Marylee MacDonald

Award-winning author and writing coach

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Creighton Begay, from Canyon de Chelly, offered this petroglyph of Navaho symbols, their meanings taught to him by his grandmother. Pecked images and oral tradition kept these ancient stories alive.

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Selected Works

FICTION
A desperate mother goes to Prague to find her missing son (winner of the American Literary Review Fiction Prize, 2010).
Walter goes to Thailand and finds the locals staring at his birthmark (winner of the Matt Clark Prize from New Delta Review, 2009).
When Mother Gokhale moves in, Leslie Flynn must come to terms with her intercultural marriage.
CREATIVE NONFICTION
The true story of a fifteen-old girl's journey to motherhood.
An art project opens the door to a child's thoughts of death.

Where Stories Come From

After being enslaved by the Spanish, the Navaho--or more correctly the Dine--returned to Canyon de Chelly. Today, old families like the Begays live deep in the canyon, close to their roots.
         In my writing and in my life, setting plays an important role in where a character finds a spiritual home or discovers he or she has arrived in an alien land. I started thinking about this when I moved to Arizona, how we are all, in some way, "displaced" or "misplaced" persons. The characters in my short story collection, TRAVELERS WITH BAGGAGE, arrive in places they never expected to be, and they have to learn how to cope.