by Donna Salli | Jul 7, 2026 | Blogs
I once imagined that a writer sits around with a martini and a typewriter, leisurely typing, as the Pulitzers and Nobel prizes roll in. What a pile of horse manure. My husband Bruce and I are writers. There had better be a damn good reason to interrupt when the other one is in the throes of working on something. It’s like looking in the mirror. What I do, he does. He’ll be at his desk, I walk in, and the hand flutters up, warning me away, followed by the sideward glance, and the glance always does it. I start thinking—today, about places I’ve lived. Some have been memorable, like an apartment where the landlady lived downstairs, her two deceased Pekingese dogs mounted and displayed in a lighted glass case. It was a bit unnerving, but now I see the love she had for them, and likely the loneliness. The place I think about most, though, isn’t that one. It was a corner apartment next to a funeral chapel, the apartment with a voice in the mirror.
by Donna Salli | Jan 14, 2026 | Blogs
I love this picture. It has that lovely blue cast to it. I was on a night bus, alone. The driver and other passengers had gone into a convenience store. Tired, only minutes from my hometown and the family farm, I snapped a picture of my reflection in the window and texted it to my husband, so he’d know I was almost there. You see, he worries. As he often will, he enlarged and cropped the photo and sent it back. The image in the window, with a light pole and tire rims beyond the glass, seems to hang outside the border of this world. It’s a landscape where you wouldn’t be surprised to see an angel, dropping in to help. In that moment, I thought of 1 Corinthians, the verse that says we see “through a glass darkly.” In other words, we don’t see. There’s so much trouble now, with neighbors, friends, even family turning against one another, arguing, among other things, over immigrants and how we should control our national borders. I sigh as I say it—we sure could use an angel or two. Sometimes I wonder if a day will come when humans just stop helping each other. …
by Donna Salli | Dec 2, 2016 | Blogs
The day after my novel was released, I was sitting at my desk, leafing through its pages. Just holding the book gave me pleasure. There’s the simple fact of it—A Notion of Pelicans, now a thing apart from me—and there’s the book itself, its cover and pages. The cover...
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