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CITY: Tucson
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COUNTRY: United States
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http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/09/entertainment/la-ca-leslie-marmon-silko-20110109 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/books/review/Thomas-t.html http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2010/10/nonfiction_review_the_turquois.html http://www.chicagohumanities.org/Genres/Literature/2010-Leslie-Marmon-Silko-The-Turquoise-Ledge.aspx
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 5, 1948, in Albuquerque, NM; daughter of Leland H. Marmon (a photographer) and Mary Virginia Leslie; married Richard C. Chapman, 1966 (divorced, 1969); married John Silko, 1971 (divorced); children: (first marriage) Robert, (second marriage) Cazimir.
EDUCATION:University of New Mexico, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1969.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist, poet, and essayist. University of Arizona, Tucson, assistant professor of English, beginning 1978. Associated with University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Head of Flood Plain Press.
AWARDS:Grant, National Endowment for the Arts, 1971; poetry award, Chicago Review, 1974; Pushcart Prize for poetry, 1977; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1980, for Ceremony; MacArthur Fellowship, 1981; grant, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 1983; Living Cultural Treasure Award, New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities, 1988; Lifetime Achievement Award, Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, 1994; Robert Kirsch Award, LA Times Book Prizes, 2020, for lifetime achievement.
WRITINGS
Work represented in anthologies, including The Man to Send Rainclouds, Viking, 1974. Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times Book Review. Almanac of the Dead has been translated into German.
SIDELIGHTS
As a novelist, poet, and essayist, Leslie Marmon Silko has earned acclaim for her writings about Native Americans. Her first book published was the 1974 volume of poems called Laguna Woman. Silko began writing poetry based on traditional stories and legends she learned from her family. For example, in the poem “Bear Story,” she uses characters from Laguna and other southwestern Indian stories to tell the tale of how bears can bring people to them and help them become bears. Her poems highlight many of the themes found in her prose, including the Native Americans’ non-Western sense of time, the strength of women, and the need for change.
Silko received wide and substantial critical attention in 1977 with her novel Ceremony. Her novels, as well as her poems, are shaped by her Native American heritage. In her writings, Silko draws from many of the traditional oral stories that she heard growing up at Laguna Pueblo Indian reservation in northern New Mexico. Her works primarily focus on the alienation of Native Americans in a white society and on the importance of native traditions and community in helping them cope with modern life. She has been recognized as a major contributor to the Native American literary and artistic renaissance that began in the late 1960s.
Novels
In Ceremony, Silko tells of a half-breed war veteran’s struggle for sanity after returning home from World War II. The veteran, Tayo, has difficulties adjusting to civilian life on a New Mexico Indian reservation. He is haunted by his violent actions during the war and by the memory of his brother’s death in the same conflict. Deranged and withdrawn, Tayo initially wastes away on the reservation while his fellow Native American veterans drink excessively and rail against racism. After futilely exploring Navajo rituals in an attempt to discover some sense of identity, Tayo befriends a wise old half-breed, Betonie, who counsels him on the value of ceremony. Betonie teaches Tayo that ceremony is not merely formal ritual but a means of conducting one’s life. With the old man’s guidance, Tayo learns that humanity and the cosmos are aspects of one vast entity, and that ceremony is the means to harmony within that entity.
With its depiction of life on the Indian reservation and its exploration of philosophical issues, Ceremony established Silko as an important Native American writer and marked her as the first Native American woman novelist. Charles R. Larson, writing in Washington Post Book World, called Ceremony a novel “powerfully conceived” and attributed much of the book’s success to Silko’s incorporation of Native American elements. “Tayo’s experiences may suggest that Ceremony falls nicely within the realm of American fiction about World War II,” Larson wrote. “Yet Silko’s novel is also strongly rooted within the author’s own tribal background and that is what I find especially valuable here.” Similarly, Frank MacShane wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Silko skillfully incorporates aspects of Native American storytelling techniques into Ceremony. “She has used animal stories and legends to give a fabulous dimension to her novel,” he declared. MacShane added that Silko is “without question … the most accomplished Indian writer of her generation.”
Some critics considered Ceremony a powerful confirmation of cosmic order. Elaine Jahner, who assessed the novel in Prairie Schooner Review, wrote that the book “is about the power of timeless, primal forms of seeing and knowing and relating to all of life.” She observed that the Native American storytelling tradition provided the novel with both theme and structure and added that Tayo eventually “perceives something of his responsibilities in shaping the story of what human beings mean to each other.” Peter G. Beidler focused on the importance of storytelling in Ceremony by writing in American Indian Quarterly that the novel is both “the story of a life [and] the life of a story.” Beidler called Ceremony “a magnificent novel” that “brings life to human beings and makes readers care about them.”
In 1983 Silko received an award from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation for her small but influential body of work. The award—for 176,000 dollars—was particularly appreciated by Silko, who produced most of her writings while also working as an English professor. Silko used that money to work on an epic novel, Almanac of the Dead, that eventually took ten years to complete. Published in 1991, the novel “ranges over five centuries of the struggle between Native Americans and Europeans and focuses upon a half-breed Tucson family voyaging to Africa and Israel,” noted John Domini in the San Francisco Review of Books. In addition to its wide scope, the novel contains a multitude of original, colorful characters. Bloomsbury Review contributor M. Annette Jaimes explained: “Throughout the book, this entire wondrous and seedy spectrum of humanity parades itself endlessly across the knotted tightrope of a world gone hopelessly, splendidly, and quite believably mad.”
Some reviewers of Almanac of the Dead felt that this array of characters is the novel’s weakest aspect. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Paul West remarked that the author’s “myth remains unforgettable, whereas her characters—too many, introduced too soon and then abandoned for long stretches—remain invisible and forgettable.” Silko herself acknowledged that she experimented with characterization in the novel. In an interview with Linda Niemann in the Women’s Review of Books, Silko commented: “I was trying to give history a character. It was as if native spirits were possessing me, like a spell. … I knew I was breaking rules about not doing characters in the traditional way, but this other notion took over—and I couldn’t tell you rationally why. I knew it was about time and about old notions of history, and about narrative being alive.” While West called the book “an excellent work of myth and a second-rate novel,” Jaimes concluded: “Almanac must be ranked as a masterpiece.”
