About Donna Veraldi
My background
My mother’s father emigrated from Dalarna, Sweden and settled on a dryland homestead in eastern Montana. He benefitted from the extra acreage allowed for farming this relatively barren land and from seven years of higher than average rainfall. My mother, the seventh of nine children, was born on Christmas Eve in a big white farmhouse that had been ordered from Montgomery Ward. My mother came of age during a prolonged severe drought and the Great Depression. She was a quiet person but so stubborn that mules would often step aside to let her pass. When she arrived at the University of Montana to start college, she listened to a speech in which the dean told the audience, “If you don’t have money, don’t come her; if you’re already here, go home.” Needless to say, my mother didn’t go home and completed her degree. My Italian grandfather came over from Calabria. He is said to have survived the trip to America by eating food that he was supposed to transport as gifts to American families. My father was born in Pittsburgh, at a time that it was a gritty, hard-working steel mill city. The air was so bad that his white shirts would be gray by the time he walked to school. My father was surrounded by a large, extended family. Although my father’s older brothers did not pursue advanced education, my father had a cousin called Tex Veraldi. The nickname was not due to any affinity that this cousin had for Texas. Instead, this cousin always dreamed of attending Carnegie Tech. At his high school graduation party, one of his Uncle Petie’s gambling friends asked him why he was so glum. Tex explained his dilemma about not being able to go to college. The gambling friend responded that he didn’t have much influence at Carnegie but that he could get Tex into Dusquesne. Benefitting from this chance meeting, my father would also enroll in Dusquesne for his college degree. My parents met at Fort Harrison in Helena, Montana, during World War II. My mother was working as an Army Hostess. My father was training in preparation for fighting the Japanese on Attu Island. (I later learned that Attu Island was a thoroughly miserable place, where many soldiers suffered from severe frostbite and loss of limbs.) At any rate, the Japanese found Attu Island to be just as miserable and left the area before my father was shipped out. While awaiting his next deployment, my father chanced to meet my mother. After two weeks, they decided to elope to Harlowton, Montana, and were married in a grocery store. Soon after, my father was sent to Guadalcanal and would have been involved in invading Japan. He and my mother would not see each other again until the end of the war. As a teenager, I was opposed to the United States dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As an adult, I am aware that if my father had invaded Japan, I might never have been born. As well, a good family friend, local artist Ben Steele, was a prisoner of war in Japan and was told that he would be killed as soon as the invasion began. I know that Truman and Eisenhower had strong disagreements about whether to bomb Japan or invade it. When such a choice has such strong repercussions for the life of my family and friends, it does create a huge moral dilemma. I was raised as the daughter of a college professor in a town that was in the backwaters of the strong currents of change in this country that would eventually become whitewater rapids. Life seemed rather safe and quite dull. I hardly knew my father’s family, which was too bad because when I was around them, they always seemed quite adoring. I knew my mother’s family quite well because the family farm drew them back to Montana quite regularly for family reunions. I did not grow up on a farm or a ranch, but I was always drawn to the country. I spent time on ranches of relatives, including the ranch up Swimming Woman Creek, which I used in my book. As an adult, I live on an acreage outside of town. It seems to provide me with almost as much stress as a real ranch would, but maybe I am exaggerating. I spent my adult life working as a forensic psychologist. That work was stressful. It was adversarial by nature, and I got beaten up a lot. I always was about two weeks away from unemployment, with huge overhead costs. I didn’t really know anything about managing an office. I travelled all over eastern Montana, and I am a cautious and easily frightened driver. There were times that I cried the whole trip. Flying wasn’t much better. One time, I flew into Sidney on the weekend before Christmas to do an emergency evaluation. When I arrived at the airport for my flight home, I was told that the flight had been cancelled. Since it was almost Christmas, there was no chance of booking another flight. I was told that, if I could get to Glendive (get to Glendive, I had no car and could hardly get around Sidney), I might be able to catch a flight. I couldn’t rent a vehicle because it was only a one-way rental. I finally found out that there was a bus that might stop in Sidney that night. The bus station wasn’t open, and I am lucky it was a warm night or I would faced the same frostbite my father would have faced at Attu Island. I sat in a little hut on a dark, deserted street, in Sidney (at the edge of the Bakken, where a schoolteacher had been abducted and killed not much earlier) and prayed that there would be a bus and it would stop. Finally, I saw the lights of the bus and made it home for Christmas. After that, I never flew on the local Montana plane service again. I enjoyed the stress of doing my job, and enjoyed doing forensic work. Then one day, I decided I was done. I had done my last psychological evaluation, had reviewed my last file. I was fortunate to be able to retire. I continued to do talks on psychology for several years, enjoying the time to research issues that I found interesting. Then one day this fall, I decided I was done with that too. I don’t want to do psychology any longer. I cannot do creative writing and technical writing at the same time. I live on my acreage, which is sort of a protective bubble. I don’t have to drive if I don’t want to. I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. I have the luxury of long, empty days that I own and don’t have to sell to my time to anyone. Meanwhile, I always wanted to be a writer. But when I was younger, I wanted to make a living, and I wasn’t sure that I could make a living as a writer. Also, I probably didn’t have much to write about when I was younger because I hadn’t experienced very much. I started my novel Up Swimming Woman Creek years ago. Back then, I would have had to find a publisher, and I realized after my first critical rejection letter that I just couldn’t tolerate “papering your walls with rejection letters” so I put it aside. But our world has changed dramatically even in those few years since I wrote the book. I have self-published my book and now have to market it. It seems easier to tolerate some criticism when I have also had people tell me that they like the book. But creativity is a fragile flame and can be blown out by the slightest breeze. So I continue to live on my place and try to replicate the sense of safety and security that my parents tried to create after they survived the war. In that safe bubble, it is easier to pursue creative writing. I don’t have all that many years left, but I do have the freedom to do whatever I want. Maybe I can get myself to do what I always wanted to do, which is write.