User:Moodring305/sandbox

“I think the primary source is just growing up in that community and learning to know a story” (Cowell, Pattie, and Silko 41). These are the words from writer Leslie Marmon Silko, the writer and creator of the autobiographical text Storyteller. Imaginative and gifted in her own right, she has taken her talents to new levels by composing an array of poems and short stories that were meshed together from her childhood. Her ancestors were her guides as she listened to the oral traditions passed down and told to her in her youth. The way in which the story begins is the prerequisite of what becomes of a journey that can be read in or out of sequence based on the readers intent.

The hopi basket is scattered with photographs which are connected to the stories that Silko engages with her audiences. Not only does she incorporate meaningful texts, she utilizes her love of photography to suture her readers into her works within the overall texts. Specifically, the hopi basket represents a collage, a modern-day mural of photographs used by her family to engage her in how her writing first developed. From the short story, Yellow Womanwhich envelopes readers into a long love lost she subscribes the audience to appreciate the larger moments in life by fulfilling the notion of intimacy both mentally and spiritually. In Cold Storm Night, a poem, Silko demonstrates a purposeful tone that is inscribed in the patterns in which she writes, and emotion that is enclosed in the minds of her readers. “Leslie Silko has assembled the parts of Storytellerto distress and interrupt the activity of reading and to disown the authority of writing and authorship” (Langen 9).

The preservation of the ideals in Silko’s life prepare readers to engage with other short stories such as Tony’s Storywhich tackles the racial discrimination of Indian men. Silko enlightens her readers on the tough choices made by men of authority and the disenfranchised by immersing these themes in texts of Storyteller. She does not disappoint with her poetry by connecting the dots between introspective tales to succinct poems that make the reader enhance their memories of her life. In Grandpa Graduated from Sherman InstituteSilko proclaims that dreams can be realized, even if someone tries to discourage you from accomplishing your passions. Her grandfather played an intricate role in her life by showing her that even if you are told that your dream is unattainable that you can still achieve a piece of your dream if you stand still. “The experience in living the reality revealed in her grandfather’s stories has shown her the oneness of past and present, of historical and mythic time, and of the stories, and the people” (Hirsch and Silko 15).

Works Cited

Silko, Leslie Marmon, and Ellen L. Arnold. Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 2000. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.gsu.edu/login?

url= http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx ?

direct=true&db=cat06552a&AN=gsu.9929916903402952&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Silko, Leslie Marmon, and Toby C. S. Langen. “Storyteller as Hopi Basket.” Studies in American

Indian Literatures, vol. 5, no. 1, 1993, pp. 6–24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20736696.

Leslie Marmon Silko, and Bernard A. Hirsch. “The Telling Which Continues”: Oral Tradition

and the Written Word in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller.”  American Indian Quarterly,

rtvol. 12, no. 1, 1988, p.1 ESBCOhost, doi:10.2307/1183784.

   

.