Mona Susan Power

Author Mona Susan Power discusses the complexities of cultural trauma, family history, and the transformative power of storytelling. 

Mona discusses why many of us struggle with ancestral trauma and deep-seated personal shame without realizing these burdens aren’t entirely theirs to carry, how witnessing the “unspoken” stories of our ancestors can lead to profound personal growth, and so much more. 

About Mona Susan Power

Mona Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and an award-winning author whose work serves as "powerful good medicine." A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has received numerous prestigious honors, including the PEN/Hemingway Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. Her most recent novel, A Council of Dolls, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Mona’s writing is celebrated for its vulnerability and ability to explore the deep intersections of Indigenous history, resilience, and healing. 

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• True healing requires more than just moving on; it requires a "witnessing" or a sincere hearing of the story without gaslighting or self-protection.
• Understanding the "why" behind the difficult choices of our parents and grandparents can help us move from a place of resentment to one of deep compassion.
• Breaking free from inherited scripts and shame can be a physical experience, a "heaviness" falling away, allowing you to step into a more stable version of yourself.

Resources Mentioned

• Harvard Magazine: Trails of Tears, and Hope: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2008/03/trails-of-tears-and-hope-html 
• The Basics of Complex Trauma | Tim Fletcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IxEwPMqB-c 

Connect with Mona Susan Power

• Website: https://www.monasusanpower.com/books 
• A Council of Dolls Book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-council-of-dolls-a-novel-mona-susan-power/4a8bb4a17e0fdf12?ean=9780063281103&next=t 
• Bloodthread (Short Story): https://www.thegeorgiareview.com/posts/bloodthread/ 
• NY Times: After a Long and Painful Absence, Writing Her Way Home Again: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/books/mona-susan-power-council-of-dolls-indigenous-book.html 

Connect with the Show

Do you have ancestors who want to be witnessed?  Share their stories on Just Like Nana.

• Website: justlikenana.com
• Share Your Story: If you have a family story or trauma you’re exploring, reach out via our website for a chance to be interviewed.

Connect with Just Like Nana's Website.

A proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective.

Theme music by Carter Penny.

Transcript

Copy

Amie Penny Sayler: 0:22

Mona Susan Power is the author of the Grass Dancer, Roofwalker, Sacred Wilderness, and her most recent book, A Council of Dolls. She's a graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She's won a PEN/Hemingway prize for her first book. And her latest novel, A Council of Dolls, was long listed for the National Book Award and Carol Shields Prize, and winner of the Minnesota Book Award. She's the recipient of several fellowships, including a Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artist Fellowship, and McKnight Fellowship. She's an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. In sum, she's a brilliant and badass and exquisite writer whose books provide powerful good medicine. Mona Susan Power, so thrilled to have you on Just Like Nana. Thank you so much for being here.

Mona Susan Power: 1:15

Well, I'm so grateful to you for reading my book and wanting to showcase that book that's so near to my heart on your podcast, so I'm grateful to you.

Amie Penny Sayler: 1:25

Absolutely, just beautiful, exquisite. It resonated so deeply with me, as I'm sure it does with a lot of people, and I just truly want to express my gratitude for your vulnerability, perseverance and dedication to your craft and putting that work out there in the world for those who need it. So thank you.

Mona Susan Power: 1:48

Oh, thank you. Thank you for saying that. And I haven't really thought about it that much, but I realized this is not a book I could have done earlier. I'm going to be 64 next month, and I finished writing this while I was in my 60s, and I waited until I would be able to be compassionate and write with love. In terms of some of the difficult family histories, there's so much that I love and admire and honor about my family and the people I come from. But you know, no family is perfect, and oh yeah, so I'm glad I waited until I'd already done a lot of healing, and the healing continues, but I have made progress,

Amie Penny Sayler: 2:27

Yeah, and it is obviously complex, and Just Like Nana tries very much to honor ancestors, it's not about blaming. We didn't live in their times, in the conditions that they were alive in. We didn't experience what they experienced in the body they experienced it in and at the same time. And this is where the complexity comes in. Some of the choices that were made directly impact us and our lives. And there can be disappointments and hurt and anger and resentment, and you know, a lot of feelings can surround that. I would love to hear if you have a memory or just a story to share about one of your grandmas. I would love to hear it.

