Mona Susan Power, author of A Council of Dolls
Novel & Short Story Category, sponsored by Minnesota Humanities Center
Each week leading up to the 36th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
My novel, A Council of Dolls, is very much about healing from generational trauma, and while I used the final section of my novel to give an example of one character’s healing process, it was necessarily a Cliff Notes version of a journey that lasts a lifetime. I could have written an entire book focusing exclusively on that challenging process.
Tell us about someone who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
The first section of the novel began as a short story that was published in The Missouri Review. A year after it was published, a dear friend of mine who had just read it—a former classmate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—sent me an email that was generously supportive of the story. She said I could write an entire novel about the narrator and her doll, Ethel. I hadn’t thought of developing that short piece into a novel until Alyssa Haywoode brought the idea into my head. I am so grateful to her!
Tell us about a favorite read from the past year. Why did you find it enjoyable, insightful, or memorable?
A novel I’ll be returning to again and again is Oscar Hokeah’s PEN/Hemingway award-winning novel, Calling for a Blanket Dance. He writes with such generous-hearted grace about families in trauma, never pulling punches when it comes to the challenges they face, yet never leaving the reader, or his characters, in a place of hopelessness. He has such an ear for the different music of diverse voices. I admire this book enormously!
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known.
I was a singer in my community when I was young—asked to sing at family functions, activist gatherings, community events. I also performed in many plays in high school, college, and summer stock. I’ve missed singing in public and will perhaps brush up on my vocal exercises in coming months and surprise folks with a concert!
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
It’s no exaggeration to say that libraries perhaps saved my life. My mother and I made the rounds of several libraries in the Chicago area each week when I was growing up. Librarians noticed I was so reverent when it came to books, they granted me my first library card at the age of two. During rough times in my life, particularly the years following the violent death of my father when I was eleven years old, libraries became a safe refuge from worries, fears, and grief. Librarians encouraged my budding writing talent, and offered solace in dark times. Bullies couldn’t reach me there, and I could step into other worlds offered up by books when the world I inhabited was too much for me to handle. Libraries were my idea of what heaven must look like.
Mona Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She is the author of three previously published works of fiction, The Grass Dancer, Sacred Wilderness, and Roofwalker. Power is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.