Lilli Jolgren Day | Photographer | Author | Artist

I was told the home page on your website should tell people who you are and what you do. So who am I? 

I am a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a sister, a daughter, a friend.

I have lived most of my adult life with invisible chronic illness. Because of that, my world has been geographically small. I do not travel widely. I am not famous. I did not graduate from an Ivy League university. I have never climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

But I have spent years studying another kind of terrain.

The interior landscape.
The way memory shifts.
The way grief lingers.
The way love endures inside ordinary days.

I admire people who move boldly across the world, who leave visible marks and build expansive lives. But I have come to understand that largeness is not measured in miles traveled or names remembered.

It is measured in depth.

We all have mountains to climb. Some rise in distant countries. Others rise quietly in living rooms, hospital rooms, childhood homes, and long afternoons that ask us to keep going.

I write about those mountains.

I write about the small, sacred spaces where lives unfold — the rooms we return to, the people who shape us, the questions that refuse to leave.

This is where I begin.

I have always felt most like myself when I was creating something.

A painting.
A quilt.
A garden full of flowers.
Even a doodle in the margin of my algebra notebook — though I never liked algebra, and no, I never found much use for it later.

I like working with words — discovering them one by one and arranging them until a scene begins to take shape. A moment. A mood. A person emerging quietly on the page.

I’m also drawn to images — to light and shadow, to color, to the small adjustments that shift how something feels. Photography, painting, and digital art let me explore those details, shaping what I see into something more intentional.

Whether with fabric, flowers, sentences, or light, I return to the same instinct: to make something that wasn’t there before.

So that is who I am. And that is what I do.

I live in the beautiful state of Michigan, where I write a little. I take photographs. I pay attention.

I look for beauty and grace in the quiet glimmers of a worthy life — the scent of fresh coffee in the morning, the curled edge of a dry November leaf, a kind word from a doctor, lunch with a friend, the slant of late-day sunlight across the living room floor. A newborn’s first steady gaze. My husband’s goodnight kiss. An unexpected kindness from a stranger. An “I love you” from a grandchild.

Magic is not rare. It is simply easy to miss.

I may not lead a large life. But I live a good one. A grateful one.