Mona Susan Power: 3:11

Absolutely and I think I got to know my Dakota grandmother better, partly because she lived with us for a very brief time when I was a little girl, but also because my mother was of my two parents, they were both parents. I'm so glad I had despite some difficulties, as we often can have, with our parents, but my mother was the one who shared very generously her stories about growing up and about her family, her parents, and about our mutual ancestors. My dad didn't like to talk about his family history at all. He spent wonderful time with me in that he would read aloud to me every night. So that was a great gift, but that wasn't coming from his personal store of memories. So I just knew more about my grandmother's histories and a personal connection that I had with her that I just remember and honor so much is when she lived with us. I was about three, four years old, and I was even then already a dramatic singer, dancer. I would perform things, and she would just laugh like she just loved me unconditionally. And that was my first experience, probably one of my only experiences, of being loved that way. It's actually a rare thing, I think, in this world, and so that meant the world to me. But in terms of what I knew about her, the stories about her, she was an incredibly important leader. The men of our tribe, many of them approached her at one point in the 1930s and they asked her if she would run for tribal council, and she was chair of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation our tribe back in the 1940s but she was already a leader during the difficult time of the 30s, during the Depression and the dirt bowl years out in North Dakota and South Dakota, which is where our reservation is located, she would hitchhike to DC try to meet with the president, then President Roosevelt, because she didn't have money to get there any other way. Also, she was always aware that we come from a hereditary chiefs family and that there are responsibilities that come with it. It doesn't mean you hold power over others, or you get to take from others. It's the opposite. It's that you need to be there for others all the time, and one of the things she drilled into her children was the chief's family eats last. If I could just say a personal aside, I think we don't have enough leaders like that in our world. Absolutely.

Amie Penny Sayler: 5:38

It sounds like your grandmother just completely embodied the leadership as service, and she understood exactly.

Mona Susan Power: 5:44

And it was hard. I mean, it was very hard on her and it was hard on her children, so some of their trauma came from having a mother wasn't always fully present, because she was splitting her attention in so many different directions, her attention and care.

Amie Penny Sayler: 5:58

Yeah, absolutely. What did you call your grandma?

Mona Susan Power: 6:02

Well, yeah, it's hard for me to remember, because I was a little probably because I was raised to speak English as my first language, I probably just called her grandma. It was later that my mother would explain to me, this is khúŋši, which is our term for in Dakota, for grandmother. But I didn't grow up speaking fluent Dakota. I still don't. I have a large vocabulary, though, in Dakota and Lakota, because we're also part Lakota, and so my mother could speak a kind of pigeon Dakota Lakota to me when she didn't want others to understand us as we were going around Chicago. I'm taking some classes, and it's just, I don't know if it's my age, it's not absorbing, but I'm grateful to just learn more about our language and just taking one one word, and you unpack that one word, and it teaches so much about our history, our values, our spiritual beliefs.

Amie Penny Sayler: 6:53

I don't want to provide any spoilers for the book. It is just beautifully written and told the way the stories unfold. I did appreciate the discussion in the book where the grandfather in the book is talking about the difference in languages and how much meaning is packed into his native language, and how that just doesn't translate into speaking English. It was just a really poignant observation, and I'm sure, incredibly and deeply authentically true.

Mona Susan Power: 7:28

Yes, and that's something I've come to understand, and why we lose a world when we lose a language,

Amie Penny Sayler: 7:34

Yes, which was obviously understood by colonizers. I'm curious, and this is a huge, broad question, how do you view ancestral trauma?

Mona Susan Power: 7:48

So I thought about that a lot, but more in recent years. It's not something you know, I was thinking about that much, even though I was a psychology major in college, there's so much packed into that there is socio cultural trauma, physiological, emotional, psychological, cultural, material, spiritual damage that can be done to an individual or a group that is so intense it's passed down to the next Generation, genetically, culturally, in all kinds of ways and well, I don't want to get ahead of myself, but just a personal aside. One way, I came to realize that I had inherited ancestral damage, a destructive habit, from both sides, even though they're very different sides. One is Dakota, one was white. One is from the Dakotas area. My white ancestors were on the East Coast, so even though they're very, very different, I think I inherited an awful lot of shame, personal shame, not that these were bad people in any way, and that I'd inherited a really ugly inner script, but we can talk about that later. But just wanted to give context when we're talking about ancestral trauma and what happens to our ancestors, where they're allowed to live, how they're allowed to live, that impacts later generations. And I thought it might be helpful if you're interested in learning more about trauma to Native communities, native North American communities, you can find it online. It's long, but it's packed with information, and it's open like you don't have to pay for it. It was published a few years ago. It's Harvard magazine, one of my alma maters a Harvard magazine from March of 2008 and the title of it is Trail of Tears and Hope. It focuses on the work of Dr Sousan Abadian, her focus is collective trauma. And so I wrote two quick, really short quotes to give you an idea of what she's talking about, because she focuses on indigenous people of this continent. She says, I don't like to compare traumas, but the kinds of traumas that native North American peoples. Have experienced are the worst. The fact that they have survived at all speaks to their resilience. The most extreme types of collective trauma are sociocultural. It's not just an aggregation of individual traumas, but disruption of the fundamental institutions of society and of its immune system that can restore people and repair a culture. So essentially, she's saying no one escaped. None of us escaped the ravage. None of our ancestors escaped this, and we're still contending with all of that damage.

