In Dog Flowers: A Memoir (2020), Danielle Geller is immediately relatable; as soon as she shares her Arby’s sandwich from the airport with her cat Little Foot, I’m hooked. When she binge watches an entire season of DragRace, with a guy she meets through an online video game, I’m there for that too. (They also listen to Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men after she picks him up at the airport and drives them back to the Navajo/Tsi’naajinii reservation—that didn’t hurt either.)
She does not have an easy childhood: “My father was stuck. His mind was an old record, the grooves scratched and collecting dirt. The needle skips backward, repeating the same notes.” But even when her parents seem to be at the heart of the story, the memoir circles more frequently around her relationship with her sister, Eileen. “I learned very young that my mother was someone not to be trusted—that she would break my heart if I let her. But for Eileen, our mother was the solution to a nameless unhappiness.”
This is partly because many of the repeating notes and nameless unhappinesses carry on into adulthood for the two sisters. The space in which the differences and similarities between the sisters reside is where the emotions swell in this story, but throughout I felt invested in their lives.
It feels like something assembled rather than crafted; besides the usual memoir writing, there are photographs with incredibly detailed captions and data, and there’s a job application that her mom filled out when she had just recently graduated from high school.
One page that I stuck on for an unusual amount of time was the November social calendar for Sneakers Bar & Brille 2010, which included markings for : “New Puzzle Book”, “Laundry Day”, when she saw her BF, when Food Stamps arrived, a Fight with Ron, Apple Crisp, Sweet Potatoes, and her menstrual cycle.
It also has an artsy side; she also added a few books to my TBR by choosing memorable epigraphs for each segment of her book (one’s by Tanya Tagaq, but many of the others were new to me).
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ Carpe Fin: A Haida Manga (2019) has created “a distinctive fusion of pop culture, Indigenous iconography and Asian graphics”.
In about seven minutes, the artist describes how this story about humans and an ocean was commissioned by the Seattle Art Gallery and how the work took shape in interview.
He speaks of the conflict between Indigeneity and colonialism and how a moment that could be the end transforms into an unexpected beginning. Viewing the ocean as a bridge that joins two Pacific coastlines and their peoples, the work unites stories of Japanese and Haida.
The paper is mulberry paper manufactured in Japan and every artistic decision appears layered and considered. Yahgulanaas doesn’t want to be prescriptive; he wants to create a space for the viewer to be able to relate directly to the work, to search for their own personal understanding and bridge from themselves to Others. Hybrids. Complexity. Diverse. Changing.
Dog Flowers definitely sounds like the kind of memoir I would like. I hadn’t heard of Danielle Geller, but anyone who binge watches Dragrace is OK by me.
Waaaaaaaaait, are you a DR fan? We HAVE GOT TO TALK! 😀
Obsessed. I even rewatch some old seasons, when there are no current ones on.
Me. Too. It’s the Best.Thing.Evahr. Prepare for your DMs to be pulsing with related GIFs and episode news. 😀
Red is waiting for me to pick up at the library 🙂 It appears I will need to request Abel through interlibrary loan sometime.
You say less about the author than I think we would in Australia, where admittedly we are just learning to deal with Indigenous nation/language group names. I might say Danielle Geller a Navajo woman of the Tsi’naajinii clan from (Geller herself doesn’t name a state) in the USA. I got that far and realised you had told me all that, more or less. An exact analogue would be Claire G Coleman, a Noongar/Wirlomin woman (and SF author). Navajo is a much more well known descriptor than Noongar, but then the Americans assume that about everything American. I’m going to stop there before I get both feet in my mouth.
The book sounds good! (but it’s not on Audible).
It’s hard to find a balance there, isn’t it. Maybe bc it’s more subjective than we tend to think?
I ponder these questions of identity in terms of how I refer to people and I make contradictory decisions. I wrote about one fictional love story (by Timothy Findley) and didn’t mention the couple in love were both males and chose to omit that because it felt like the author was telling a love story first and the lovers were also both male, but with other writers (like Bryan Washington, for instance) I felt like he was prioritizing queer identity and his queer, male characters were also lovers so I felt he would want it specified. All in my own mind though!
When it comes to writing about Indigenous authors, I check to see how they self-define and many have websites/social media–but not all–there’s a lot of variation there too, from a single descriptor to a string of connections including enrolled memberships/band status for a specific band/clan/tribe/kinship/community. What to do? For some writers, their ethnicity is the driving force behind their storytelling; for others, it’s only one aspect of their identity. And I don’t want to offend either way…
In my reviews of new books I try not to reveal stuff that I think the author wishes to reveal during the course of the story, even if it’s quite early. Old books I tend to discuss right through to the end (which means Whispering Gums has stopped reading my Such is Life series because the book is on her (enormous) TBR).
I’m getting the impression there’s a bit of a template developing for describing Australian Indigenous authors, an idea made difficult by white ‘Protectors’ forcing a wide range of clan groups into one or two central reservations in each state and so separating people from their clan/language structures for one, two or three generations. Hence Bruce Pascoe for instance claims three separate clan affiliations, all disputed.
As an aside, I was astonished to learn (Wimbledon champion) Ash Barty is Indigenous (according to wiki her father identifies as Ngaragu).
I’ve never heard of Danielle Gellar, but that memoir sounds fabulous. I met Michael a while ago back in Calgary when he came through for the writers festival – he was in artist in every sense of the word! I remember thinking he was brilliant, but I was a bit afraid of him too LOL
His passion for his work seems intense, even in a short interview; I can see how his presence would be impressive. There’s so much cool art and literature on the west coast; whenever I “discover” someone like this, I’m reminded of how expansive this continent is, from a geographical perspective, and how easy it is to overlook that reality.
Two more fascinating looking books – thank you for sharing about these. The first one sounds very intriguing.
Another candidate for your “women’s lives” reading project. 😀
Um, I’m not doing a “women’s lives” project at the moment … I’m doing an “Other lives than mine” theme for my first two months of my 20 Books of Summer, and in fact a lot of those have accidentally been men’s lives, although I have Afuah Hirsch coming up next.
I was just messin’ with you, Liz… expanding your Angelou reading into a lifelong reading project… a joke that I’ve carried onto your blog as well, which probably also did not make you laugh. insert emoji both laughing and crying
Oh, so intrigued by Carpe Fin!. My library doesn’t have it but they have Red so I requested it. Have you read that one?
I haven’t, but I did peek and they are very similar; I’m looking forward to your thoughts. I hope you can find Jordan Abel’s poems: you’d really appreciate his style (regarding another post)!