An examination of the “competing, even contradictory, visions of the West” in
Shepard’s family trilogy that challenges readings that ignore negative Western
images in the plays; appropriate for more-advanced students.
Leonard Wilcox, ed., Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays
of Sam Shepard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
Includes a broad range of theoretical approaches, including feminist and
structuralist.
—Linda Trinh Moser and Chelsea Russellh
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
(New York: Viking, 1977)Leslie Marmon Silko is recognized as one of the key voices in the Native American
Renaissance and as a major contemporary American author both for her multicul-
tural exploration of being, in her words, “mixed breed,” as well as for her Postmod-
ernist techniques. She is of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white heritage. She was
born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 5 March 1948 and grew up in a house on
the edge of the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Her father, Lee Marmon, was a noted
photographer. Her mother was Mary Virginia Leslie. Owing to her mixed heritage,
Leslie Marmon was not allowed to participate in some of the sacred ceremonies of
the Pueblo. Nevertheless, she recounts in Storyteller (1981) and in various essays and
interviews how she grew up immersed in the Pueblo storytelling traditions from her
grandmother, great-grandmother, and aunts. Silko combines characters and motifs
from those traditional stories, legends, and myths with an awareness of contem-
porary social and political issues in her prose and her poetry. Ceremony is her most
acclaimed novel, and is frequently taught on college campuses around the country.
Marmon attended the University of New Mexico, earning a B.A. in English
with honors in 1969. She was married to Richard Chapman from 1966 to 1969;
they had one son, Robert. She later began law school, planning to practice in the
area of Native American law, but quit after three semesters, deciding she could
achieve more through her writing. Her first published story, “The Man to Send
Rain Clouds,” became the title piece of one of the earliest anthologies of contempo-
rary short fiction by Native writers; of the nineteen stories in the volume, Marmon
wrote seven. In 1971 she married John Silko, and had a son, Cazimir, the next year.
Also in 1972 the family moved to Ketchikan, Alaska. Finding herself homesick for
family and the Pueblo culture and landscape, Silko turned to her writing, starting
Ceremony. As she describes in her introduction to the thirtieth-anniversary edition,
her vivid, color-rich depictions of the Southwestern landscape were a way to ward
off the depression she felt in the rainy, often sunless Alaskan climate. Also during
this era, Silko developed a close friendship with Chinese-American poet Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge, to whom she dedicates several works.