For writer Mona Susan Power ’86, her Harvard Law School experience was perfect foreshadowing. Indeed, to use a legal term, perhaps her destiny was foreseeable.
“I had a blast,” Power says of her time as a student. During her first year, she was part of an experimental section that tried to blur the traditional boundaries between different black letter law courses. She enjoyed constitutional law with Professor Laurence Tribe ’66 and Alan Dershowitz’s criminal law class. She studied American Indian law and participated in the Native American student organization.
But it was during the future author’s involvement with the Harvard Law School Drama Society that she truly flourished, acting in and producing around a dozen shows with the group by the time she was a third-year student. Power even penned the spring musical one year — a parody called “Alice in Wonderlaw.”
There were other hints of her creative fate: In a course on Dickens and the law, Power fell in love with the Victorian author’s serial “Bleak House.” And when her Evidence professor assigned a take-home final that asked her to analyze the legal tactics in a popular French film, she may have been one of the few students who relished the opportunity.
It might not come as much of a surprise, then, that not long after commencement, Power traded casebooks for fiction books — and is today the bestselling, critically acclaimed author of four books of fiction, including her most recent, “A Council of Dolls.”
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of my favorite classes featured connections to art,” she says.
Power, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, grew up singing, dancing, acting, and writing. But after she graduated from Harvard College, her mother encouraged her to study law, fearing that her daughter would be unable to make a living in the arts. Although Power ultimately decided not to pursue a legal career, she insists that the arts and the law have things in common.
“Language is such a fundamental aspect of law,” she says. “The best lawyers learn to use language in ways that are either carefully specific or purposefully vague. Lawyers also need to be good storytellers in order to make a compelling case, whether in front of a jury, before the Supreme Court, or in their legal briefs.”
Power’s current project centers on five Native students at Harvard College.
After Harvard Law, Power attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and it was then that she began to work on her first novel, “The Grass Dancer,” which received the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel in 1995.
Power says her law degree gave her a kind of unfair credibility once it was published, credibility that would otherwise have shamefully been denied her as a Native writer.
“I was told explicitly by one publishing insider that he sighed when he saw my novel, thinking, Oh, another Indian book,” she says, “at a time when there were very few Native American authors being published. But he went on to say that in reading my bio, he noted I had a Harvard Law degree. So, he read the book and loved it! I don’t even recall what I said in response. I was so angry and pained by his racist ignorance.”
Power says that, unlike some writers who collect ideas for their books long before they put pen to paper, for her, inspiration often occurs spontaneously, and sometimes in surprising ways. “My mother would say it was ancestors bringing forward inspiration, which could very well be,” she says. “Sometimes I’m given a waking vision, like a film playing out unexpectedly in my head. The vision presents a kind of puzzle. I want to understand it. The pursuit of understanding launches a novel.”
“A Council of Dolls,” her latest novel, is told through the interconnected stories of three generations of Native girls, each of whom has a special relationship to a cherished doll. The toys are more than playthings — they serve as friends, confidants, and even protectors as the girls endure trials from their families and the wider world, which has tried to mold and even erase their identities as Indigenous people.
“In 2019, I sat down to write a short story about a little girl very much like me — the girl version of myself I’m still so closely in touch with, given all the healing work I’ve been doing — and she just led me where she wanted to go,” Power says. “I also didn’t consciously choose to write the book in the present tense. It was gut instinct. After the fact, it made sense to me, because what that ‘choice’ is telling me is that the past is never really past. We carry it with us in each moment.”
Power adds that the book was influenced in part by her own history, and her grappling with the wounds of her youth, including the sudden violent death of her father when she was 11 years old.
“When I thought about the appearance of dolls and how they ultimately served the story, I realized that they were a reflection of my own survival strategy as a child,” she says. “I turned to art to express myself when I wasn’t allowed to work through my pain and frustration, sometimes rage, in any other way. I wasn’t allowed a counselor to help me process things. Creativity saved me, and it saves the girls in this novel, too, because their own imaginative impulses manifest the allies they need to survive.”
Finding a way to work through discomfort and suffering informs Power’s current project, too, a novel she began in 2014. With an intriguing and enigmatic working title — “Harvard Indian Séance at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast” — the book centers on five Native students at Harvard College who decide to stay at the eponymous B&B for one last adventure together before graduation, and wind up stirring up ghosts of another kind.
“Each of them has a problem in their past that they haven’t addressed, and certainly not healed,” she says. “They bring all of that to the house, which is already a troubled place.”
Like her other works, this novel will explore traumas imparted by colonialism and racism, and the ways pain is passed down through families, among other themes. But Power’s books also shimmer with a quiet hope, reflecting the joys and beauty of life, and of Native culture, identity, and history. This may not be a conscious choice, but Power says it is no accident.
Despite having dealt with depression for much of her life, Power says she has nonetheless always maintained a sense of optimism — and a wicked sense of humor. “I’m all about hope,” she says. “What else is there for us to do in the midst of such horrors going on in our world? Horrors in our past? If we allow ourselves to be swallowed up by anger, fear, despair, then we’re lost.”
Her work channels that philosophy. “The best thing I know how to do is to pick myself up and start over, try again. Make myself laugh. Believe in miracles,” Power says. “I’ve definitely been granted a few.”