Silko’s third novel, Gardens in the Dunes, directly contrasts the traditional world of Native Americans with the European and American upper- class culture through the story of Sister Salt and Indigo, members of the ancient Sand Lizard tribe. After witnessing a miraculous and disturbing appearance of the Messiah along with his Holy Mother and eleven children, the girls are eventually separated. Indigo runs away from a government school and is taken in by a white couple, who bring her to New York and then to Europe. The surrogate mother, Hattie, is rebellious of the staid Victorian culture yet tries to bring Indigo up as a well-bred white American child. But Indigo’s worldview is still steeped in her Native American culture, and Hattie has as much to learn from Indigo as the young girl does from her. As another plot device, Indigo saves the seeds and roots that she gathers from around the world, leading to, as Donna Seaman noted in Booklist, “musings on the cultivation of plants and the exploitation of the earth.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly said that Silko “soars beyond the simpler categorizations that might circumscribe her virtuosic and visionary work.” The reviewer also noted: “Silko’s integration of glorious details into her many vivid settings and intense characters is a triumph of the storyteller’s art.” In Booklist, Seaman called the novel “an intricate, mesmerizing, and phantasmagorical tale, rooted in Silko’s passionate involvement with history, deep thinking about the spiritual consequences of our ravaging of the planet, and astoundingly fertile imagination.”
Short Stories and Poetry
After the publication of Ceremony in 1977, Silko received greater recognition for her earlier short stories. Among her most noteworthy stories are “Lullaby,” “Yellow Woman,” and “Tony’s Story.” “Lullaby” is an old woman’s recollection of how her children were once taken away for education and how they returned to a culture that no longer seemed familiar or comfortable. Writing in the Southwest Review, Edith Blicksilver called “Lullaby” Silko’s “version of the Native American’s present-day reality.” “Yellow Woman” concerns a Navajo woman who is abducted by a cattle ranger; she begins to believe that she is both herself and acting in the role of the mythical Yellow Woman, while the stranger is also whom she suspects to be the embodiment of a ka’tsina spirit.
Some of Silko’s stories were included in the anthology The Man to Send Rainclouds, which derives its title from Silko’s humorous tale of conflict between a Catholic priest and Pueblo Indians during a Native American funeral. Silko also included some of her early stories in her 1981 collection Storyteller, which features her poetry as well. In the New York Times Book Review, N. Scott Momaday called Storyteller “a rich, many-faceted book.” Momaday acknowledged Silko’s interests in ritual and the Native American storytelling tradition and her ability to portray characters and situations. “At her best,” Momaday contended, “Silko is very good indeed. She has a sharp sense of the way in which the profound and the mundane often run together.” James Polk gave similar praise in Saturday Review when he wrote that Silko’s “perceptions are accurate, and her style reflects the breadth, the texture, the mortality of her subjects.”
Nonfiction
Silko’s other works include Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, which features correspondence between Silko and Pulitzer Prize- winning poet James Wright. Writing a review in the journal Standards, Emmanuela de Léon noted that the two “shared a personal admiration for one another’s work, as well as a kinship developed through shared experiences of their individual employment as lecturers … and their struggles with health and family matters. When these simple commonalities are expressed in the form of an ongoing epistolary exchange between two of our greatest literary talents, the private dialogue becomes a source of true literary enrichment.” Silko self-published her multigenre book Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures under her own imprint (Flood Plain Press). As a result, she was able to experiment with the text’s physical form and the use of handmade materials. Her collection of essays Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today focuses on the spirit and voice of Native Americans, from her exploration of literature and language in Native American heritage to the wisdom of her ancestors to the racist treatment of Native Americans.
With The Turquoise Ledge, Silko explores her Native American heritage in memoir form. The book is an introspective self-portrait that is metaphorically driven by the turquoise- filled ridge near Silko’s home in Tucson. To Silko, this ridge is a symbol of the Southwest and of her heritage. Through her exploration of her family tree, Silko reveals how the Native American slave trade and the forced relocation of indigenous tribes affected her history. The region’s past is also discussed, from uranium mining to atomic bomb testing. The book is “billed as a memoir,” Casey Sanchez commented in the Santa Fe New Mexican, “but it’s really a strange hybrid of a natural history of the desert wilderness near Tucson and a nonlinear glimpse at Silko’s notebooks, with some arresting anecdotes about her pets, including one rattlesnake, seven birds, a pit bull, and six stately English mastiffs.” According Susan Salter Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times, “Silko writes in the language of the spirit—reading her words as she constructs a portrait of herself for this memoir is not only like being inside her head, it is like eavesdropping on her silent conversations with her gods.” Reynolds also pointed out: “No matter how much she writes of ancestors and geography, these pages echo forward, not back.”
Considered by many as one of the most important contemporary Native American writers, Silko is also a writer who bridges cultures. “I see myself as a member of the global community,” Silko told Thomas Irmer in an interview in the Write Stuff. “My old folks who raised me saw themselves as citizens of the world. We see no borders. When I write I am writing to the world, not to the United States alone. I do believe that the things I am talking about will finally, maybe not in my lifetime … turn out.”
(open new)In an interview posted on the University of Arizona Poetry Center website, Silko described what living a writer’s life is for her. She explained that “the writer’s life is a constant battle to balance your responsibility to your writing with your responsibilities to the everyday world, meaning people, your pets, your landlord, whatever. There’s that constant pull of the world, which is opposed to the need to clear out a kind of psychic space with plenty of time and no interruptions. Time to think and gradually to descend into the area where you have to work. In a way it’s like working underground. It’s not easy to get down there and it’s not easy to get back.” Emphasizing the inability to get it all just right, she stated: “You can never reach that perfect balance. You always feel that one part or the other is not getting enough time.”
