Storyteller
Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She has said that her writing has at its core “the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or mixed-blood person.” As she grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, she learned the stories and culture of the Laguna people from her great-grandmother and other female relatives. After receiving her B. A. in English at the University of New Mexico, she enrolled in the University of New Mexico law school but completed only three semesters before deciding that writing and storytelling, not law, were the means by which she could best promote justice. She married John Silko in 1970. Prior to the writing ofCeremony, she published a series of short stories, including “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.” She also authored a volume of poetry,Laguna Woman: Poems, for which she received the Pushcart Prize for Poetry.In 1973, Silko moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she wroteCeremony. Initially conceived as a comic story abut a mother’s attempts to keep her son, a war veteran, away from alcohol,Ceremonygradually transformed into an intricate meditation on mental disturbance, despair, and the power of stories and traditional culture as the keys to self-awareness and, eventually, emotional healing. Having battled depression herself while composing her novel, Silko was later to call her book “a ceremony for staying sane.” Silko has followed the critical success ofCeremonywith a series of other novels, includingStoryteller, Almanac for the Dead, andGardens in the Dunes. Nevertheless, it was the singular achievement ofCeremonythat first secured her a place among the first rank of Native American novelists. Leslie Marmon Silko now lives on a ranch near Tucson, Arizona.