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Mona Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux nation. She is the author of four books of fiction: The Grass Dancer (winner of the 1995 PEN/Hemingway award), Roofwalker, Sacred Wilderness, and A Council of Dolls. Her fellowships include an Iowa Arts Fellowship, James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship, McKnight Fellowship, and Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including: The Best American Short Stories of 1993, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Southern Review and Granta. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Mona Susan Power's website
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A Council of Dolls began as a short story project. I often write stories—this one meant to explore a childhood dream of becoming a ballerina like my idol, Maria Tallchief. I desperately wanted pointe shoes as a little girl, even though they're not safe for children younger than twelve and our family operated on a pinched budget. Some nights as I lay awake, I would pray and pray for the miracle of finding pink pointe shoes under the bed the next morning. I wholeheartedly believed that such glorious magic was possible! Of course, the shoes never materialized, but a fiction writer can manifest anything in our pages! So I outlined a story about a little girl very much like myself when I was seven years old, who has an emotionally distant mother. She shares her dream with the mother and is scolded for being so fanciful. Yet the next week, the girl wakes to find the beautiful shoes tucked beneath her bed, nestled in a crumpled box. The girl wonders whether the gift arrived via magic, or through the actions of her mother. I pulled out a notebook and began to write ... but as my hand moved across the page, the pointe shoes never made an appearance. Instead, there was Ethel, a chubby-cheeked adorable baby doll, the Black version of ...
Lisa Bird-Wilson is a Cree-Métis writer and poet and the CEO of the Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies, an organization committed to the renewal and development of Métis culture and education. Her fiction ... (more)
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