Silko received the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement in 2020. The award is given to writers whose work focuses on the American West. Times Book Editor Boris Kachka said: “We are so pleased to recognize Leslie’s remarkable writing career, spanning more than four decades, with this year’s Kirsch Award…. Her contributions to the renaissance of Native American literature and art paved the way for subsequent generations of Native American writers. Her works draw on the myths and traditions of her Laguna heritage to powerfully illuminate the lives of her characters; they have also expanded the canon of America’s literature to include its original cultures and ways of seeing the world.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Allen, Paula Gunn, editor, Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, Modern Language Association of America (New York, NY), 1983, pp. 127-133.
Barnard, Anja, and Anna Sheets Nesbitt, editors, Short Story Criticism, Volume 37, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 23, 1983, Volume 74, 1993, Volume 114, 1999, pp. 282- 344.
Contemporary Poets, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 143: American Novelists since World War II, Third Series, 1994, Volume 175: Native American Writers of the United States, 1997.
Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Native North American Literature, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.
Patraka, Vivian, and Louise A. Tilly, editors, Feminist Re-Visions: What Has Been and Might Be, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1983, pp. 26- 42.
Riggs, Thomas, editor, Reference Guide to American Literature, 4th Edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.
Scholer, Bo, editor, Coyote Was Here: Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization, Seklos (Aarhus, Denmark), 1984, pp. 116-123.
Seyerstad, Per, Leslie Marmon Silko, Boise State University (Boise, ID), 1980, pp. 45- 50.
Velie, Alan R., Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 1982, pp. 106-121.
PERIODICALS
Bloomsbury Review, April 1, 1992, M. Annette Jaimes, review of Almanac of the Dead, p. 5.
Booklist, February 1, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Gardens in the Dunes, p. 942; December 15, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of Gardens in the Dunes, p. 787.
College Literature, December 22, 2001, review of Almanac of the Dead and Storyteller, p. 29.
Los Angeles Times, January 9, 2011, Susan Salter Reynolds, review of The Turquoise Ledge; March 2, 2021, “The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes to Honor Leslie Marmon Silko and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 2, 1992, Paul West, review of Almanac of the Dead, p. 8.
New York Times Book Review, June 12, 1977, Frank MacShane, review of Ceremony; May 24, 1981, N. Scott Momaday, review of Storyteller; April 18, 1999, review of Gardens in the Dunes, p. 31.
Prairie Schooner Review, December 22, 1977, Elaine Jahner, review of Ceremony.
Publishers Weekly, March 1, 1999, review of Gardens in the Dunes, p. 59.
San Francisco Review of Books, September 22, 1992, John Domini, review of Almanac of the Dead, p. 18.
Santa Fe New Mexican, November 19, 2010, Casey Sanchez, “Leslie Marmon Silko: Miner for a Heart of Turquoise.”
Saturday Review, May 1, 1981, James Polk, review of Storyteller.
Southwest Review, March 22, 1979, Edith Blicksilver, review of “Lullaby.”
Time, May 3, 1999, review of Gardens in the Dunes, p. 78.
Washington Post Book World, April 24, 1977, Charles R. Larson, review of Ceremony.
Western American Literature, March 22, 1999, review of Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, p. 48.
Women’s Review of Books, July 1, 1992, Linda Niemann, interview with Silko, p. 10.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets website, https://poets.org/ (January 27, 2023), author profile.
Department of English, Colorado State University website, https://english.colostate.edu/ (March 13, 2017), Katie Haggstrom, “Women’s History Month: Leslie Marmon Silko.”
Dr. Fidel Fajardo-Acosta’s World Literature, http://fajardo-acosta.com/ (June 28, 2011), author profile.
Poetry Center, University of Arizona website, https://poetry.arizona.edu/ (November 9, 2015), Christina M. Castro, “An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko.”
Standards, http://www.colorado.edu/journals/ standards/ (January 28, 2003), Volume 6, Emmanuela de Léon, review of Delicacy and Strength of Lace.
University of North Georgia Press website, https://blog.ung.edu/ (November 3, 2017), Samuel Young, “Native American Author Spotlight: Leslie Marmon Silko.”
Voices from the Gaps, http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ (October 9, 2002), “Biography-Criticism.”
Write Stuff, http:// www.altx.com/interviews/ (October 9, 2002), Thomas Irmer, “An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko.”
Leslie Marmon Silko
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Leslie Marmon Silko
Silko at a 2011 reading
Silko at a 2011 reading
Born Leslie Marmon
March 5, 1948
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Occupation
Writereducatorfilm maker
Nationality Laguna Pueblo, American
Alma mater University of New Mexico
Genre Fiction
Literary movement Native American Renaissance
Notable work Ceremony (1977)
Storyteller (1981)
The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright (1986)
Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon; born March 5, 1948) is an American writer. A Laguna Pueblo Indian woman, she is one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
Silko was a debut recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant in 1981. the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994[1] and the Robert Kirsch Award in 2020.[2] She currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
Contents
1 Early life
2 Early literary work
3 Literary relevance and themes
4 Ceremony
5 1980s
5.1 Storyteller
5.2 Delicacy and Strength of Lace
6 1990s
6.1 Almanac of the Dead
6.2 Sacred Water
6.3 Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today
6.4 Rain
6.5 Gardens In The Dunes
7 2000s
7.1 The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir
8 Essays
9 Personal life
10 Bibliography
10.1 Novels
10.2 Poetry and short story collections
10.3 Other works
11 See also
12 References
13 Further reading
14 External links
Early life
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Leslie Marmon Silko was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico to Leland Howard Marmon, a noted photographer, and Mary Virginia Leslie, a teacher, and grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Indian reservation.[citation needed]
Silko grew up on the edge of pueblo society both literally – her family's house was at the edge of the Laguna Pueblo reservation – and figuratively, as she was not permitted to participate in various tribal rituals or join any of the pueblo's religious societies.
While her parents worked, Silko and her two sisters were cared for by their grandmother, Lillie Stagner, and great-grandmother, Helen Romero, both story-tellers.[3] Silko learned much of the traditional stories of the Laguna people from her grandmother, whom she called A'mooh, her aunt Susie, and her grandfather Hank during her early years. As a result, Silko has always identified most strongly with her Laguna ancestry, stating in an interview with Alan Velie, "I am of mixed-breed ancestry, but what I know is Laguna".[4]
Silko's education included preschool through the fourth grade at Laguna BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) School and followed by Albuquerque Indian School (a private day school), the latter meant a day's drive by her father of 100 miles to avoid the boarding-school experience. Silko went on to receive a BA in English Literature from the University of New Mexico in 1969; she briefly attended the University of New Mexico law school before pursuing her literary career full-time.