Amie Penny Sayler: 10:35

It was a soul rendering. You know, it wasn't just live in a different place, which is horrific enough, but as you mentioned, just at the very root of society and culture and just a destruction, an attempted destruction.

Mona Susan Power: 10:53

Our kinship networks completely disrupted our educational system. The way we pass down information, what we taught, completely changed. Our spiritual practices were outlawed until 1978 Okay, wow, and on and on. So is big. It was a lot the ways we could feed ourselves and provide for ourselves. It's all gone.

Amie Penny Sayler: 11:14

All right, yeah, and we will link just so you know that article in the show notes, so make it easy for folks to grab it.

Mona Susan Power: 11:23

You know, people are like, Oh, why can't they just get over it, right? You know, look at other people. Everybody, all of our ancestors have experienced some kind of trauma. We all have that somewhere. But at least this one researcher has been trying to explain why some are different and why they persist. The difficulties persist and continue to get passed down.

Amie Penny Sayler: 11:42

I appreciate that. Yeah, let's jump in with, again don't want to get into story lines, because just it's just a magical experience to read the story itself and let it speak for itself. And your writing, I will tell you that much of it resonated with me, very deeply and personally, and not the cultural aspect, admittedly, but the familial aspect, and especially what kind of transpires down the line with women in a family. And you know, to that point, I mean, women have a lot of their own experiences going on in the world. I mean, I'm blown away that your grandmother was such a leader in the 1930s and 40s. That's amazing. Just what a testament to her and her character. You really captured the essence of what, Just Like Nana, is trying to do. And I'm at quote now. It's being pulled into conversation with ancestors who never had their say they were too busy surviving. And that's the end of the quote. From your perspective, I would love to just hear about why you think it's important for our ancestors stories to be witnessed.

Mona Susan Power: 12:53

I'm coming at your question in a roundabout sort of way. I love it's an important question. And thank you for asking such great questions. So there's this one character in the book who literally floated into a scene as I was typing it. Sometimes I'm hearing a voice in a character sort of guiding me as I write. Sometimes it's visual. I'm seeing almost like a film in my head that I'm following. You know, the imagination is such a complex, mysterious process, at least for me, and so I feel as if I've learned to surrender to my process and get out of the way. And so I'm opening and I feel these characters just float in, sometimes literally. So this character floated into the scene where a character named Cora, who is very much inspired by my own grandmother's experience. She is a little girl at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which both of my maternal grandparents attended. And she is dying of pneumonia. And I as a little kid, when I was 10, I had double lung pneumonia. It was no joke. It was so frightening, and they weren't sure I was going to survive it. And so I know what she was feeling and going through. And so I'm writing this intense scene when this figure floats above her while she's in her sick bed, and it's this Dakota woman, a young woman, and she's wrapped up in a blanket, but when the blanket drops, Cora sees that she's naked. She understands she's a spirit. She's not walked into the room. But I didn't have a name for the character. It wasn't until I got to the end, towards the end of the book, that I found her name. So I only knew her as the injured woman, because her body is just riddled with horrific wounds, any one of which could have been lethal. And she represented ancestors who went through literal massacres, like at Whitestone Hill in 1863 my ancestors on the Dakota side. And she is over massacred. She's massacred again and again. But her story isn't out there most people, even if there. Interested in native history, they will never hear about it. And so she does this perverse, horrible thing where she's picking at these injuries to keep them open, to not allow them to heal. And what she was trying to explain to young Cora, and trying to explain to me, when I was no this is too much, too intense. I don't want to over traumatized my readers, you know, and is that she does that, not to be perverse. She does that, not because she enjoys pain, but because she wants a true healing, not some shallow, fake covering over coming together of the flesh. No, she wants a full recovery, which would mean she would be allowed to tell her story, to have her story heard and acknowledged, if reparations are possible, to have reparations made, if not to her, then to her family or her people or her descendants in some way. And so that for her would be a true healing. And I came to realize that's kind of what I'm doing, in a way, writing this book. I'm trying to take some of our history, a small slice of it, and put it out there, put our truth out there. And I'm just so grateful for those who take the time to actually read it and spend time with these stories, these histories. So she came to be a critically important character, and I'm glad that my intuition, my trust in my process, my having been taught to honor ancestors, just overrode my concerns and that I she was absolutely vital to the book.

