Congratulations!

Author Anja Snellman celebrated her 70th birthday on May 23, 2024. “I feel quite ageless,” Snellman says. “I don’t know what I should be like as a seventy-year-old, and to be honest, I’m not that interested in knowing. I don’t think about age, not my own or that of others.” She thinks people should have “lifelong curiosity”:  a life story doesn’t need to be predictable. You can always change plans and direction. Continue >>

Once a day

I’m lying on warm, smooth, wave-worn rock near the water’s edge. The waves are waking up, stretching against the warm rock, yawning. I wake up. The sun is setting. Once a day I’m asleep; once a day I wake up. Once a day I’m sad. Once a day I long to see my daughters’ faces. Once a day I make love to my husband, and I fight with him once a day. I don’t know how to write just once a day. Continue >>

The fourth sister

Anton Chekhov wrote Three Sisters in 1900, and the play was first performed at the Moscow Art Theater in 1901. “Sometimes I look around and feel like the fourth sister. The one Chekhov feared a little. The one he could never figure out. The one he never wrote about. Today, in the checkout line at the grocery store, I heard someone say: a shallow abyss. I thought of Olga, Masha, and Irina,” writes Anja Snellman. Continue >>

Gracefully alert

What do artist Susanna Kaapu and Anja Snellman have in common? A fascination with deer, to begin with: their graceful alertness, constant vigilance, and instinctive readiness to react in less than a heartbeat. Like Snellman, Kaapu is a highly sensitive person. “Through deer, I can best express my sensitivity and longing for a comforting, gentle gaze. I’m easily scared, yet cautiously curious about the world.” Continue >>