Includes bibliographical references.

Part 1-- Saving The Life That Is Your Own: The Importance Of Models In The Artist's Life -- Black writer and the Southern experience -- But yet and still the cotton gin kept on working -- Talk: convocation -- Beyond the peacock: the reconstruction of Flannery O'Connor -- Divided life of Jean Toomer -- Writer because of, not in spite of, her children -- Gifts of power: the writings of Rebecca Jackson -- Zora Neale Hurston: a cautionary tale and a partisan view -- Looking for Zora -- Part 2 -- Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It? -- Unglamorous by worthwhile duties of the Black revolutionary artist, or of the Black writer who simply works and writes -- Almost year -- Choice: a tribute to Dr Martin Luther King, Jr -- Coretta King: revisited -- Choosing to stay at home: ten years after the March on Washington -- Good morning, revolution: uncollected writings of social protest -- Making the movies and the movies we want -- Lulls -- My father's country is the poor -- Recording the seasons -- Part 3 -- In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens -- From an interview -- Letter to the editor of Ms -- Breaking chains and encouraging life -- If the present looks like the past, what does the future look like? -- Looking to the side, and back -- To the black scholar -- Brothers and sisters -- Part 4 -- Silver Writes -- Only justice can stop a curse -- Nuclear madness: what you can do -- To the editors of Ms magazine -- Writing The color purple -- Beauty: when the other dancer is the self -- One child of one's own: a meaningful digression within the work(s) -- Publication acknowledgments.

From the Publisher: In this, her first collection of nonfiction, Alice Walker speaks out as a black woman, writer, mother, and feminist in thirty-six pieces ranging from the personal to the political. Among the contents are essays about other writers, accounts of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, and a vivid memoir of a scarring childhood injury and her daughter's healing words.

Also issued online.