Danielle Geller is a writer of personal essays and memoir. Her first book, Dog Flowers, was published by One World/Random House in 2021. She received her MFA in creative writing for nonfiction at the University of Arizona, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award in 2016. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The New Yorker, Brevity, and Arizona Highways, and has been anthologized in This Is the Place and The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature. She teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria and is also a faculty mentor for the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a citizen of the Navajo Nation: born to the Tsi’naajinii, born for the bilagaana.
Interviewed by Kate Kimberley
Kate Kimberley (KK): Dog Flowers is a powerful memoir about uncovering truths about your mother, and your family, after her death, and the reflections you have about both about her life and about being your mother’s daughter. Can you tell us a bit more about Dog Flowers, and how it came about that you developed a memoir/creative non-fiction piece of your experience?
Danielle Geller (DG): After my mother passed away in 2013, I was living in Boston, working in libraries and archives, and I started writing what would become Dog Flowers. When I first started writing, I was actually writing down memories of my mother and of the time that I had spent with her in the hospital – and also going back further, such as trips that I had taken to see her. I also used to transcribe the phone conversations that I had with my mom, mostly because we talked so infrequently over the years, and I wanted to hold onto those memories of her a little bit longer. So the writing was a process of remembering my mom. About six months after her death, I was revisiting all of these writings, including those that I had written down for my sister while my mom was in the hospital, as she was unable to come with me to Florida to be with my mom at that time. After my mom died, my sister was also supposed to come to Boston to visit me and we would go through all my mom’s stuff together, but that kept being delayed. My sister found herself in jail, and I began writing her letters while she was there.
Writing letters had in some ways become a family tradition; my dad was in and out of jail when I was growing up, and my sister and I would write letters to him. My sister was also in and out of juvenile detention, and in foster care, and so while she was gone, she would write to us, and I would write her back.
So that’s how the writing that became Dog Flowers began. Along the way, and with my sister’s encouragement, I started to think of the writing as something less personal, less particular to a time and circumstance, but something that might have a purpose or value for a different audience.
KK: Your observations of the natural world (birds in particular) are often included, sometimes utilized as metaphor, in Dog Flowers. How do animals and the natural world play into your writing. Can you tell me more about this?
DG: The part of the world in Arizona that is in my writing is a birder’s paradise. It’s a place where there are species of birds that migrate north from central America, as well as South from north America; it’s a meeting place. The landscape is diverse, with mountains and desert, so many different biomes.
Years ago, I took a CNF workshop with Rita Zoey Chin at Grubstreet in Boston, and she talked about this idea of chiaroscuro which isn’t talked about a lot as it relates in creative writing. In art, it’s the way that you treat light and shade, that contrast is represented, in visual art. This really resonated for me. I find that when it comes to writing, I often feel like I have movies and scenes running through my head – a series of images, or colours, or sensory impressions that ground my memory. In these images, one of the places where my eye is drawn is to the natural world. And with birds, often you hear it before you see it, so I have an added piece. So, when I’m drafting a scene, often I’m thinking about what I’m looking at, but also what’s happening around me: the contrasts, the balancing of elements. Dog Flowers can be a difficult book to read, and there’s a lot of heavy material that I am working through. One of the ways I felt I could assist the reader to navigate some of the more painful human experiences, was to offer these moments of lightness: the birds, the lizards, the sage brush, as contrast. Yellow became a guiding colour for me while I was writing. When I think about Metaphor in literature there are images, symbols that carry weight over the centuries, whereas I tend to focus on creating metaphor in my writing based on what is important to me, to what I pay attention to the most. It needs to be particular to you – to matter to you – as a writer. So the natural world for me is a metaphor, as well as a balancing of the contrasts.
KK: In my read of Dog Flowers, I felt that it had such a strong, authentic voice. Is this something that came naturally for you? Is it something you crafted over time? You are teaching in the Creative Writing program at UVic; what can you share about the use of narrative voice in memoir? Any advice?
DG: My writing voice has changed over time, and I think that something that has shaped it in part is that I read aloud what I write as I am working on it and revising it. My revision process is slow [laughter] because it involves a lot of rewriting based on how it flows. I feel very lucky that I had a high school teacher whose love for grammar was infectious, and I still find myself looking up grammatical structure. For me it’s less about the archaic rules of grammar per se, and more about being intentional and consistent in the way that I write. For example, if I am using a period, I want to make sure that the way that I read it aloud is consistent. Same with an em-dash or a semi-colon. I listen and notice how my voice moves; does it rise, or does it fall? What is the rhythm of my sentences and phrases? Much of my reading and writing style is seeking simplicity in phrasing, especially when the ideas or the emotions are complicated. I enjoy and appreciate language, and I like taking the time to be intentional about how I present things. I think that this has really shaped my voice.
KK: In Dog Flowers, you write about what could be described as family dysfunction, including differences in how you and your sister were treated, the prevalence of alcohol use, and periods of incarceration for your sister and your dad. What’s your experience when it comes to the “exposure” that memoirs can have about people in your life? Did you get blowback – and if so how did that impact you?
DG: I once heard advice that you shouldn’t share any of what you are writing with the people that you are writing about until you are pretty much done. That doing so earlier can stall your writing process in unhelpful ways. But for me, it was really important that I share it with people that I was writing about that I wanted to maintain a relationship with. In my case, those people were my sister, my Dad, and would’ve been my mother if she was alive. From my perspective, writing a book like this has the potential to end a relationship. As I was writing it, my sister was often very supportive, but sometimes she would get worried and say that she wanted it to be fiction {laughter}. She was concerned about how she would be perceived, as she was still struggling with her addiction and trying to figure out her own life and relationship to some of the things that I write about in Dog Flowers. It was important for me to share what I was writing with my sister because it was a way for me to get feedback, and also to recalibrate how I perceived our relationship. During this time we were repairing our relationship, and rebuilding trust. It was important for me to have my sister read it, and by doing so and talking about it, we moved our relationship in a new direction.