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 | Sep 12, 2018 | Blogs
The photo at the top of this post is of my mother, Rauha, reading the newspaper in her room at our family farm. A few years ago, she made the hard decision to sell the farm and now lives down the street. She is deeply private, doubly so because she’s a Finn. We Finns are famous for our reticence. Mom would draw apart to that room, sometimes sleeping, sometimes reading. I quietly snapped the photo that winter day, wanting to preserve the moment and even the place. I could see the day coming when we would no longer have the farm, its quiet fields and serene tree line. I was sensing the approach of days so upending that I’d want to make my own retreat to the woods.
by Donna Salli | May 4, 2017 | Blogs
I learned to read from a Dick and Jane reader. I remember the chalky smell of the classroom, the confines of our circled chairs. Each word was breathtaking, the way it filled its page, and as the words began to come together to create sense—Oh! I was at the border to...
by Donna Salli | Apr 25, 2017 | Blogs
Have you spent much time—figuring out how you figure things out? I have. I do it by writing, following thought after unfettered thought, wherever it leads, then holding my breath and sharing. Sometimes all that introspection ends in a fiction. The generating event in...
by Donna Salli | Feb 9, 2017 | Blogs
What do you think about, when you think of your grandparents? When I think about mine, I remember the hours that I spent following them around their rock-strewn farms. Those were idyllic hours, and the memory of them is a hedge against the harsher realities of this...
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