How author Danielle Geller masterfully unites pain and hope in her memoir 'Dog Flowers'
So often we split the memory in two: short-term and long-term. Danielle Geller presents other dimensions.
Song lyrics and movie plot points evanesce, she said, but Geller owns a remarkable recall of sound and light, word-for-word conversations and complex timelines; the "fulgid sunlight and flat horizons" of Florida, "the purple fragile sticker" affixed to a piece of luggage, "the songbirds breakfasting at" her aunt's feeders and the dying sun — "a cube of fading orange light" — in her dreams.
These details and impressions, stamped upon Geller's spirit, recreate her world for readers of "Dog Flowers," the remarkable memoir she released last year. After her mother died, Geller took to the page, reflecting on growing up, the dysfunction — and incredibly lucid moments of love — within her family and her mother's Diné, or Navajo, birthright. One scene, one photograph, one childlike drawing at a time.
Geller owes her capacity for cataloging memories in part to skills she's developed as a writer and archivist. "Dog Flowers" also reflects an innate response to trauma, a calculus learned while working out her own survival — anticipating problems before they come, working out every potential cause and effect.
"I do think that because I spent so much time to try to survive and anticipate scenarios ... I think I did hold on to a lot of irrelevant details, or that felt irrelevant," she said. "But when I think back, it’s almost like a movie is playing sometimes. If I can’t focus on the thing that’s really painful in front of me, I’m often looking for a distraction. So it might be a color or an animal, anything that would ground me."
Geller will appear virtually at an event Monday co-hosted by the Stafford Library and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Columbia College as well as Daniel Boone Regional Library. The event sits at the intersection of Indigenous Peoples' Day and American Archives Month, Geller said.
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Moving toward the truth
In its song "Keys to Paradise," Minnesota string band Trampled by Turtles offers this sad-eyed proverb: "Little bandages add up to a coffin, baby." The lyric resembles the experience of reading of "Dog Flowers."
Perpetual instances of neglect, disappointment and peril, observations made from the outside looking in on a loved one who's slowly wasting their life add up. Their sum: a quietly harrowing feeling, and a spirit of solidarity with Geller as she gamely navigates a world forever giving her trouble.
The book began, Geller said, as a means to soulful ends — better knowing and understanding her mother upon her passing. Sifting her personal artifacts, Geller moved through her mother's story alongside her, she said.
"Dog Flowers" took several forms — letters to her sister, a book of essays — before Geller found its truest shape. After a course on documentary poetics in her MFA program at the University of Arizona, she saw a path forward. Poets who wrote around objects and documents, exploring their endless meaning and multiplying layers of context, seemed to take her by the hand.
The book readers hold bears Geller's meticulous, lyrical reflections interspersed with photographs of her and her mother — captured in moments of commingled innocence and joy; stained and smudged job applications; childhood letters written by a girl forced to grow up in other peoples' timing; snapshots of cross-country sojourns, and images of family members Geller never chose, but learned to abide.
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Penning the book sent Geller back to her own personal archives: the LiveJournal site she kept as a teen, the incomplete writing which helped fill out her own story. In both her mother's and her own chronicles, she faced "incongruities," entries that mixed fact and fiction for the sake of getting by.
"I wasn’t always truthful — and this is something I noticed in my mom’s diaries too," Geller said. "Even in writing down where no one else is potentially going to see it, you still don’t always feel entirely comfortable writing the truth. Or you might be skewing it, either in favor of what you want to be true or what you hope isn’t true."
Book of revelation
In her slim yet staggering essay "On Keeping a Notebook," Joan Didion writes about registering the details of someone else's story, then discovering the hidden effect of her record-keeping.
"I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about people," she wrote. "But of course it is not. … Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point."
Creating a mosaic of her mother in photographs and word pictures, Geller's own visage came into clearer relief — as did her relationship with her sister. Coming of age together, she laid blame for her sister's struggles squarely at her sister's doorstep. If they lived within the same walls and knew the same people, yet turned out different, it must be her own fault, she remembered thinking.
Sifting their shared history while writing "Dog Flowers," she realized that just wasn't true. Geller recognized moments in which her sister was let down, wasn't cared for to the proper degree — or with the proper gravity — and started reconciling pictures of her on the page.
Contrary to what other authors experience, writing the book wasn't cathartic, Geller said. At times it proved so painful she called out of work, engaged in a cycle of writing and crying, writing and crying, she said. But this was necessary labor.
"It almost feels like this process of excavation — you’re digging up everything that’s been buried. And some of it is hard to confront, and you don’t always know what to do with it or how to process it," Geller said.
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For all its shadows and unswept corners, "Dog Flowers" is shot through with light and flawed beauty. The book's title comes from Geller's mother and a phrase she used for the dirty prints her boyfriend's dog left after digging.
"I looked again at the mud blooming on the ground and tried very hard to see what my mother had seen," Geller writes in a soft, staggering gesture toward making peace with the dead.
Despite the self-inflicted scars her family members bear, all the times they couldn't budge out of their own way — or out of Geller's — the book looks upon them with affection. "Dog Flowers" not only catalogues their failures, but also the moments they fulfilled their humanity. This lends the book both a sense of nature degraded and "a sense of resurrection," Nikki Leahy wrote in a piece for the Southern Review of Books.
"The most important disruptions ... are the multitude acts of kindness that are discernible beneath all the poverty and pain," Leahy wrote.
Geller thinks about "how much pain would I have saved myself in the long run" had she severed ties with her family at 18, she admits. But bonds proved their worth, even if momentarily. "I didn’t just love them because I was told to," she said of her family.
She writes her difficult family history into the permanent record, but also believes the best about her loved ones, preserving her hopes for their change and healing in ink.
"Holding onto that hope is what kept me in those relationships," she said.
Walking through rooms with Geller on the page, and hearing her speak of the writing process, we carry that same burden of hope with her.
Geller will speak at 7 p.m. Monday. There are two attendance options: an in-person watch party at Columbia College's New Hall, with refreshments at 6 p.m., or via Zoom. Learn more via the library's website at https://events.dbrl.org/event/7203060 or in a Facebook event at https://www.facebook.com/events/390613176583890.
Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. Find him on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Memoirist brings painful memories, hope of change to Columbia College talk