Amie Penny Sayler: 16:37

Wow, that's so powerful. And this has come up in other episodes, and tell me if I state this incorrectly, but I think you said it, and part of what you're saying is for true healing to occur, there needs to be a witnessing, there needs to be a hearing of the story. And I don't want to call it validation, because I don't mean that someone else needs to tell you, Oh, you're right. You know your own truth, but to have someone else acknowledge and recognize you are telling me your experience, and that is exactly what you experienced. I don't think there's a substitute for it, right?

Mona Susan Power: 17:16

With no gaslighting, with no qualified falling in absolute, pure acceptance. And actually, I remember the first time I gave that gift to someone else, and this was in a personal connection with someone that could be very fraught. And, you know, we don't always take full responsibility for what we've contributed to a difficult situation. And I'd been working on myself, and I remembered I would have been in the past. I wouldn't have been able to allow this person to share all they needed to, like all of the difficult things between us that just it's like he just needed to be able to express all these things without my interrupting or protecting myself. And I was just able to hear him and then say, I am so sorry for what I contributed to this, which I did, and what you've said is fair, and I hear you, and I'm so sorry. I saw an instant transformation. His face changed. It's like he lost years. I don't mean in a bad way. I mean like he suddenly looked younger, like a child again, just a beaming child. We don't do that often enough, because we're guarded, because so much of us inherit shame. We inherit these other things. We're protecting ourselves. We're trying to protect our you know, our tender little self and ego and all of that just hold together, you know. So it can be really hard to love ourselves enough to be able to really hear the difficult truths. None of us is perfect. Of course, we've all made mistakes, right, especially if we inherit a lot of difficult self sabotaging ways and not great habits or ways of responding to conflict. And so it doesn't mean we're bad people at all, and it can change. And so sorry. That was a long rant.

Amie Penny Sayler: 19:05

No, no, important, I think, yes, absolutely. It just shows how powerful that was. And you just saw that, however you want to define it, energy, spirit, that residue of what was hanging on was able to move on once he had been acknowledged.

Mona Susan Power: 19:24

Yes, I heard him, and he knew I was sincere. I wasn't just like, Oh yeah, okay, I'm sorry, no. And it was just like, it's like, someone just wiped away all of the anger and pain and everything, and we could step onto a new page.

Amie Penny Sayler: 19:39

Yeah, and you know, part of this, and I don't mean to lecture anything, and everyone is uncomfortable with this, including myself, is complexity is hard, like we talked about in the beginning with family. And I don't know if history has always been like this. If this is new, I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that we seem to live in a time where it's one way or the other. It's right or it's wrong, it's true or it's false, without a recognition of all of the gray in between all of that and that. It's all a matter of perspective. So just to be comfortable with that, and as you said, willing to sort of let go of the protection of, oh, but I don't want to feel discomfort, or I don't want to feel that I did something wrong, exactly? Wow, so powerful. I'm gonna ask. And I think you started to kind of get to this when you were talking about the character who floated in, which is just a beautiful image. Did you set out to write A Council of Dolls as an exploration of family trauma? Did that unfold as the stories were told to you? How did that work?