Early literary work
Silko garnered early literary acclaim for her short story "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," which was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Discovery Grant. The story continues to be included in anthologies.
During the years 1968 to 1974, Silko wrote and published many short stories and poems that were featured in her Laguna Woman (1974).
Her other publications, include: Laguna Woman: Poems (1974), Ceremony (1977), Storyteller (1981), and, with the poet James A. Wright, With the Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright (1985). Almanac of the Dead, a novel, appeared in 1991, and a collection of essays, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today, was published in 1996.[5]
Silko wrote a screenplay based on the comic book Honkytonk Sue, in collaboration with novelist Larry McMurtry, which has not been produced.[6]
Literary relevance and themes
Throughout her career as a writer and teacher, she has remained grounded in the history-filled landscape of the Laguna Pueblo. Her experiences in the culture have fueled an interest to preserve cultural traditions and understand the impact of the past on contemporary life. A well-known novelist and poet, Silko's career has been characterized by making people aware of ingrained racism and white cultural imperialism, and a commitment to support women's issues.[7] Her novels have many characters who attempt what some perceive a simple yet uneasy return to balance Native American traditions survivalism with the violence of modern America. The clash of civilizations is a continuing theme in the modern Southwest and of the difficult search for balance that the region's inhabitants encounter.[5]
Her literary contributions are particularly important [8] because they open up the Anglo-European prevailing definitions of the American literary tradition to accommodate the often underrepresented traditions, priorities, and ideas about identity that in a general way characterize many American Indian cultures and in a more specific way form the bedrock of Silko's Laguna heritage and experience.
During an interview in Germany in 1995, Silko shared the significance of her writings as a continuation of an existing oral tradition within the Laguna people. She specified that her works are not re-interpretations of old legends, but carry the same important messages as when they were told hundreds of years ago. Silko explains that the Laguna view on the passage of time is responsible for this condition, stating, “The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. If time is round, if time is an ocean, then something that happened 500 years ago may be quite immediate and real, whereas something inconsequential that happened an hour ago could be far away.” [9]
Ceremony
Main article: Ceremony (Silko novel)
Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony was first published by Penguin in March 1977 to much critical acclaim.
The novel tells the story of Tayo, a wounded returning World War II veteran of mixed Laguna-white ancestry following a short stint at a Los Angeles VA hospital. He is returning to the poverty-stricken Laguna reservation, continuing to suffer from "battle fatigue" (shell-shock), and is haunted by memories of his cousin Rocky who died in the conflict during the Bataan Death March of 1942. His initial escape from pain leads him to alcoholism, but his Old Grandma and mixed-blood Navajo medicine-man Betonie help him through native ceremonies to develop a greater understanding of the world and his place as a Laguna man.
Ceremony has been called a Grail fiction, wherein the hero overcomes a series of challenges to reach a specified goal; but this point of view has been criticized as Eurocentric, since it involves a Native American contextualizing backdrop, and not one based on European-American myths. Silko's writing skill in the novel is deeply rooted in the use of storytelling that pass on traditions and understanding from the old to the new. Fellow Pueblo poet Paula Gunn Allen criticized the book on this account, saying that Silko was divulging secret tribal knowledge reserved for the tribe, not outsiders.[10]
Ceremony gained immediate and long-term acceptance when returning Vietnam war veterans took to the novel's theme of coping, healing and reconciliation between races and people that share the trauma of military actions. It was largely on the strength of this work that critic Alan Velie named Silko one of his Four Native American Literary Masters, along with N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor and James Welch.
Ceremony remains a literary work featured on college and university syllabi, and one of the few individual works by any Native American author to have received book-length critical inquiry.
1980s
Storyteller
In 1981, Silko released Storyteller, a collection of poems and short stories that incorporated creative writing, mythology, and autobiography, which garnered favorable reception as it followed in much the same poetic form as the novel Ceremony.
Delicacy and Strength of Lace
In 1986, Delicacy and Strength of Lace was released. The book is a collected volume of correspondence between Silko and her friend James Wright whom she met following the publication of Ceremony. The work was edited by Wright's wife, Ann Wright, and released after Wright's death in March 1980.
1990s
Almanac of the Dead
Almanac of the Dead was published in 1991. This work took Silko ten years to complete and received mixed reviews. The vision of the book stretches over both American continents and includes the Zapatista Army of National Liberation revolutionaries, based in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, as just one group among a pantheon of characters. The theme of the novel, like that of Ceremony, focuses on the conflict between Anglo-Americans and Native Americans.
Several literary critics have been critical of the novel's depiction of homosexuality, based on the fact that the novel features male homosexual and bisexual characters who are variously abusive, sadistic, and cruel.[11] Almanac of the Dead has not achieved the same mainstream success as its predecessor.
Sacred Water
In June 1993, Silko published a limited run of Sacred Water under Flood Plain Press, a self-printing venture by Silko. Each copy of Sacred Water is handmade by Silko using her personal typewriter combining written text set next to poignant photographs taken by the author.
Sacred Water is composed of autobiographical prose, poetry and pueblo mythology focusing on the importance and centrality of water to life.
Silko issued a second printing of Sacred Water in 1994 in order to make the work more accessible to students and academics although it was limited. This edition used printing methods suited for a greater production distribution.
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today was published by Simon & Schuster in March 1997.
The work is a collection of short stories on various topics; including an autobiographical essay of her childhood at Laguna Pueblo and the racism she faced as a mixed blood person; stark criticism directed at President Bill Clinton regarding his immigration policies; and praise for the development of and lamentation for the loss of the Aztec and Maya codices, along with commentary on Pueblo mythology.
