After a long and painful absence, writing her way home again
When she was 4 years old she met Martin Luther King
Jr., who tugged playfully on her pigtails; at 17 she found herself at the Academy Awards, mingling with a bedazzlement of movie stars. By her early 30s she had earned a law degree from Harvard, an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PEN/Hemingway Award for her lauded debut novel,
“The Grass Dancer.” Then
Mona Susan Power's world went dark.
A prominent Sioux lineage helped propel the Zelig-like encounters of Power's youth: Her great-grandmother is Nellie Two Bear Gates, whose meticulous beadwork sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; her late mother, activist Susan Kelly Power, was a stalwart of the Native Rights movement. Power's own precocious intelligence allowed entrance into rarefied circles of publishing and academia. But depression, anxiety, and what she
would later learn to identify as complex PTSD led her to withdraw almost completely from a life she felt increasingly illequipped to handle in the wake of “The Grass Dancer's” success. “It was like I won the lottery,” said Power, 61, who was born in Chicago and is now a longtime resident of St. Paul, Minnesota. “But what happens to a lot of people who literally win the lottery? They flame out, right? If you're not prepared for it, if you don't really believe that you deserve it ...; the whole impostor syndrome thing, it just got worse. There were years I could barely leave my apartment.”
Nearly three decades later, Power has found her way home — in several senses of the word — with the publication of “A Council of Dolls,” a multifaceted and deeply felt novel-instories drawn largely from her own fraught family history.
From the pandemic
Like many recent creative projects, inspiration sprung from the itchy confinement of the pandemic — and in this case, a freak household accident. In late 2020, Power fell backward down the stairs, breaking her arm at the shoulder. Stuck inside with severely restricted use of her writing hand, something else jolted into place.
A friend suggested she expand a semi-autobiographical short story she had published in “The Missouri Review” about Sissy, a young Native girl in circa-1969 Chicago who is equally attached to her brownskinned baby-doll and her fearsome, beautiful mother. The piece, “Naming Ceremony,” now forms the book's first section.
“Then I remembered this episode from my mother's actual life where she had a doll given to her by some mission lady for Christmas,” Power recalled. “And shortly after she got it, her mother encouraged her to give the doll away to this little girl who was dying of tuberculosis. So she did, and the doll was buried with the little girl. That stuck in my head.”
Devised in nesting chapters that move backward in time from the `60s and `30s to the turn of the 20th century,