Mona Susan Power: 20:53

Thank you for asking that, and it was a really organic, unexpected process. And first, I can rarely choose my projects like they come to me. And I mean, obviously I could decide I'm a writer. I could say, okay, today I'm going to write a short story about this and such, and I want it to be approximately this length. I can put the words down, but it usually won't work when I am controlling when I have the agenda and I'm trying to force an agenda on the page, what I have to do is always surrender my agendas for my best work to show up. And so I decided I wanted to write a short story for a particular literary contest where I was needing some money. You know, living the art life can be very uneven, making a living at it. And so I needed some money. Their first prize is 5000 bucks. I was like, the odds are, of course, I won't win, but I was a finalist. One like, hey, let me try again. And so there was a certain length. I knew it had to be a certain number of words. So I was like, will I write about I didn't have anything just coming to me organically. And I thought, well, it'd be fun to write something about a character like me who's Native American Dakota, growing up in Chicago in the 1960s and spending so much time with her mother. And she adores her mother, but her mother's difficult. But I wanted it to be sweet. I didn't want it to be dramatic and difficult. So I wanted her to sort of magically have one of this little girl's dreams come true. But at the end, you don't know, like, was it magic? She believes fully in magic, you know, stories she's been raised to hearing, and she wants to be magic. But almost more than that, she wants it to be her mother that made the magic happen. That maybe her mother did this for her secretly, and it's really her mother, which for her would be a different kind of magic. And so I had all these good intentions, and I sit down to write, and once I'm in writing mode, it turned a very different it turned darker. I know I'm writing a scene where she has this little baby doll, Ethel, and she's black, and I realized, Oh, this is a doll that I really had when I was a kid. So that didn't surprise me, but what they're listening to, it's the news about which and this did happen to me too, growing up, my parents didn't really over protect me, and I just dealt with whatever they were dealing with. And so the news came on about the horrific killings of eight student nurses in the Chicago area by Richard Speck, and one of the ninth nurse survives because she hides under this bed and doesn't make a sound all night long. And so I was already growing up in sometimes difficult situations, so survival information was important, so I stalked that away, as that was possible survival thing to do, hide under the bed, don't make a sound. They won't even know you're there. That's kind of dark. So it ended up being a short story. I forget how many pages, maybe 15 typed pages called naming ceremony, and that's the title of the first section of this novel A Council of Dolls. Didn't think it was going to be a novel. It didn't win, but it was some sort of honorable mention or something where they did publish it. And then a long time after this, at least a year after I wrote it, a dear writer friend of mine, she read story, and she's African American, and so she said about the doll, Ethel. You could write a whole novel about Ethel and black protectiveness, and that just triggered my imagination and associating a doll with protectiveness. So that's when the idea of a novel it so it came from somebody else, not even for me, but it haunted me. And so I started thinking, what would that look like? And at first I thought it would just be about Sissy, the little girl like me. But then, as I started developing, it like other episodes, other things that could happen, and it wasn't pure autobiography, I didn't want to write that, so I made choices that would help me. Into imagine scenes that didn't happen. For example, in real life, my father was not Native American. He was white, but I made him Lakota. I gave Sissy a Lakota father. That changes a lot the kinds of conversations they can have. That helped me get in that realm of imagination. But as I worked on it, thinking about it, taking notes, I thought, but I don't want readers to judge this mother. She can be dangerous. There's clearly something wrong here, but she loves her daughter. Her daughter loves her, so why don't I have a section where I show her as a little girl? So I start developing the Lillian section, but then she has a problematic father, inspired by my real life maternal grandfather, and I don't want him to be judged either. I didn't want the villain of this novel to be any of these characters. I wanted it to be colonization itself, that process and what it did to disrupt, for example, our healthier child raising practices and connections and all of that. How much other people would have been involved in the raising of children. So that's how the novel grew. And the last thing I'll say about it I'm making this way long, is at first I thought, Oh, finally, I have a novel written in chronological order. You know, Western terms of West the western model, yeah, right, right. I could start with the oldest generation or earliest generation, and then move forward in time, but I realized, as I started thinking about it, conceiving of it that way, what you would do is you might have audience, readers really care about these children characters have compassion for them, but then when you see them as an adult, you're left with a bad taste in your mouth. Whereas, if I flipped the order, you might have a bad taste in your mouth, but that might develop into compassion. So as you read, you're all headed more in the direction of compassion, as opposed to judgment.

Amie Penny Sayler: 27:00

Yes, it worked splendidly. Your thinking was correct on that. And it does, again, get back to even if you have some sort of idea about certain characters, as you get to know those characters more, your idea shifts because you understand their world. It's just beautiful how it happens, and it shows a complete whole person, instead of a flat character with good things and bad things about them, instead, they're completely intertwined, and you see the development from situations that were forced upon them, yep.

Mona Susan Power: 27:36

Well, thank you. I'm so glad. I'm glad when people see that, right? That's how they respond to the book.

Amie Penny Sayler: 27:51

In the book, you address that healing can't occur by pretending awful events didn't happen. And I think that kind of ties back to your story of the spiritual woman who appears to Cora. And I'm going to quote here, because, again, I can't come up with words that are as beautiful as yours, so I'm going to use yours tragedy just breaks out somewhere else along the line the story won't heal until the players do. I'm curious about your ideas about ancestral healing, so I'll just start with a tiny little story about my own work. So I'm writing a story about my grandmother's that have the name Elizabeth. That's my middle name. There are 45 of them. So, you know, sometimes it goes back to a 10th great grandma, and Elizabeth just feels so powerful to me because it comes from disparate family lines that aren't connected for, you know, until generations in the future. So it's not like it just follows one line. But when I set out and I started writing, I was thinking, These are women who didn't have a voice, whose stories are buried and lost and and I'm going to witness them, and I'm going to, you know, tell a story, and hopefully I'll just it sounds so egotistical, but when I started kind of help them heal through, you know, me telling their stories, and I've quickly come to realize that they're fine, and they're helping me heal. So I'm curious about and I'm humbly grateful for that and for them showing me actually, child, let us help you. When you think about ancestral healing, do you think about it going up the line and like, down to descendants. How do you sort of envision it happening spiritually, energetically, you know, as it happens in a family?

