Dog Flowers is WGBH’s Bookmarked: The Under the Radar Book Club’s April selection for 2021. Danielle spoke with host Callie Crossley about the process of writing the book and why she chose not to fictionalize her family’s struggles with addiction.
Abalone Mountain Press is a Diné woman-owned press with a mission to create a space for Indigenous voices to be heard without having to accommodate the white gaze. Abalone Mountain Press Podcast focuses on Indigenous writers and their writing journies. Danielle joined host Amber McCrary on Episode 2 of the podcast to talk about Dog Flowers and writing through familial trauma.
Danielle was interviewed by Jessica Douglass for High Country News about her memoir Dog Flowers.
HCN: Are there any particular passages in Dog Flowers that you are most proud of?
DG: There is a passage on this idea of “ghost sickness” that when I first wrote it, I was like, this is it — this is key to how I am thinking about my relationship with my mother’s belongings, with this history and her death. What I say in that section is that I’m not writing about grief, I’m not writing about losing my mother or those feelings of grief, because I don’t think this book really offers you a path through that.
Instead, I’m writing about (how) I feel possessed. I feel haunted by her life as much as her death, and the things that I wanted from that relationship that I didn’t get. I felt most proud when I emerged from the writing of that passage, because I was articulating early on what I was setting out to do.
Danielle Geller 