An extraordinary and moving reading experience, How to Make and American Quilt is an exploration of women of yesterday and today, who join together in a uniquely female experience. As they gather year after year, their stories, their wisdom, their lives, form the pattern from which all of us draw warmth and comfort for ourselves. The story was made into a major motion picture starring with Maya Angelou, Winona Ryder, and Rip Torn, and released in cinemas in fall of 1995.

“The book radiates with what it portrays—those charged years of early, unburdened adulthood that so quickly fade.”—Seattle Weekly “Beguiling . . . Otto focuses on the minute connections—a glance, a touch—that suddenly bind [her] characters to love’s tenuous grasp.” —Entertainment Weekly

With her trademark originality, Whitney Otto tells the story of a bohemian couple and the years they spend finding and losing each other. The Passion Dream Book is about artists, their tendency to colonize and to migrate. Written in elegant and spellbinding prose, this love story and novel of ideas is an homage to passion and dreams.