Arden Benbow is a motorcycle riding, lesbian Latina poet from LA who has at last received her degree from UCLA. Now she's been hired to teach poetry in a small liberal arts college in northwest Florida and the administrators have no idea what they're about to come up against. This is the seventies, and social change is creeping slowly but inevitably across the country from California. Since firing Arden is out of the question, the administration soon sets into motion a plan they feel is certain to make Arden want to leave. As their machinations become increasingly complex, Arden happily and even obliviously sets up housekeeping in her newly purchased decaying southern mansion just across the rugby field from the college. While the administration struggles to keep southern academe the same, Arden gradually enlists women faculty, immigrant farm laborers, rural residents, a lesbian feminist press, and the whole student body to create a new green world of women's values.