A collection of 21 essays. Titles include: Finding Poems; The Gospel of Thomas; Saturn and the Flying Boy; On Not Being Southern; The Soul, Herself Surprised;My Mother, Remembering; Seeing the Cézannes; Drawing and Talent; The Dear Love of Comrades; An Interview with Lynda Barry; Teaching/Writing; Feeding the Ghosts of Christmas Past; August 1974; The Enigma of Healing; Bardo, Texas; Palm Springs: Bonfires of the Banalities; Don't Shoot, I'm Canadian; Jill Johnston: An Unofficial Ubiquitary; Theater; Pilgrimage; and Next of Kin.

"Compelling and provocative. A book too interesting not to talk about."

- Faith Fuller

"Friendship - the making of friends, the keeping of them, the richness they add to one's life, the grief accompanying their loss - is one of the subjects of ... this amazing collection of ... essays. In the course of this book we meet actors and artists, lesbian activists and activist nuns, drinkers and writers and rabbis and mystics and astrologers. You can dip in anywhere - in St Louis, or Palm Springs, London or Leningrad or Vancouver - or you can read from beginning to end, watching the story unfold, one episode after another."

- Agnes Bushell from the Introduction