"the ease I have in writing?...It must come from being immersed in a community where every interaction reinforces a narrative vision of oneself and one's belonging. Narrative is the only way they keep track of all the rituals, all the hunting places, all the history, all of the chemistry. How you do this, how you make that, how you bend this. Nothing written down. All in the human memory and kept collectively. So that you'll go clear to the next village to ask some old woman how was it exactly that they used to do this. They used human brains for books. Because the information is stored in narrative, it's ordered completely differently than western European ordering of, like, technical botany or biology, by taking things apart. It puts things together and reinforces stories. So that one deer hunting story can contain valuable information in a number of different areas that you'd have to cross-catalogue."
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesPeople from Albuquerque
Original Language: English
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Leslie Marmon Silko
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