Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko Ellen L. Arnold, ed. Jackson. University Press of Mississippi. 2000. xvi + 200 pages. $45 ($18 paper) ISBN 1-57806-300-0 (301-9 paper)

FOR THE LAGUNA Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, the sense of being within history and culture passes down through a strong oral storytelling tradition. Fitting, then, that editor Ellen Arnold culls fifteen interviews from a twenty-five-year period to weave a complex portrait of Laguna Pueblo-born and -raised novelist and prose poet Leslie Mormon Silko. Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko begins early in Silko's career as a writer in the late 1970s with the publication of her widely acclaimed Ceremony - and ends in the late 199os, on the eve of her release of Gardens of the Dunes (1999; see my review in WLT 74:2, p. 81). Together the conversations spin a web of concentric circles that conjoin at a center where Silko's intricately layered life and work shimmer like gossamer.

Of mixed Mexican, Anglo, and Laguna Indian heritage, Silko grew up within and at the margins of her community. Her family lived by the river at the edge of town, giving her from an early age an insider and outsider perspective on life in the pueblo. In this place where "the past was in the present, and the future was in the present," she learned more from her Model A-trained mechanic grandmother and hunter/photographer/storyteller father than from her Bureau of Indian Affairs schoolteachers. Once Silko had her ABCs down, the family moved to Albuquerque for more resourceful schooling. While her family were what she calls "book people" (they read a lot at home), her new school offered an abundance of written myths, including the exhilarating adventures of Thor and Odin in the Old Norse tales.

From an early age (she started crafting stories at age five), Silko gravitated toward the storytelling form, especially those stories within stories she would hear at home that had no "edges or ends" to them. Raised in the matriarchal Laguna community, she says, "a girl has as much of a chance, as she grows up, to be a teller, to be a storyteller, as a boy-- child." In 1965, when Silko makes tracks for the University of New Mexico, it's hardly surprising that she would pursue a degree in English and creative writing. However, it was not in the classroom that she found her voice; it was during a postgraduation stint in Alaska with her husband and newborn son, Robert. The complete isolation coupled with sickness led her to invent the character Tayo and what would become her first novel, Ceremony (1977). (She talks at length about how her character's healing process allowed her to self-heal.)

Invigorated by the crossover success of Ceremony, Silko went on to publish the photo-collage, prose-poem narrative, Storyteller (1981). Her radical shift away from the novel form reflected her aural sensibility. She tells Florence Boos, "If one just works with the word on the page or the word in the air, something's left out." Soon after, Silko began work on what would become her 700-pages-plus tome, Almanac of the Dead (1991), a novel she likens to a two-hour film that's ripped up, remixed, then replayed. After she published Almanac to mixed reviews, she brought out a collection of prose poems and a collection of essays, then launched into a new novel about gardens that she intended to be apolitical and simply an exercise in storytelling. After years of research and writing, the politicized Gardens of the Dunes (1999) appeared; Silko revealed a world where even orchids are caught up in violent and oppressive colonial trade zones.

Each novel and collection is a birthing process for Silko; she not only refers to postpartum depressions but also talks about "stillborn novels," those stories that die out as others come to life. Her writing is a carefully honed and researched craft: she sees herself as an organic extension of Indians of the Americas, where the impulse is to say, "Let's look at it and see if there's anything we can use." Silko transports her material whether literally dreamed up, passed down from her community, culled from the American literary canon, or clipped from newspapers - to what she calls her "writing room," where she wrestles with it until it becomes a story with an "aftereffect in the unconscious."

The many conversations with Silko provide a complex portrait that startles. Yes, she speaks about Laguna Pueblo influences, but also about the important influence of writers like Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, and William Faulkner on her work, even declaring at one point that "Burroughs was one of my heroes." And while she infuses the rich culture of her Laguna sensibility into her stories, she adds, "Good literature has to be accessible. It's incredibly narcissistic to be otherwise." Refreshingly, too, the collection captures responses which remind literary critics that writers sometimes make choices just because: she named her protagonist Tayo in Ceremony because "I just liked the sound."

As with any collection of interviews conducted by a variety of individuals, the book is uneven: some more than others draw out deep, articulate, even interestingly contradictory responses (especially Laura Coltelli); some interviewers are more focused than others on their own life and work than on Silko's (especially Rolando Hinojosa). And because the interviews span twenty-five years and often include similar questions, there is repetition. Perhaps Ellen Arnold might have done well to break the interviews up into thematic clusters. As a whole, however, each interviewer's different critical perspective (they are journalists, academics, and creative writers situated in different moments of time), the collection casts a wide net that shows Silko's multiply dimensioned and complex place within contemporary American letters.