By Christina M. Castro

 

Originally published in the University of Arizona Poetry Center Newsletter 25.2, Spring 2000.

The moment I had been looking forward to for years was upon me and I was lost. I couldn't find Leslie Silko's house. I had everything. The recorder, a notebook filled with questions, muffins. Everything except the directions.

I knew the street name and more or less where it was and I thought my "Indian intuition" would guide me, but it must not have been working that morning. I was already over fifteen minutes late and about to give up when I noticed a big truck coming up the secluded dirt road.

I jumped out of my Pathfinder and flagged the driver down. I told him what I remembered. Something about a trailhead and a horse corral. "You still have another mile or so to go," he said. "There's only one house up there. That's gotta be it." I jumped back into my Lil’ Feather and pushed on the gas.

Nearly a mile up, I could see what had to be her house, alone on a hill surrounded by saguaros. My excitement made me push a little harder. Then suddenly a curve in the road appeared before me. I couldn't turn fast enough. My Lil’ Feather went straight and rolled right into a ditch. Clouds of dirt flew in the air.

My Lil’ Feather is equipped with four-by-four capabilities, but I am a city girl, I am, and it never occurred to me that I should learn to use it. Just then I had no choice but to get out and trek the rest of the way up. I gathered all I needed and set forth under the glaring mid-day sun.

Silko seemed annoyed when I arrived. "I'm so sorry I'm late," I said. "I had a minor accident."  She led me into her office, which coincidentally had a window that opened on the winding road below. "Look outside," I said.  She did and let out a throaty laugh.

After our interview, she drove me down the road to where my pathetic-looking truck sat out of place amongst the desert life, and to my surprise offered to move it out. She reached under Lil’ Feather and started moving rocks. I stood there like a fool, not knowing what to do. I handed her my keys and she got in, started her up, and within two minutes had that bad girl out of there.

When I thanked her profusely, she replied, "This was the best part!" I had to agree.

Christina M. Castro: How would you describe the writer's life?

Leslie Marmon Silko: The writer's life is a constant battle to balance your responsibility to your writing with your responsibilities to the everyday world, meaning people, your pets, your landlord, whatever. There's that constant pull of the world, which is opposed to the need to clear out a kind of psychic space with plenty of time and no interruptions.  Time to think and gradually to descend into the area where you have to work. In a way it's like working underground. It's not easy to get down there and it's not easy to get back.

You can never reach that perfect balance. You always feel that one part or the other is not getting enough time.

Christina: How has the publishing industry changed in the last twenty years?

Leslie: The changes in the publishing world have been tremendous. It's hard to believe.  Twenty years ago, I thought computers would make writing novels easier and working with publishers easier but it seems like the publishers didn't buy any of that new equipment. Simon and Schuster, my publisher, make as many mistakes or more mistakes when they typeset my manuscript now. They haven't gotten any more accurate—in fact they've gotten less accurate. The editing has gotten worse but at the same time everything now is about marketing. They really don't care about the writing itself—they only care about coming up with a strategy to sell your work. Marketers pigeonhole, they target audiences. Since I've started writing, they've gotten much more exclusive.

If you're a writer and you're trying to write to many people, in many different places, the marketers want to cut off all of those connections. They have their target audiences. For example, white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty or white females between the ages of ten and fourteen.

They decide first who they want to sell to and then they go look for what it is they want to buy, which is the reverse of the situation twenty years ago when I got into the business. The editors, the publishers, were looking for different kinds of books. They had not narrowed the audiences so much. Now it's really fragmented. When they do that with your book, they cut you off from ever spreading to other kinds of audiences.

For Almanac of the Dead, Toni Morrison wrote this really good blurb. Because the marketers at Simon and Schuster were thinking only "Native American, Southwestern" they didn't even use her blurb on the book. Anyone could've known she was going to get the Nobel Prize sooner or later. By limiting who they think the audience is for my work is, Simon and Schuster actually cut out the true audience.

The marketers don't know what they're doing. They're idiots. They don't know anything about literature. The emphasis has gone from literature, or any sense of larger community made by literature, to these little pigeonholes.

You have to be really careful now. Your publisher is not your friend. Your publishers can be your enemies. They can do you in and they don't care. That's the big change. A complete disregard for the readers, a complete disregard for the writers, and a total focus on marketing, publicity, and demographics.

Another thing is, when I started writing, your book went out and you could expect to see it around for a year. Publishers gave bookstores one year to sell it. Now, your book has a shelf life of thirty days. For thirty days Barnes and Noble or Borders will keep hard cover copies of Gardens in the Dunes on the shelf.

If your readership does not increase in that time they take it off the shelf.

Amazon.com has destroyed the small booksellers, but at the same time it gives its readers another way to find out about books. Through hearing people on the internet write about a book they're excited about, maybe that can be a hopeful way of readers finding writing and writers they like.

Christina: Everyone knows that the number of titles in serious fiction is shrinking. Would you then encourage writers to avoid major publishing houses and to stick with smaller presses for more artistic control?

