Under the Tucson Moon

For nine winters, writer Kim Antieau and her husband, Mario Milosevic, travelled to the Sonoran Desert. Kim wrote many novels on these retreats, including the well-loved Church of the Old Mermaids, The Fish Wife, Whackadoodle Times, and The Monster’s Daughter.


While in the desert, Kim also wrote a series of essays about borderlands: not just political borderlands, but those in-between places where creativity thrives or dies, those places profane or sacred, joyful or despairing. In her novel, The Desert Siren, Kim describes one of her characters as “a siren. She sings to the wild things, she wrangles sea horses and dust storms. She directs coyote choruses and bargains with ravens. She does not hear the call of the wild. She is the call of the wild.” Kim is a desert siren, too, only she wrangles words, instead of horses.


Enter the life of a deeply creative artist in these essays, gathered in one place for the first time, under the Tucson moon.