As one reviewer notes, Silko's essays "encompass traditional storytelling, discussions of the power of words to the Pueblo, reminiscences on photography, frightening tales of the U.S. border patrol, historical explanations of the Mayan codices, and socio-political commentary on the relationship of the U.S. government to various nations, including the Pueblo".[12]
The short story "Yellow Woman" concerns a young woman who becomes romantically and emotionally involved with her kidnapper, despite having a husband and children. The story is related to the traditional Laguna legend/myth of the Yellow Woman.
Rain
In 1997, Silko ran a limited number of handmade books through Flood Plain Press. Like Sacred Water, Rain was again a combination of short autobiographical prose and poetry inset with her photographs.
The short volume focused on the importance of rain to personal and spiritual survival in the Southwest.
Gardens In The Dunes
Gardens in the Dunes was published in 1999. The work weaves together themes of feminism, slavery, conquest and botany, while following the story of a young girl named Indigo from the fictional "Sand Lizard People" in the Arizona Territory and her European travels as a summer companion to an affluent White woman named Hattie.
The story is set against the back drop of the enforcement of Indian boarding schools, the California Gold Rush and the rise of the Ghost Dance Religion.
2000s
The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir
In 2010, Silko released The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir. Written using distinctive prose and overall structure influenced by Native American storytelling traditions, the book is a broad-ranging exploration not only of her Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, Mexican and European family history but also of the natural world, suffering, insight, environmentalism and the sacred. The desert southwest setting is prominent. Although non-fiction, the stylized presentation is reminiscent of creative fiction.
Essays
A longtime commentator on Native American affairs, Silko has published many non-fictional articles on Native American affairs and literature.
Silko's two most famous essays are outspoken attacks on fellow writers. In "An Old-Fashioned Indian Attack in Two Parts", first published in Geary Hobson's collection The Remembered Earth (1978), Silko accused Gary Snyder of profiting from Native American culture, particularly in his collection Turtle Island, the name and theme of which was taken from Pueblo mythology.
In 1986, Silko published a review entitled "Here's an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf", on Anishinaabe writer Louise Erdrich's novel The Beet Queen. Silko claimed Erdrich had abandoned writing about the Native American struggle for sovereignty in exchange for writing "self-referential", postmodern fiction.
In 2012, the textbook, Rethinking Columbus, which includes an essay by her, was banned by the Tucson Unified School District following a statewide ban on Ethnic and Cultural Studies.[13][14]
Personal life
In 1965, she married Richard C. Chapman, and together, they had a son, Robert Chapman, before divorcing in 1969.[citation needed]
In 1971, she and John Silko were married. They had a son, Casimir Silko.[15] This marriage also ended in divorce.[citation needed]
Bibliography
Novels
Ceremony. 1977. / reprint. San Val, Incorporated. 1986. ISBN 978-0-613-03297-1.
Almanac of the Dead. 1991. / reprint. Penguin. 1991. ISBN 978-0140173192.
Gardens in the Dunes. Simon and Schuster. 2000. ISBN 978-0-684-86332-0.
Poetry and short story collections
Laguna Women: Poems (1974)
Western Stories (1980)
Storyteller. Henry Holt & Company. 1981. ISBN 978-0-8050-0192-1.
Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures. Flood Plain Press. 1994. ISBN 978-0-9636554-0-0.
Rain (1996)
Love poem and Slim Canyon (1996)
Oceanstory (2011) Published as a Kindle Single and available for digital download on Amazon.com
Other works
The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir (2010)
Ellen L. Arnold, ed. (2000). Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-57806-301-7.
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. Simon and Schuster. 1997. ISBN 978-0-684-82707-0. Leslie Marmon Silko.
Melody Graulich, ed. (1993). Yellow woman. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-2005-6.
Delicacy And Strength of Lace Letters (1986)
"Indian Song: Survival", Chicago Review, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Spring, 1973), pp. 94–96
Acclaimed novelist, poet, and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko is known for her lyric treatment of Native American subjects. Born in 1948 to the photographer Lee Marmon and his wife Mary Virginia Leslie, Marmon Silko is of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican and Anglo-American heritage. Her mixed ancestry has influenced her work in myriad ways. Growing up on the edge of the Laguna Pueblo reservation, Marmon Silko’s earliest experiences were positioned between cultures. Remarking in an interview with Alan Velie, she said she is of mixed-race ancestry “but what I know is Laguna,” Marmon Silko has deepened her affiliation to her tribe through her books, which draw on Laguna myths and story-telling traditions. In 1974 she published a volume of poetry called Laguna Woman. Marmon Silko has also acknowledged the influence of her own family’s storytelling on her method and vision. Her works primarily focus on the alienation of Native Americans in a white society and on the importance of native traditions and community in helping them cope with modern life. She has been noted as a major contributor to the Native American literary and artistic renaissance, which began in the late 1960s.
Silko attended school on the Laguna reservation until the fifth grade, when she transferred to Catholic school in distant Albuquerque. Prohibited from speaking the Keresan language of her grandmother and aunts, Silko nonetheless excelled academically and went on to receive her bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico in 1969. That same year her first story, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” was published. She briefly enrolled in law school, but left to pursue her writing career in 1971 when she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Grant. Silko won many major awards throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, including a Pushcart Prize for Poetry and the MacArthur “Genius” Award. This last award allowed Silko to quit her teaching job at the University of Arizon-Tucson and devote herself full-time to writing. In 1988 she received the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities “Living Cultural Treasure” Award. She is also well-known for her friendship with the poet James Wright. Their correspondence was chronicled in the book With the Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright (1986), which won the Boston Globe Book Prize for non-fiction.
Though perhaps best known as a novelist, Silko is also an accomplished poet. She began writing poetry based on traditional stories and legends she learned from her family. For example, her poem "Bear Story" uses characters from Laguna and other Southwestern Indian stories to retell an ancient metamorphosis myth about humans and bears. Her poems highlight many of the same themes found in her prose, including the Native Americans' non-Western sense of time, the strength of women, and the need for political and social change. Silko self-published her multi-genre book Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures (1993) under her own imprint (Flood Plain Press). As a result, she was able to experiment with the text's physical form and the use of handmade materials. Her collection of essays Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (1996) focuses on the spirit and voice of Native Americans. Silko provides nuanced explorations of the literature, language, and heritage of Native Americans; she also includes essays on subjects ranging from the wisdom of her ancestors to the racist treatment of Native Americans.
