"She told me the first day we talked that she had a bad heart and . . . couldn’t do sports," said Wilson during an interview this week in Halifax.

Wilson, who splits her time between Northwest Cove, Lunenburg Co., and Halifax, explores unlikely friendships while tackling tough subjects, such as sexuality and betrayal.

It was following the publication of Fractures, Wilson’s book about families that editors at Penguin asked her to write about friends. She turned them down.

But, as Wilson writes in her introduction, "if you are looking for a collection of short stories in which each one is about a peer friendship, you’re looking in the wrong book."

Connections in Wilson’s stories are made between young and old, child and animal, even between two people who haven’t officially met.

"Sometimes it’s hard to recognize a friend, nor is a friend always a person," Wilson writes in the book’s introduction. "But a friend is someone you like, someone you want to spend time with or think about. Without that friend, you’d be less comfortable in your life, less safe. A friend is someone who listens to you when you talk, and who understands what you’re saying."

In The Snake, the first story in the collection, a girl finds courage and comfort in the very thing she fears the most — a snake. It is a story based on Wilson’s own experience years ago while she was on an outing with her two daughters.

Wilson, who was deathly frightened of snakes but had always pretended otherwise in front of her children, was presented with a small snake in a bucket.

"Then one of them said, ‘Pick it up, Mommy.’ " Determined not to pass on that fear to her children, she scooped up the reptile and felt her revulsion melt away.

"It was a life-changing experience. I can still feel it. Every since then, everything’s been fine," says Wilson who laughs when she adds, "I wish somebody had done that with spiders."

Perhaps the most moving story in the collection is also Wilson’s favourite. In Father by Mail, a teenaged boy whose father has just left without explanation takes out his anger in impassioned letters to dad: "I’ve tried not to feel mad at you about your sudden disappearance. But now I got to tell you that I feel a rolling bubble rising in me — the kind that precedes a volcanic eruption . . ."

"The story brings up the whole gay factor," says Wilson, when asked why it’s her favourite story. "There are lots of gay kids out there who are scared to death . . . afraid to show themselves."

It also speaks to boys, something that Wilson admits she doesn’t do nearly enough. In fact, in the six months before she started writing Friendships, Wilson received two letters, both from boys who said they didn’t like her writing because she never wrote about boys.

Friendships changed that, with half of the stories told by teenaged boys. "They have fears and they have insecurities and they’ve got a lot of qualities that don’t just belong to girls," says Wilson. "Boys need to hear that because they are sometimes afraid of showing that."

Making a good friend can help kids feel safe, can lessen the chances that they’ll be bullied and creates a lasting connection in their lives, says Wilson.

Making friends with someone can also take time, as it did between Wilson and her sister, Joan Colborne, who was almost five years older. Separated by age, interests and eventually by the demands of being wives and mothers, the two didn’t truly connect until their late 40s. But from that point on, the connection was unshakable — and unbroken by the ravages of time.

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