Leslie: I think it's a misconception that the smaller publishers will be any better. You have a different set of frustrations with smaller publishers. They don't have as much money for distribution. Publishing is so expensive and your smaller publisher sometimes has to make sacrifices that in the end also jeopardize the success of your book.

What I would tell young writers is to put the focus on the work. You have to live doing it. You can't think that it's going to make you money; you can't think that it's even going to support you. You can't think like that because what you'll end up having to do is sacrifice your own ideas to fall in line with what they want you to do. The important thing is to get a book completely finished, or nearly finished, before you even go to any publisher.

Some writers try to take and sell an idea, or just a small portion of a book to publishers and there are a couple of dangers in that. The first is that they won't give you enough money to get the book written and you'll end up owing them money. Secondly they'll start telling you it has to be this way or that way.

It's better to go in with the idea that you can't depend on a publisher. You can only depend on yourself. The next thing is to be very wary. Make sure that you have someone whose judgment you trust, whether it's a fellow writer or teacher. Don't show it to anyone too soon if it's a longer piece. It can make you self-conscious and can confuse your own judgment about what you want. You'll end up working against yourself. Once you get the manuscript together, show it to people you trust before you show it to editors.

These are the kinds of things you're up against as a fiction writer. With poetry it's different. For a poet, your hopes of getting your book out there and reviewed are actually better now than ever. The hard thing for fiction writers is that most of the small presses can't afford to publish fiction. They can only afford to publish poetry. Smaller books. So in some sense, the chances are better that you'll get your book of poetry out by a small press and get it done right.

Joy Harjo is one of the few poets I've ever known who writes poetry for the big presses. There are so few books of poetry published by the big guys. In my mind, having her work published by Norton is a big accomplishment.

Christina: There is an ongoing debate in the literary world regarding writers who attempt to write from a different cultural, racial perspective than their own. What are your thoughts on this?

Leslie: That's been going on for hundreds of years. There are two thoughts I have on this. If this were the best of all possible worlds, which it isn't, then publishing wouldn't concern itself with pigeonholing and marketing to certain groups. There would be a level playing ground. Everyone would have the same chance of getting a novel published. If our education system would include education on different cultures and groups of people who are a part of the United States, you wouldn't have this. When people get excluded, that's when you have this sort of fragmentation and things being broken down into categories. It's a political problem.

If there were many books by Pueblo people out there, for example, then we could say, "Let that guy publish that book on Pueblo culture or oral literature," because there's all these other books by Pueblo writers or people from that community that are out there so that there's an opportunity for people to see the difference between someone who's just pretending, someone who is trying to wrap themselves in the mantle of a culture, versus someone who is actually from there.

The problem is in this country is that you have this political machine in the arts that suppresses Indian writers to take power away from the people. They have continued to publish books about Indians by non-Indians for political reasons. Non-Indians, generally, even if they've tried to be very sympathetic, can't help but replicate a worldview that is sympathetic to the political ends of the power structure.

Yet you can't limit the freedom of the artist. We can't say, "You can't use your imagination." It's extremely difficult for a person to imagine themselves in the shoes, life and culture of someone else, but let's not put any limitations on what possibly could happen. We can't limit human beings and the human imagination. The reason there is so much strong feeling about, let's say, non-Indian writers writing about non-Indian subjects is because good Indian writers don't get published and bad white writers do. That's the problem.

It's getting to the point, though, where there's enough good writing out there and there's gradually becoming more knowledge of Indian culture. Readers can now pick up a book by a non-Indian with a bad imagination and say, "This is crap."  As long as certain communities are marginalized, it's a political act against them to allow a stranger to portray them. It's a part of suppression. Once there's an opening up and a political equality, a political power given to marginalized people, then it won't matter.

I think we’re gradually getting enough good Indian writers out there that only the most brilliant imaginings by non-Indians of what it would be to be part of some other culture would get published. One example of such a work is a collection of poetry entitled Crazy Horse in Stillness by William Heyen.

Christina: What are you working on these days?

Leslie: I've always been interested in the occult. Anglo-American, European, African, Asian—if you go back into these cultures they all have ideas about the occult. I'm interested in these pre-Christian or Pagan beliefs in Europe and in other places. It's in the pre-Christian beliefs that you can find common ground with the Native American community. If you’re coming out of a community like ours, sometimes you can feel more comfortable when you go into those areas and those cultures where they're talking about the occult. That's an area where there's a belief in timelessness and spirituality that you don't find in mainstream dominant culture.

I've been reading up on Tarot cards, dream interpretation, and tealeaf reading. People in all cultures talk about good and bad luck, evil and so on. I've read about Jewish witchcraft and magic, which really freaked out the Europeans. My new work wants to go onto this more familiar ground.

There's a lot of humor that can be gained as well. There's the new age movement that is big now, not just in the U.S. but in Europe is just full of those types. That's the way to do it, in a humorous way. Otherwise, if you get all serious about it then you go Gothic. Maybe that's what will happen to me. I'll go Gothic.