A highly regarded novelist, Silko received wide and substantial critical attention for her first novel Ceremony (1977). The story of a mixed-race war veteran's struggle for sanity after returning home from World War II, the book explores the redemptive powers of Native American ceremony—not just as formal ritual but as a means of conducting one’s life. With its depiction of life on the Indian reservation and its exploration of philosophical issues, Ceremony established Silko as an important Native American writer and marked her as the first Native American woman novelist. After the publication of Ceremony in 1977, Silko received greater recognition for her earlier work, including the exemplary short stories "Lullaby," "Yellow Woman," and "Tony's Story." "Lullaby"—an old woman's recollection of how her children were once taken away for education and how they returned to a culture that no longer seemed familiar or comfortable—is typical Silko, dealing with themes of alienation and generational difference that mark the daily reality of Native Americans. Silko included many early stories in her collection Storyteller (1981), which features her poetry as well. In the New York Times Book Review, Pulitzer-prize winning novelist N. Scott Momaday called Storyteller "a rich, many-faceted book." Momaday contended, "Leslie Silko is very good indeed. She has a sharp sense of the way in which the profound and the mundane often run together."
Silko’s next book took over ten years to complete. Using her MacArthur fellowship to fund the years spent working on the epic Almanac of the Dead (1991), Silko acknowledged the effect of her cash prize to Time, admitting that she was now "a little less beholden to the everyday world." Almanac of the Dead "ranges over five centuries of the struggle between Native Americans and Europeans and focuses upon a half-breed Tucson family voyaging to Africa and Israel," noted John Domini in the San Francisco Review of Books. In addition to its wide scope, the novel contains a multitude of original, colorful characters. Silko discussed the ways in which she experimented with characterization in the novel. In an interview with Linda Niemann for the Women's Review of Books, Silko commented: "I was trying to give history a character. It was as if native spirits were possessing me, like a spell…I knew I was breaking rules about not doing characters in the traditional way, but this other notion took over—and I couldn't tell you rationally why. I knew it was about time and about old notions of history, and about narrative being alive."
Silko's third novel, Gardens in the Dunes (1999), directly contrasts the traditional world of Native Americans with European and American upper-class culture. Following the adventures of a young Native American girl through nineteenth-century America and Europe, Silko explores differing cultural attitudes towards nature, drawing sharp contrasts between Native American stewardship and Euro-American exploitation.
Considered by many as one of the most important contemporary Native American writers, Silko bridges cultures in all of her work. "I see myself as a member of the global community," Silko told Thomas Irmer for an interview in the Write Stuff. "My old folks who raised me saw themselves as citizens of the world. We see no borders. When I write I am writing to the world, not to the United States alone."
Native American Author Spotlight: Leslie Marmon Silko
November 3, 2017 - by Samuel Young - Leave a Comment
Reading stories from other cultures is essential to understanding our diverse world. During November, we celebrate National Native American Heritage Month. For the next four weeks, we will be spotlighting four different influential Native American authors. Today, we will be highlighting the works of Leslie Marmon Silko.
Leslie Marmon Silko smiles. She has medium-length black hair and wears a blue shirt and blue handkerchief around her neck.
Leslie Marmon Silko
Leslie Marmon Silko was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on March 5, 1948. She was raised on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico in a family with Laguna Pueblo, white, and Mexican ancestry. Much like the characters in her stories, Silko’s upbringing left her at a crossroads between cultures. This caused her to not feel fully accepted by either the Laguna Pubelo people or white people because of her mixed background.
After graduating from the University of New Mexico, she went on to pursue law school but found that it wasn’t the right environment for her to make an impact for her community. She realized that her efforts for Native American justice would be better invested in storytelling and writing. Through her writings, she has created a dialogue about the struggles of the modern Native American and other issues that the Native American community faces.
All of these themes and personal experiences are encapsulated in her most well-known book, Ceremony. This is a story of a war veteran with mixed Laguna and Anglo heritage. The protagonist meets a tribal wise man who teaches him Laguna folklore and traditional ceremonies that help heal the psychological wounds caused by war. Ceremony is a story of contrasting cultures, mental illness, and transformation through his Native American roots. It is critically acclaimed and has given Silko the title of the “first female Native American novelist.” She later received many accolades for this book, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award.
Silko is still writing today. She recently published a memoir, The Turquoise Ledge, in 2010 and a Kindle short story collection in 2011. She teaches currently at the University of Arizona at Tucson. Check out one of her books this month as you celebrate Native American Heritage Month.
What are your thoughts on Leslie Marmon Silko? Leave a comment below and let us know. Follow UNG Press on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more great content, and find our complete catalog on our homepage.
March 13, 2017 Author - Leave a comment Katie HaggstromLeslie Marmon SilkoWomen's History Month
Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She identifies as an Anglo American and Mexican American, noting that she is ¼ Laguna Pueblo, a Native American tribe predominantly located along the Rio San Jose in west-central New Mexico.
Growing up along the border of the Laguna Pueblo reservation provided Silko with the insight and drive to infuse her writing with her family’s rich history. She attended school at the Laguna BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) School and the Albuquerque Indian School. In 1969, she graduated from the University of New Mexico and dabbled in law school at the same university before dedicating her time to literature.
Silko published her first poetry collection Laguna Woman in 1974. She gained attention for her short story called “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” which went on to win the National Endowment for the Humanities Discovery Grant. As the Poetry Foundation explains, Silko is known for “her lyric treatment of Native American subjects.”
Her 1977 novel Ceremony is her most acclaimed novel. The story follows a part-Laguna WWII veteran as he combats the painful memories of wartime. Silko relies heavily on the oral traditions and practices of both the Navajo and Pueblo people throughout this story.
Almanac of the Dead was Silko’s second book, publishing in 1991 after 10 years of writing and researching. The almost 800-page novel received mixed reviews for the depth of the interwoven plots and the breadth of characters. But in an interview, Silko explained that “in the Native American community people love this book, it gives them hope. When I started out in 1981 I had no idea it would be a statement against capitalism.”
