Jeanne Northrop is a Swedish/Indian (Seneca & Miami)/Irish etc. mix from Bradford, Pennsylvania.  She is a writer, and a teacher of composition at Fletcher Technical Community College in Houma, Louisiana.  Additionally, she is pursing (sometimes actively, sometimes not) a PhD from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in English with a concentration in Folklore.  She received her MA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington and is a graduate of the National Writing Project’s Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project.  The submitted story is from an on-going semi-autobiographical, though semi-fictional project tentatively titled The Powwow Cookbook, several chapters of which have been presented at various venues, including the Southern Women’s Writing Conference.  She currently lives in Algiers Point in New Orleans, walking distance from the French Quarter, though she foregoes walking on water and takes the ferry instead.