Ellen L. Arnold

Review of Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko edited by Ellen Arnold

Google is great. Don't get me wrong. I love the amount of research material that you can find with the click of a button. But. It is making it easier and easier for us to forget that their are resources left in this world that WE NEED to be aware of and know how to find. One of the biggest resources to me as an English student is the book. Whenever I find a really good resource book I grab it up and try to find a place in my tiny apartment to place the book so I won't trip over it. While doing a biographical sketch on Leslie Marmon Silko I did not have a lot of confidence that I would find book length criticism or any prose about her. Since she is a writer I was quickly able to ascertain those short works of criticism, mostly articles or essays in larger collections, on some of her major work, but what I wanted was something that would include Silko's voice. Low and behond, there it was. Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko by Ellen Arnold. A collection of 16 interviews starting in 1976 by Per Seyersted and ending in 1998 with an interview by the editor of this collection, Ellen Arnold. Silko only gives very rare interviews. Out of the over thirty years of her writing career, and a renowned one at that, she has only given a handful per year, and some years not at all, of interviews in print form or other media such as radio or television. To find a book that ranged from almost the beginning of her career to within little more than 10 years ago, I was astounded.

More than that, Ellen Arnold has a respect for Leslie Marmon Silko that is apparent in her handling of this collection. The introduction by Arnold is eloquently academic and full of praise that I could relate to as a fan of Silko's work. She follows the introduction with a timeline. Also a rarity when looking up information on Silko. For some reason, this was the only traditionally formatted timeline I could find for Silko. Her biographical information can be very vague with literary groups only focusing on her writing career and her only on the more distant past. For example, in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit she gives biographical information that mostly describes her family history with very little personal history. A person could find everything they need to know about her since so much of her non-fiction is biographical, but that would mean scouring through handfuls of books for each tidbit of information. I was appreciative of Arnold's inclusion of the timeline in her collection.

The interviews include a variety of subjects that are of importance to understanding Silko and her work. Silko's bond with her home and community and the oral tradition that she was taught growing up are essential to understanding the unique techniques she uses in her fictional work. The first interview with Larry Evers and Denny Carr contain very specific questions about the landscape around where Silko grew up and its importance to elements in her book. For example, the river near her childhood home that skirted Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico. The river shows up in her poetry in Storyteller and in her ceremonies concerning Tayo in Ceremony.

In the classroom, I would not suggest reading this book cover to cover. It is resource material, and thus can be read for specific information to answer research questions. The interviews I found most helpful to me were ones where Silko explained how she felt as a Native American (tribal connections and her categorization by the publishing world as a female Native American minority writer) and her descriptions of her relationship with language (oral tradition and writing). The interviews also cover most of her books. The interviews then could be used to supplement comprehension of one of her fictional works like Ceremony. Ceremony is the most taught novels written by a Native American. To have resources where the author is speaking about the work is rare and wonderful. I recommend a look or a a recommendation to your local library to carry this great resource regarding Native American literature.… (mer)