In the same interview, Silko also thinks back to the idea that “almanacs, not just the Native American Mayan almanacs but also Western Europeans almanacs or medicine almanacs in the U.S. have many little, many different sections. All of a sudden I became aware of, yes, what needed to be done was many, many chapters so that the chapter headings themselves could tell a story or express something.”
Silko’s writings and career have made her an influential person among the Native American Renaissance, categorized by the insurgence of literature written by Native Americans is the late 1960s. Recently, in 2010, she released her memoir The Turquoise Ledge in 2010. In an LA Times review, they explain that she “writes in the language of spirit—reading her words…is not only like being inside her head, it is like eavesdropping on her silent conversations with her gods.”
Leslie Marmon Silko has given a voice to the Laguna Pueblo people, a voice that will continue to carry through generations of Native American (and non-Native American) peoples: “I will tell you something about stories. They aren’t just entertainment. They are all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have stories.”
Leslie Marmon Silko
1948–
Leslie Marmon Silko was born March 5, 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She attended the University of New Mexico, and graduated with honors in 1969 with a B.A. in English. Her books of poetry include Storyteller (Seaver Books, 1981), and Laguna Women Poems (1974). She is also a writer of short stories and fiction. A child of mixed Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white heritage, her first novel, Ceremony (1977), was one of the first published novels by an American Indian woman. Her other novels include Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and Almanac of the Dead (1992).
Silko's honors include a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and a Rosewater Foundation grant. She has been named a Living Cultural Treasure by the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Council, and has also received the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award. Silko has taught English at the Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona, and at the University of New Mexico. She is currently a professor at the University of Arizona at Tucson.
An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko
NOVEMBER 9TH, 2015
By Christina M. Castro
Originally published in the University of Arizona Poetry Center Newsletter 25.2, Spring 2000.
The moment I had been looking forward to for years was upon me and I was lost. I couldn't find Leslie Silko's house. I had everything. The recorder, a notebook filled with questions, muffins. Everything except the directions.
I knew the street name and more or less where it was and I thought my "Indian intuition" would guide me, but it must not have been working that morning. I was already over fifteen minutes late and about to give up when I noticed a big truck coming up the secluded dirt road.
I jumped out of my Pathfinder and flagged the driver down. I told him what I remembered. Something about a trailhead and a horse corral. "You still have another mile or so to go," he said. "There's only one house up there. That's gotta be it." I jumped back into my Lil’ Feather and pushed on the gas.
Nearly a mile up, I could see what had to be her house, alone on a hill surrounded by saguaros. My excitement made me push a little harder. Then suddenly a curve in the road appeared before me. I couldn't turn fast enough. My Lil’ Feather went straight and rolled right into a ditch. Clouds of dirt flew in the air.
My Lil’ Feather is equipped with four-by-four capabilities, but I am a city girl, I am, and it never occurred to me that I should learn to use it. Just then I had no choice but to get out and trek the rest of the way up. I gathered all I needed and set forth under the glaring mid-day sun.
Silko seemed annoyed when I arrived. "I'm so sorry I'm late," I said. "I had a minor accident." She led me into her office, which coincidentally had a window that opened on the winding road below. "Look outside," I said. She did and let out a throaty laugh.
After our interview, she drove me down the road to where my pathetic-looking truck sat out of place amongst the desert life, and to my surprise offered to move it out. She reached under Lil’ Feather and started moving rocks. I stood there like a fool, not knowing what to do. I handed her my keys and she got in, started her up, and within two minutes had that bad girl out of there.
When I thanked her profusely, she replied, "This was the best part!" I had to agree.
Christina M. Castro: How would you describe the writer's life?
Leslie Marmon Silko: The writer's life is a constant battle to balance your responsibility to your writing with your responsibilities to the everyday world, meaning people, your pets, your landlord, whatever. There's that constant pull of the world, which is opposed to the need to clear out a kind of psychic space with plenty of time and no interruptions. Time to think and gradually to descend into the area where you have to work. In a way it's like working underground. It's not easy to get down there and it's not easy to get back.
You can never reach that perfect balance. You always feel that one part or the other is not getting enough time.
Christina: How has the publishing industry changed in the last twenty years?
Leslie: The changes in the publishing world have been tremendous. It's hard to believe. Twenty years ago, I thought computers would make writing novels easier and working with publishers easier but it seems like the publishers didn't buy any of that new equipment. Simon and Schuster, my publisher, make as many mistakes or more mistakes when they typeset my manuscript now. They haven't gotten any more accurate—in fact they've gotten less accurate. The editing has gotten worse but at the same time everything now is about marketing. They really don't care about the writing itself—they only care about coming up with a strategy to sell your work. Marketers pigeonhole, they target audiences. Since I've started writing, they've gotten much more exclusive.
If you're a writer and you're trying to write to many people, in many different places, the marketers want to cut off all of those connections. They have their target audiences. For example, white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty or white females between the ages of ten and fourteen.
They decide first who they want to sell to and then they go look for what it is they want to buy, which is the reverse of the situation twenty years ago when I got into the business. The editors, the publishers, were looking for different kinds of books. They had not narrowed the audiences so much. Now it's really fragmented. When they do that with your book, they cut you off from ever spreading to other kinds of audiences.
For Almanac of the Dead, Toni Morrison wrote this really good blurb. Because the marketers at Simon and Schuster were thinking only "Native American, Southwestern" they didn't even use her blurb on the book. Anyone could've known she was going to get the Nobel Prize sooner or later. By limiting who they think the audience is for my work is, Simon and Schuster actually cut out the true audience.
The marketers don't know what they're doing. They're idiots. They don't know anything about literature. The emphasis has gone from literature, or any sense of larger community made by literature, to these little pigeonholes.
You have to be really careful now. Your publisher is not your friend. Your publishers can be your enemies. They can do you in and they don't care. That's the big change. A complete disregard for the readers, a complete disregard for the writers, and a total focus on marketing, publicity, and demographics.
Another thing is, when I started writing, your book went out and you could expect to see it around for a year. Publishers gave bookstores one year to sell it. Now, your book has a shelf life of thirty days. For thirty days Barnes and Noble or Borders will keep hard cover copies of Gardens in the Dunes on the shelf.
