The Secret Ranch

After a journalist takes an interest in eighty-five-year-old Jean Warner’s experience as an enemy code interceptor during World War II, Jean reflects upon her past, which was often challenging and painful.

Jean relives her experiences during the war when she was in the Women’s Army Corps and did grueling secret work deciphering enemy Morse Code at Two Rock Ranch Station, near Petaluma, California. During this time, she has a challenging friendship with another WAC, pursues a rocky relationship with a soldier, and constantly fears for the lives of her two brothers who are fighting in the war. As difficult as it has been to dwell on her past, Jean eventually realizes that she has acquired insights that have helped her understand herself and strengthened her relationship with her troubled daughter, who has assumed that her mother conducted her life perfectly.

The novel takes place in the 1940s and 2006.

Hillary Tiefer has a PhD in English and has taught at Southern Oregon University and other colleges in the Pacific Northwest. Her short stories have been published in Descant, Red Rock Review, Mission at Tenth, Blue Moon Literary Review, Gray Sparrow Journal, Poetica Magazine, Poydras Review, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, JuxtaProse, The Literary Nest, Smoky Blue Literature and Art Magazine, Five on the Fifth, The Opiate, The Manifest-Station, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Minerva Rising Press’s The Keeping Room. Her novel, Lily’s Home Front, was published in 2018. Her essays on the author Thomas Hardy have been published in scholarly journals.