by Donna Salli | Aug 13, 2024 | Blogs
The photo at the top of this post is of my mother, Rauha, and her older sister, Ingrid. Mom is on the right. The picture was taken at Pikes Peak. My memory is that Mom and Dad were on their honeymoon. They’re all gone now—Mom, Dad, and Ingrid. But “gone” doesn’t mean gone. When I look at this picture, I feel both Mom and Ingrid so strongly, it’s as if they are with me. They were both mothers to me, in different ways. I had many mothers, growing up—my other aunts, my grandmothers, even some of our neighbor women—but I’ve been thinking, lately, about Mom and Ingrid especially. They were in some ways opposites. Watching them, I learned that there are many ways to fill the world with mother love.
by Donna Salli | Jan 24, 2018 | Blogs
I write mostly for women. I’ve been doing it since the first time I set pen to paper, the summer after high school. I began a novel that summer, based on my maternal grandparents’ lives, from the point of view of my grandmother. I only wrote a few chapters, but I still have the hand-written manuscript, in pencil no less. Once I got to college and began taking writing classes, I came to see that, for many, my writing for women would make me seem less serious as a writer. I kept doing it anyway—determined to figure out a way to interweave women and seemingly masculine concerns like architecture. I also decided to keep writing about grandmothers. I’d heard classmates disparage grandmother poems, and it rankled me. Stubbornness? Independence? Yes, but I did it mostly because I am a daughter of my mother.
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