If your readership does not increase in that time they take it off the shelf.
Amazon.com has destroyed the small booksellers, but at the same time it gives its readers another way to find out about books. Through hearing people on the internet write about a book they're excited about, maybe that can be a hopeful way of readers finding writing and writers they like.
Christina: Everyone knows that the number of titles in serious fiction is shrinking. Would you then encourage writers to avoid major publishing houses and to stick with smaller presses for more artistic control?
Leslie: I think it's a misconception that the smaller publishers will be any better. You have a different set of frustrations with smaller publishers. They don't have as much money for distribution. Publishing is so expensive and your smaller publisher sometimes has to make sacrifices that in the end also jeopardize the success of your book.
What I would tell young writers is to put the focus on the work. You have to live doing it. You can't think that it's going to make you money; you can't think that it's even going to support you. You can't think like that because what you'll end up having to do is sacrifice your own ideas to fall in line with what they want you to do. The important thing is to get a book completely finished, or nearly finished, before you even go to any publisher.
Some writers try to take and sell an idea, or just a small portion of a book to publishers and there are a couple of dangers in that. The first is that they won't give you enough money to get the book written and you'll end up owing them money. Secondly they'll start telling you it has to be this way or that way.
It's better to go in with the idea that you can't depend on a publisher. You can only depend on yourself. The next thing is to be very wary. Make sure that you have someone whose judgment you trust, whether it's a fellow writer or teacher. Don't show it to anyone too soon if it's a longer piece. It can make you self-conscious and can confuse your own judgment about what you want. You'll end up working against yourself. Once you get the manuscript together, show it to people you trust before you show it to editors.
These are the kinds of things you're up against as a fiction writer. With poetry it's different. For a poet, your hopes of getting your book out there and reviewed are actually better now than ever. The hard thing for fiction writers is that most of the small presses can't afford to publish fiction. They can only afford to publish poetry. Smaller books. So in some sense, the chances are better that you'll get your book of poetry out by a small press and get it done right.
Joy Harjo is one of the few poets I've ever known who writes poetry for the big presses. There are so few books of poetry published by the big guys. In my mind, having her work published by Norton is a big accomplishment.
Christina: There is an ongoing debate in the literary world regarding writers who attempt to write from a different cultural, racial perspective than their own. What are your thoughts on this?
Leslie: That's been going on for hundreds of years. There are two thoughts I have on this. If this were the best of all possible worlds, which it isn't, then publishing wouldn't concern itself with pigeonholing and marketing to certain groups. There would be a level playing ground. Everyone would have the same chance of getting a novel published. If our education system would include education on different cultures and groups of people who are a part of the United States, you wouldn't have this. When people get excluded, that's when you have this sort of fragmentation and things being broken down into categories. It's a political problem.
If there were many books by Pueblo people out there, for example, then we could say, "Let that guy publish that book on Pueblo culture or oral literature," because there's all these other books by Pueblo writers or people from that community that are out there so that there's an opportunity for people to see the difference between someone who's just pretending, someone who is trying to wrap themselves in the mantle of a culture, versus someone who is actually from there.
The problem is in this country is that you have this political machine in the arts that suppresses Indian writers to take power away from the people. They have continued to publish books about Indians by non-Indians for political reasons. Non-Indians, generally, even if they've tried to be very sympathetic, can't help but replicate a worldview that is sympathetic to the political ends of the power structure.
Yet you can't limit the freedom of the artist. We can't say, "You can't use your imagination." It's extremely difficult for a person to imagine themselves in the shoes, life and culture of someone else, but let's not put any limitations on what possibly could happen. We can't limit human beings and the human imagination. The reason there is so much strong feeling about, let's say, non-Indian writers writing about non-Indian subjects is because good Indian writers don't get published and bad white writers do. That's the problem.
It's getting to the point, though, where there's enough good writing out there and there's gradually becoming more knowledge of Indian culture. Readers can now pick up a book by a non-Indian with a bad imagination and say, "This is crap." As long as certain communities are marginalized, it's a political act against them to allow a stranger to portray them. It's a part of suppression. Once there's an opening up and a political equality, a political power given to marginalized people, then it won't matter.
I think we’re gradually getting enough good Indian writers out there that only the most brilliant imaginings by non-Indians of what it would be to be part of some other culture would get published. One example of such a work is a collection of poetry entitled Crazy Horse in Stillness by William Heyen.
Christina: What are you working on these days?
Leslie: I've always been interested in the occult. Anglo-American, European, African, Asian—if you go back into these cultures they all have ideas about the occult. I'm interested in these pre-Christian or Pagan beliefs in Europe and in other places. It's in the pre-Christian beliefs that you can find common ground with the Native American community. If you’re coming out of a community like ours, sometimes you can feel more comfortable when you go into those areas and those cultures where they're talking about the occult. That's an area where there's a belief in timelessness and spirituality that you don't find in mainstream dominant culture.
I've been reading up on Tarot cards, dream interpretation, and tealeaf reading. People in all cultures talk about good and bad luck, evil and so on. I've read about Jewish witchcraft and magic, which really freaked out the Europeans. My new work wants to go onto this more familiar ground.
There's a lot of humor that can be gained as well. There's the new age movement that is big now, not just in the U.S. but in Europe is just full of those types. That's the way to do it, in a humorous way. Otherwise, if you get all serious about it then you go Gothic. Maybe that's what will happen to me. I'll go Gothic.
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Leslie Marmon Silko
USA flag (b.1948)
She was educated at a Catholic school in Albuquerque, and went on to receive a BA from the University of New Mexico in 1969. She briefly attended law school before leaving to pursue her literary career.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Novels
Ceremony (1977)
Almanac of the Dead (1991)
Gardens in the Dunes (1999)
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Collections
Storyteller (1980)
Yellow Woman (1993)
Laguna Woman (poems) (1994)
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Novellas
Oceanstory (2011)
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Non fiction
The Delicacy and Strength of Lace (1985) (with James Wright)
Sacred Water (1993)
Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko (2000)
The Turquoise Ledge (2010)
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (2013)