The lack of recorded intimacy in Emily Carr's life has long been a troublesome subject. Was she the victim of abuse as a child? Was she a lesbian? Was she overwhelmingly egocentric as an artist? The reasons for her prickly surface manners will likely never be unravelled, but Linda Morra has at least revealed the extent to which Carr yearned for, and appreciated, friendship and intimacy by gathering the twilight correspondence between Carr and her literary mentor, Ira Dilworth, regional director of CBC radio, for Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth (UTP 2006). Of more than 440 extant letters written between early 1940 and Carr's death in March of 1945, 195 were written by Dilworth and 250 by Carr. With encouragement and direction from Doris Shadbolt and research advisor Eva-Marie Kroller, Morra has selected 142 of them to represent the heartfelt neediness of the pair. "God bless you, Emily!" wrote Dilworth, while sending her "oodles of love." For five years they were devoted to one another, linked as if they had been lovers in the flesh. Carr's often hasty and randomly punctuated letters to her editor and confidante reveal her intrepid and uncompromising nature. She once told Dilworth that for a "letter to be a correspondence [there] must be a spontaneous loving outpour from one to another[.] How can you 'respond' if there is not a 'co'?" In Carr's last will and testament, addressed to Ira Dilworth, she concludes, "Forgive me dear for all the times I have been unreasonable or petulant or weepy. I have loved you truly & shall as long as I can [.] Thank you for the love you have given to me. God bless you--goodbye." An unpublished story by Carr entitled Small's Gold is also included in Morra's volume.