Mona Susan Power: 29:29

That's again another wonderful, brilliant question, and I can, of course, only speak from my own personal experience, so I'm not saying I'm right. This is just how it has worked for me and what I've come to understand. And my mother raised me to remember my ancestors. If I know their names, to speak their names aloud, to speak to them. Sometimes, if I don't know their names, that's okay. She says they know yours. The way that we believe, the way she was taught me to believe, is that they are still there in. Some sense around us, involved. They care about us. They're invested what happens to us. And so that I should absolutely call on them for help, that they want to be remembered in that way. And so you should always do that. You should ask for help, for guidance. And now, I mean, when I was younger, especially in the days when the Academy had a lot of influence on me when I was in college, a psychology major, if something wasn't statistically significant, it might not be real. You know, back in those days, I sometimes might not do all of these things, but as soon as I got serious about my creative writing, it's like all of her teachings just were flooding back, and creativity opened me back up to who I am, authentically, deeply. So all of that came back. And I talked to my ancestors and asked them for help all the time now, and I feel their support. I literally when I was writing this book, before every session, when I was going to write, I would really make sure to ask for their help and their guidance, because this was scary for me, and it's not a family history, but there are a lot of episodes that are definitely coming from our experiences. And there were times where I'd be writing where I just felt my room was crowded with ancestors, and I felt that some of the relationships of relatives who are gone without having healed things between them, with things being still really difficult, and that in having characters inspired by them, having these scenes where the love part of those relationships were there for all to see, that there was healing happening in the writing of this, that I was bringing them together, not just showing the difficulties, But showing the love too, how much love there was in real life, my mother was estranged from her father when he died. She was estranged from one of her closest sisters when she died. And on the page, I was bringing them back together and showing the love part of their connection that was always there. My mother felt horrible because both times before these relatives died, they had called her and she'd hung up on them without speaking to them. But now it's like she could set all that guilt aside and because here is her daughter doing this on the page and bringing all the family together. And I don't mean this, that sounds really arrogant. I don't mean oh, I have so much it was, I think the intention was for all of this to be healing, and that's what felt true. This is how it felt, and so that's how I was able to write about how healing the present doesn't only heal now or the future, it also can move backwards and give our loved ones who are long gone relief that all the things they were concerned about. Oh, my poor girl. What's she doing? Oh, why didn't I do a better job? Oh, why did I put them through so much? They're like, Oh, she's okay now. Oh, and then they can be okay. That's what it felt like.

Amie Penny Sayler: 32:57

That makes sense, it does, and what a beautiful gift to give your ancestors. So I'm going to do another quote, and this will be the last quote. And I did add, just for the listeners, it's the last half of a sentence. So I added one word in here, so it's almost your words, but I added an and. You're talking about the experiences of your ancestors. And the character says they live in my body and swirl through the coiled rope of my DNA. I'm curious about the body part, so I think, you know, I did for many years, and I'm working on this very much. And I think a lot of us tend to think of our bodies as an inconvenience. We don't want to be embodied. Instead, we kind of think we're walking around as walking brains, but our body is crucial and critical to our experience here, and I'm curious about the embodied part for you, as you were writing and as your characters were talking to you, did you feel senses in your body? Where was that? How did you experience that?

Mona Susan Power: 34:06

Again, that's a terrific question that one's more difficult for me because I am so much in my head, my thoughts rule me more than anything else, my thoughts and emotions. So it's hard for me to you know, I know from my dad's side I inherited arthritis. So that's something that I know this because my older half brother and half sister, we share the same Dad, we got arthritis early. And so there's certain things like that. But when I think about some of the difficult inherent inheritances, and of course, they can be these genetic issues, health issues that can come down. I experience all of this. It's in my head. I have a very chattery, noisy brain that's always going and so this is the best I can answer, because I'm a little different in how I experience things. And so I was remembering my parents were so different. And they did both of them. I just love them so much, and they're things I appreciate that they gave me so much. But I know they both really had these horrific inner scripts where they're always beating themselves up in their head. They had no self love at all. They were so down on themselves. And for my dad, you know, it just made him extra sensitive sometimes, where he just was pussy footing around other people, because he just felt like he was always failing and always making a mistake. And you know, the opposite with my mother, her protective armor would go up. And I inherited the both ways. But I also just had this mean voice in my head all the time judging myself. If I did something good and accomplished something good, it would say, Well, you've had all this, these privileges. Look at the education opportunities that you've had. You should have accomplished something, or you should do something right sometimes. And, you know, I just couldn't cut myself any kind of slack. Oh, actually, this does get to embodiment, though. So I worked for years to change that inner script, and it took years, and I'm not Buddhist, but it was actually Buddhist authors who helped me the most, writing in their books, writing about how you can retrain the mind and our thought patterns, and that I should gently correct that voice and contradict it when it was being unfair and unhealthy, not go no in but gently, just gently. Always be gentle in these practices. After years of that. We come the fall of 2019, and I start noticing, oh, I'm being a lot nicer to myself. If I make a mistake, I say something like, that's okay, I love you anyway. But it all came to a head, a climax, kind of like in the book, it's the fall of 2019 and there's one of these super moons that look just so large, it's so close, almost like one could touch it. And I don't know what it was about that super full moon that particular year, but all of a sudden, I just felt something happening to me. I had worked towards it, but it's like body, mind, spirit, ancestors, present person that I it all came together in a rush that I felt physically. I physically felt all of the shame, my shame parental going back however many generations on however many part sides of the family, all fall away. And it's like I just stepped out of it into a new me. Wow, it was physical. I mean, it's like the change, the breakthrough, was so massive. It's like even my body felt it. And the heaviness of all that I've been hauling along was an actual physical hauling, if that makes any kind of sense.

