Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Women in Community -- A Distant Star Called Possibility: Wintergreen -- Wintergreen and Alaga Syrup: A Writer's Reflections on Memory, Writing, and Place -- From "Shaping the World of My Art" -- Outside of Dreams -- Negotiating the Academy -- The Case of the Reluctant Reader: She Who Reads Last . . . -- Parting the Blue Miasma -- New Kid on the Block -- Obstacles or Opportunities: The Wisdom to Know the Difference -- The Faith Walk of Writing: Connecting Head and Heart -- Silence. . . A Dangerous Luxury -- On My Return from Exile -- Of History and Healing -- The Conscientious Outsider -- The Mother's Board -- Spirit Houses -- My Father's Passage -- A Blessed Life -- A Birth and a Death, or Everything Important Happens on Monday -- Ambrosia -- What Roots Us -- Cotton Pickin' Authority -- The First Time I Saw Big Daddy Grinning -- On Gardening, or A Love Supreme -- A Very Good Year -- A Sanctuary of Words -- Bury the Thought -- The Death of the Mother -- A Remembrance -- The Night I Stopped Singing like Billie Holiday -- Afterword: Rites, Rituals, and Creative Ceremonies: A Social History of the Wintergreen Women Writers' Collective -- Poetry Reading: A Coda -- Contributors.