• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Victoria Festival of Authors

An annual celebration of writers and literature

  • Home
  • VFA 2022
    • Spring Workshops
    • Spring Book Club
  • Partners
  • Support Us
    • Donate
    • Sponsor Us
    • Volunteer
  • About Us
    • Our mission
    • Strategic Plan
    • History
    • Who we are
    • Contact Us
  • Archive
    • VFA 2021
      • Welcome
      • Schedule
      • Participants
      • Books
      • Author Interviews
    • VFA 2020 and earlier
      • 2020 Webcasts and Podcasts
      • 2020 Books
      • Author Interviews 2020 and earlier

Dog Flowers

By Danielle Geller

Dog Flowers
Buy at Munro's

A daughter returns home to the Navajo reservation to retrace her mother’s life in a memoir that is both a narrative and an archive of one family’s troubled history.

“This shattering memoir combines image and text to reveal a portrait of home.”—Elle

When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most were filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contained diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash.

Geller, an archivist and a writer, uses these pieces of her mother’s life to try and understand her mother’s relationship to home, and their shared need to leave it. Geller embarks on a journey where she confronts her family’s history and the decisions that she herself had been forced to make while growing up, a journey that will end at her mother’s home: the Navajo reservation.

Dog Flowers is an arresting, photo-lingual memoir that masterfully weaves together images and text to examine mothers and mothering, sisters and caretaking, and colonized bodies. Exploring loss and inheritance, beauty and balance, Danielle Geller pays homage to our pasts, traditions, and heritage, to the families we are given and the families we choose.


Series: 2021 Books

Footer

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • SoundCloud

Victoria Festival of Authors respectfully acknowledges that we are located on the traditional territories of the Lekwungen people now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt nations.
Copyright © 2022 Victoria Festival of Authors.