Amie Penny Sayler: 37:49

It's beautiful and powerful and incredible. What an experience to have. And yeah, there was a lot of work that brought you there. But thank you, Moon, yes.

Mona Susan Power: 38:01

Oh, and sad, PS though to that was that, so it's getting towards the end of 2019 and I said, Yeah, I had been just beset with sometimes, just the most horrific depressions where I just couldn't be out there in the world, and I would hide away, just barely functioning and barely keeping my little boat afloat financially, because I just limited in what I could do, sometimes for periods of time. And I thought, Oh, my God, I'm ready to be out in the world again. And then, of course, just a few months later, lockdown, wow, yeah, I didn't see that coming, right? Oh, wow.

Amie Penny Sayler: 38:45

Well, we won't blame the moon for that.

Mona Susan Power: 38:48

Yeah, I'm forever grateful for whatever magic. I mean, it really felt magical, and I worked towards it. But even that work, I felt was being guided, being directed to the right. You know, I found this terrific guy online. He's got this series on collective trauma that helped me. It's like so many sort because I couldn't have by the time I was ready for traditional therapy, I couldn't afford it, and so I had to cobble together my own strange kind of thing. And some of it was spiritual work. It was it was just so many different ways and ideas and voices coming together, and I feel there was a lot of guidance, the guidance I asked for helping me to come across the right voices that would help me.

Amie Penny Sayler: 39:28

Yeah, do you mind sharing his name? You said he had information on

Mona Susan Power: 39:33

I'd have to look it up. Tim, yeah, I don't have it right off my bat, but I could find it and I could email it

Amie Penny Sayler: 39:39

to you. Okay, if you think it would be helpful to listeners, I'd love to link it in show notes.

Mona Susan Power: 39:44

I will, because he really and he continues to, you know, he continues to put out videos on this. He is a Canadian guy, and he's where he learned to develop this whole system of how these things work, I mean, and trauma works. What? Is, he has been a counselor for people who had all kinds of addiction issues, and so he would spend day in and day out, hearing their stories, and he saw patterns in their stories, and he started focusing on these patterns and figuring out, you know, how and how can we address these, what sort of things work how? Anyway, so he helped me so much. And sometimes when I need a refresher, I'll look up his some of his videos. There are tons and tons of them now, because this was years ago.

Amie Penny Sayler: 40:31

So yeah, that's amazing. I'm so grateful for systems thinkers who can just sort of lean back and see a bigger picture. Yeah, where can people follow your work?

Mona Susan Power: 40:47

So I'm kind of old school. My only social media is Facebook. I don't do Instagram or Tik Tok or any of that, and I have a website. So Mona Susan Power has a lot of information about me and the other work that I've done on there and and a way for people to email me. So, yeah, so just, if you just Google Mona Susan Power both my website and if, well, if you put in Facebook that should my facebook page should come up?

Amie Penny Sayler: 41:15

Too. Wonderful. That is fantastic. Do you have anything else that you feel is wanting to be said that hasn't been said.

Mona Susan Power: 41:24

Only if I could offer any advice. I really, really have come a long way. I've gotten to a point in my life I don't think I ever thought was possible. Life is still hard. But don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm Snow White and on her happy days, you know, in the forest now, the chipmunks come running and etc, etc, and she's singing her song. So I don't mean life is ever easy, but when we are, we have become our own best friend, our own best ally. It is transformative. It just changes relationships. It changes so much. And I just want to tell people never to give up on themselves and not to judge oneself too harshly. The irony that I've learned is the more I've come to truly just feel I am of worth and to truly just love myself in a healthy way. It's easier for me to be honest with myself, take instant accountability to say, Oh, this is an old pattern of yours. This is not helpful to do. You're learning about boundaries. Finally, right? You want people to honor your own. You need to be very careful and honor others. I can catch myself right now with things. I'll just say this much politically, this is a difficult time for many people in our country, and a lot of folks are walking through the world just very triggered. And, you know, doesn't take much to light a fire and have people snap at each other and etc, etc. And so one of the things I've been doing, you know, in my meditation practices and things, is saying sometimes all I can offer the world right now don't have big answers, don't have much power, is to be a small oasis of stability. So if someone is provocative towards me out there, I don't have a car, so I'm on riding busses, local busses, I'm on the sidewalk. So I see a lot of stuff, right? Stuff happening, people on edge, people going through a lot. I don't just react, even if it's not fair, I'll say, Oh, that's terrible. Oh, I'm sorry. I just stable calm, and you just see the other person almost always is like, oh, sorry. Or just stop whatever it is. Sometimes it's all I can do, but it's a lot. So just hoping to empower people that radical change, radical healing, is possible. And I apologize for the siren, but my windows are open. Siren is like, yeah, what's happening? We all are needed to show up in the best way possible.

