by Donna Salli | Oct 27, 2022 | Blogs
I need this picture. Do you? I need Heaven on earth. The photo, which I took earlier this fall, captures my most peaceful experience of the last twelve months. It’s been a hard year. My mom passed suddenly last November, when I was already feeling for myself the woes of growing older. Then there’s the daily news. Reading it, watching it, can make me want to shut down. I know I’m not alone in the anxiety I feel—but I suspect I may be alone in my habit of speaking it out loud. Heaven on earth? Is it possible? I’m a down-to-earth sort, and I know it’s on us to bring that sort of peace into this world—that idea of our hands, God’s work. I see it, especially, as being on women. We’re understood, in collective lore, to be caregivers. While I know with every cell of my body that “caregiver” is too narrow a definition, I don’t see it as being generally untrue.
by Donna Salli | Sep 24, 2020 | Blogs
This morning, it’s a mist-in-the-lowlands kind of morning. Earlier, as the sun was coming up, I drove for groceries. Our quiet town was peaceful. Anyone driving through it, I thought, might forget the country is in disarray. I love the stillness before dawn—even a grocery store has a peaceful feeling then. During the drive, I reflected on what we’re facing, with the pandemic, the unrest, and the failure of so many of our country’s leaders to act for the collective good. The sky was a mottled blue and orange, so beautiful, and as I felt its calm wash over me, a memory surfaced from when I was in middle school. Just like that, I had a new way of thinking about what needs to happen, to solve the problems we’re facing.
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.
by Donna Salli | Sep 6, 2016 | Blogs
As I write this blog post, it’s twenty-one days until the release of my novel, A Notion of Pelicans. In my next post, I’ll explain the origin of the book—how I came to write it, where the pelicans came from as a motif. I’ve wondered as the publication date has neared...
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