TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I

1. The Cat Giver

2. Story of the Story

3. Why Certain Women Spurn Mirrors

4. What the Women Built

5. Eve: Why We Love Her So Much

6. The Windswept Morning of Juliana

7. Where Are You Going?

8. What She Meant

9. Household Affairs

10. Man, Woman, Dog: A Love Story

11. Thunder: Perfect Mind

12. In Order to Obey the Law

13. From One Day’s Chat with a Beloved Woman

14. The Comfort

15. The Specialist in Truth

16. The Letters Every Day

PART II

1. Candletalk

2. The Problem with Commodities

3. The Engineering of Fate

4. Pencil

5. Original Grace and the Glory of History

6. The Way She Labored

7. Graffiti Carved in Bartops by a Traveling Girl

8. The Compass

9. Matrices

10. Who Needs a Lover

11. She Revised Her Stories Until They Became Proverbs

12. Beautiful Doctor of Faith Meets the Janitor

13. The Jackal and the Butterfly

14. A Business Life, a Social Life

15. In Praise of Female Bartenders

16. The Thank-you Notes

PART III

1. Where in the World Is Your World

2. Work May Be Good for Something

3. The Castle in the Air

4. The Astrophysics of Children

5. What We Mean by Bread; and by Sacrament

6. The Bank of Days

7. One Little Record of One Little Death

8. Angel-painter

9. She Claims That Even Tidal Waves Mean Something

10. She Is Impertinent About Tragedy

11. The Good Doctor Turns Loose a Tirade About Evil

12. The Grandmother

13. A Country Girl in the City Canyons

14. The Books Were So Bad, She Set Out to Make the World from Scratch

15. Proposition for Nancy

16. The Panhandler

PART IV

1. The Silent Woman

2. A Nun and Her Loving

3. The Hunt

4. Statements She Planted That Grew Up to Be Stories

5. The Fashionable Lady and Her Jewels

6. If She Once Had the Ghost of a Chance at Understanding

7. The Painter of Light in the Canyon of Light

8. The Sweetness of Life Gives a Gal Odd Habits

9. A Woman Coming for Love

10. She Writes About the King She Loves

11. A Visitation of Comets

12. A Luminous Newspaper

13. Soul, Words, God: She’s Got Issues

14. The Carpenter of the Heart

15. What She Told Me About Why She Writes

16. In the Hot Climate of Promises and Grace

Afterword

Notes

Acknowledgments