Amie Penny Sayler: 44:05

I have a question about that. I'm curious about as someone who has been working on boundaries herself, I'm curious about the intersection of your boundaries and being stable and offering kind of that forgiveness and grace where maybe it wasn't asked for, or even, I do want to say it's not warranted, because I think we all need to give each other forgiveness and grace. But do you feel that rub up against your boundaries, or does it come from such a place of, like you said, stability and your own sense of power and self worth and human compassion that it doesn't feel like it's creeping past your boundaries.

Mona Susan Power: 44:43

It takes more to get me triggered, because I have really worked on understanding where those come from, what my sensitive points are, and remembering all the wrong ways that I've responded to triggers. So I've worked a lot on this to just. As often as possible, just start doing like a breathing exercise, even if I'm walking, I can start doing that even if whatever's triggering me is out there in the world. If I'm sitting on a bus and I do protect myself, I'm not saying, you know, if somebody looks like it could end up being a dangerous situation, I will do my very best to get out of the way. And I think I have more emotional bandwidth available these days because I learned about boundaries. My mother was a community leader, just as her mother was. She felt again. We come from a line of hereditary chiefs, and we are here to serve in part. So for her, that meant anytime anybody needed anything. She was supposed to be the one on call, and sometimes she began to resent that. It would make her very angry, right? I have allowed myself to become who I think I'm here. What am I here to do? How can I best serve part of that is actually through my creative work. That's where my better self, my wiser self, perhaps where I'm my most generous self, because I put everything into it. I will take all kinds of risks. I will be vulnerable. I will do the work. I will show up as much as I can on the page, and then I'll take it out in the world and be happy to share it by talking about it. So because I've learned to say no where it feels inappropriate, and not just no to an event or a specific favor, but sometimes to a connection. When you do become more of a public figure, you get more communications. And you can't be close to everybody. None of us can, right? We are allowed to choose who becomes a really close inner circle person in our life. Another thing my mother would feel like everybody needs to have her time whenever they want it. And so in learning to say no, gently, politely, but to have boundaries and mean it and back it up with just yeah, there are things you're just not going to do or show up for, because you can't it. Just I have more time with myself. I have more energy to do what I feel I'm here to do. So I'm not walking around my own powder keg. I'm not contributing to the powder keg. If so, hopefully this makes some sense.

Amie Penny Sayler: 47:13

It does absolutely yeah. Well, thank you so much for talking with us and for letting us all enjoy this beautiful work. The Grass Dancer is on my nightstand now. I'm reading Anna Karenina right now, but it's going to be my next book.

Mona Susan Power: 47:32

Enjoy it. And I'm working really hard to finish. I'm getting close to finishing another novel. Oh, wow, is one I started years ago, and then I got to a point where I was stuck. I just didn't know how to structurally, have all these different strands of the story I felt were important to it, how to bring the ball into it. And some of the characters, it's like they didn't quite trust me yet, to open up completely. And now it's like I wrote A Council of Dolls, and it feels this is what it feels like. Feels like those skeptical characters are like, Oh, all right, I think she can do it Okay, opening up. And I've been really enjoying the process of writing this one so and it's a spooky one, because I spent so many years in Massachusetts, which is where my father's ancestors originally came from, on this continent, yeah, they originally landed. I went to school in Massachusetts. I lived there for a number of years. And so this is set in Massachusetts, and the working title will give an idea. It's too long a title, but it's kind of what came to me first, what launched the whole book. So the working title is Harvard Indian Seance at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast. I love it. I stayed there in 2017 I got a literary fellowship, and it funded my renting out the place for a night, and I invited two dear friends to spend the night there with me for research. And this is in Fall River, Massachusetts, where the infamous double murders happened in 1892 so So, yeah, so it's, it's been fun.

Amie Penny Sayler: 49:04

That's amazing. Well, I can't wait to read it.