Living on the Borderlines
Stories
Both on and off the rez, characters contend with identity as contemporary Haudenosaunee peoples; the stories "cross bloodlines, heart lines, and cultural lines, powerfully charting whta it is to be human in a world that works to divide us" (Susan Power, author of Sacred Wilderness).
In Living on the Borderlines, intergenerational memory and trauma slip into everyday life: a teenager struggles to understand her grandmother’s silences, a man contemplates what it means to preserve tradition in the wake of the “disappearing Indian” myth, and an older woman challenges her town’s prejudice while uniting an unlikely family.
With these stories, debut writer Melissa Michal weaves together an understated and contemplative collection exploring what it means to be Indigenous.
Melissa Michal is of Seneca descent. She teaches creative writing and literature and loves helping students find that they too can write. She is a fiction writer, essayist, photographer, and a professor. She has her MFA from Chatham University, MA from The Pennsylvania State University, and her PhD in literature from Arizona State University where she focused on education and representation of Indigenous histories and literatures in curriculum. She has been grateful to read at the National American Indian Museum in DC and Amerind Museum in Dragoon. Melissa has work appearing in The Florida Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and other places. She was a finalist for the Louise Meriwether first book prize. She has a novel completed and is working on her nonfiction essay collection.
