by Donna Salli | Mar 29, 2026 | Blogs
I took the photo above in eastern Finland. It was late October, and I was at a country home not far from the Russian border. 50 miles or so. It felt surreal to be there, knowing the fraught history Finland has with Russia. But it also felt like home. That staircase built of stone was part of an old root cellar. My mother’s Finnish immigrant father constructed a staircase identical to it, to connect the basement of his Michigan farmhouse to the yard. He dug the basement a good while after the house had been built. I’ve often felt wonder about that—the logistics of it, the progression of his thinking and efforts. It makes me think of the progression of my own life. I’d like to understand, I mean really understand, what this life is about.
by Donna Salli | Feb 10, 2026 | Blogs
My sister Doreen and I are poets. Recently, without discussion, 650 miles apart, on the exact same day, we each wrote a new poem. Something in the way our country has been changing is driving poets to pick up their pens. In this essay, which we’re writing together, we’d like to share the poems we wrote so unknowingly and mysteriously on that day, to explain the how and why: how it is we wrote them, why we see the things we wrote as mattering to more than ourselves. We live, after all, in a large community called the United States, made up of smaller communities with their own integrity and cultures. How do we live good, honorable lives as individuals? How do we turn outward and live with concern for the group? Poetry is a way of thinking about those things—it’s one part language, nine parts nuance. …
by Donna Salli | Dec 6, 2022 | Blogs
I don’t know much about motorcycles, except that men seem to like them. My first year of college, I planned to be a writer. I was taking a creative writing class, and that detail about men was reason enough for me to write a motorcycle poem. In it, a man is waxing his bike, and a woman watches. I had little romantic experience at that point, but I already knew that the human need for love was going to drive me artistically. Now, I’ll get bored occasionally with the status quo—doing more of the same, in the same way. So instead of crafting here a well-behaved essay, with tight focus, I’ve mixed it up. Today’s piece winds between the search for love, the ways of teachers, and the methods and idiosyncrasies of poets. Are you scratching your head, thinking, “Those things go together?” Yes, they do—so follow along, and I’ll illustrate. I don’t know about you, but it’s reassuring to me to hear other people’s stories, to be reminded I’m not the only one walking some wobbly blacktop through life.
by Donna Salli | Oct 29, 2019 | Blogs
Many years ago, I went home to our family farm to visit my mom and dad. While I was there, my mother’s brothers Ernie and Bill came by. We fell into telling family stories over kahvi, which is Finnish for “coffee.” We sat a long time at that table, reminiscing and laughing as the blues and grays of evening began to filter in through the window. It struck me that no one turned a light on—no one wanted to break the spell. My uncles were educators and good storytellers. There was a playful impertinence in their eyes as they told their stories, and I understood it completely. Drinking kahvi with the uncles, I saw again what I’d always known: playful impertinence runs in our family. It’s why I write, why I write what I write—more than that, why I write poetry, which to much of the world seems a waste of time.
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