wheelin’ is the first novel in the A&Z series, following Adrien and Zander across four decades as they navigate love, faith, family, loss, and a changing world.
Inspired by Real Events
In 1982, I served on the leadership team for a 500-mile Girl Scout bicycle expedition in California. For two weeks, thirty-six teenage girls pedaled from San Francisco to Los Angeles, climbing mountains, camping under the stars, solving problems together, and discovering they were capable of far more than they'd imagined.
That journey gave this novel its bones. Adrien, Zander, Savannah, and the events of the story are fictional—but the confidence those girls found on the road is not. I hope that readers close the book believing, as those girls did, that you find out what you're made of by going anyway.
“Tairi Blair’s first novel is a gorgeously written story about finding your truth, even when it means letting go of everything safe.” ~Lori L. Lake, award-winning author of 12 novels.
Also in Progress
Tentative cover
Shades of Indigo: Stories Inspired by The Girls
Inspired by the music of the Indigo Girls, Shades of Indigo is a collection of sixteen stories exploring love, loss, identity, resilience, and the extraordinary moments hidden within ordinary lives.
Blending literary fiction, romance, crime, speculative fiction, humor, and historical fiction, the collection follows characters as they search for connection, wrestle with grief, discover unexpected courage, and find hope where they least expect it. Though each story stands on its own, together they celebrate queer lives, chosen family, second chances, and the resilience of the human spirit.
The Indigo Girls have long written songs that ask difficult questions without offering easy answers. Shades of Indigo follows that same path, inviting readers into stories that are by turns hopeful, heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and quietly joyful.
Whether you've been a lifelong Indigo Girls fan or simply love emotionally rich fiction, Shades of Indigo offers stories that linger long after the final page.
Tentative cover
Another Option
Book Two in the Adrien & Zander Trilogy
(Literary Fiction / LGBTQ+ / Family & Identity)
What does it mean to build a family in a world that tells you you can’t?
In 1988, Adrien's brother and his girlfriend were killed in a mass shooting, leaving behind their premature infant daughter in the NICU. Adrien and her partner, Zander, long to adopt the baby, but they're told, in ways both cruel and quiet, that two women are not suitable parents.
What follows is nearly a decade of false hope, failed fertility treatments, and the grief of miscarriage as they fight for the right to love and raise a child in a system built to exclude them. Along the way, they encounter other queer families forging their own paths to parenthood, each discovering that there is more than one way to build a family.
Set against late-1980s and early-1990s California, Another Option asks what it means to become a mother when every institution says no. Told with emotional precision, dry wit, and literary grace, it is the second installment in the Adrien & Zander trilogy—a love story that spans decades, from desire to devotion to legacy.
Tentative cover
The Only Thing Left
Book Three in the Adrien & Zander Trilogy
(Literary Fiction / LGBTQ+ / Grief & Caregiving)
After forty years together, Adrien and Zander have earned an ordinary retirement. Instead, they’re blindsided by Zander’s early-onset Alzheimer’s.
As the disease slowly reshapes their world, Adrien becomes navigator, advocate, and caregiver—learning that each day brings a different version of the woman she loves. Some days are heartbreaking. Others are unexpectedly funny: getting dressed for work an hour after bedtime or insisting they somehow have two dogs.
Along the way, Adrien discovers unexpected allies, deeper friendships, and moments of grace she never would have chosen—but wouldn't trade.
The Only Thing Left is a story about queer love, aging, family, and the resilience that carries us through life's most difficult seasons. Honest, hopeful, and deeply human, it explores not only what Alzheimer's changes, but also what it cannot erase.
Tentative cover
Wondering Hearts
A collection of stories about love, faith, family, identity, and the people who keep searching for home. Some are quietly hopeful. Others confront grief, prejudice, or loss. Together they explore the moments that shape ordinary lives and the relationships that sustain us through them.
From Fifty-Two Dollars and Sixteen Cents to The Mothers Next Door and The Willingness to Believe, these stories introduce memorable characters whose lives intersect in surprising ways. A hummingbird, a heating pad, an old photograph, or a simple act of kindness can become the turning point that changes everything.
Written with warmth, honesty, and compassion, these stories are for anyone who has ever questioned, hoped, loved deeply, or found the strength to keep going.
"Wow!! I just read your writing in SubStack app about apricots and sent it to a ton of friends. Damn!!
~Lauren Bennett, UFMCC general conference coordinator
What Reviewers are Saying
"As a queer person of faith, I didn’t know how much I needed this story until it held me. California Wheelin’ is tender, emotionally honest, and beautifully captures the courage it takes to choose love—even when it’s complicated."
~Rev. Vickie Miller, Florida, after reading California Wheelin’.
“This story reminded me of my worst fear: leaving my home to build a new one with my wife! I was so afraid that I would lose my children!”
~Wendy, California, after reading “The Mothers Next Door,” a short story from the unfinished manuscript collection, Wondering Hearts, featured in TairiBlair.Substack.com
The Ghost story set in the 1800s is “heart-achingly beautiful.”
~ Rose Grumbine, Illinois, after reading the short story in the Shades of Indigo collection.
“One circle, one chapter is complete. But wait, there's more..... I’m looking forward to it.”
~Jenni Nichols, Los Angeles, after reading “Fifty-Two Dollars and Sixteen Cents,” a short story from the unfinished manuscript collection, Wondering Hearts, featured in TairiBlair.Substack.com
“I may not be lesbian, but I still enjoyed the story. Sweet, funny, caring, loving. Definitely a good read.”
~Becky Crowe, Nevada, after reading “The Building Season” in Shades of Indigo.
“Thank you for sharing your wisdom through these words, which speak to my heart.”
Karla Forsythe, Oregon, after reading “Will I Still be Able to Help?” a personal essay in TairiBlair.Substack.com
“Laugh out loud funny. We all need to level up.”
~Anne Odgers, California, after reading “The Building Season” in Shades of Indigo.
FAQ
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Tairi Blair is a former university professor who taught MBA students about human behavior in organizations—always sitting in a circle, because she believes learning should be shared.
Bonus fact. She draws people interacting. Can you find the drawing on her website?
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Tairi is pronounced like “Terry.” She chose the spelling with “AIR” to echo her last name, Blair—giving her name a little lift and a touch of poetry.
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Tairi draws on a rich life experience. She has backpacked off-trail in the Sierras and led canoe, rafting, backpack, and bike trips. Of course, she also does traditional research.
View her stories at TairiBlair.substack.com
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What You’ll Get (and When)
🕰 How often she’ll post:
Once a week-ish. Sometimes more. Never spammy.
Usually on Fridays or Saturdays—good days for stories.
📬 Free subscribers will get:
Weekly stories
First access to excerpts from Shades of Indigo
Updates on what she’s working on (and probably overthinking)
Paid subscribers will get:
Full access to Shades of Indigo (serialized)
Bonus material including journal entries, early drafts of stories, reflections, invitations to meet-ups
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Selected Fiction Publications & Recognition
Blair, Tairi. "Harmony at Sea." In Her Compass Was a Woman: Love Stories Inspired by Olivia Travel, edited by Sally Anne Monti, 15-34. Salinas, CA: Sapphire Books, 2026.
—"The Double." In The Lines We Cross: Bouchercon Anthology 2026, edited by Olyn Fleming Ozbick. Lutz, FL: Down & Out Books, forthcoming.
Media
Blair, Tairi. “Author and Substack Writer Tairi Blair Talks Writing with a Pseudonym.” Interview by Felice Cohen. Saphic Lit Pop-Up Bookstore. July 22, 2026. YouTube video. 6:11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1KLAFcWQ3A