Photography
In the "Introduction" to the second version of Storyteller, Silko writes that she wanted readers to have a sense about the landscape and family she came from, so she included photographs as a way to help give readers this context.[11]
Silko's father, Lee Marmon, took the majority of the photos featured in Storyteller. She writes of his contribution in her "Acknowledgements." All the photos in Storyteller are in black and white. The majority of the photos feature Silko and her family as well as the mesas and landscape surrounding her Laguna village. Within the "Acknowledgements," Silko also includes a link to the New Mexico Digital Collections, which showcases the Lee Marmon collection of photos.[2]
In "The Telling Which Continues": Oral Tradition and the Written Word in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller," Bernard Hirsch notes how the photographs "are arranged to suggest the circular design of Storyteller, a design characteristic of oral tradition." According to Hirsh, the photographs and their arrangements help merge the "personal, historical, and cultural levels of being and experience."[12]
Poetry
The poems in Storyteller make up the bulk of the collection, greatly outnumbering the amount of short stories and photographs they accompany. Silko has commented on her poetic structure, saying, “I gave examples of what I heard as best as I could remember, and how I developed these elements into prose, into fiction, and into poetry, moving from what was basically an oral tradition into a written tradition.”[13] Silko gives readers further insight into her writing process in the untitled poem that begins “This is the way Aunt Susie told the story.” She says, “I write when I still hear / her voice as she tells the story.”[2]
In a review of Storyteller, Jim Ruppert points out that Silko uses characters and voices in poems and "creates a reality the merges with" extra-textual reality.[14]
Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico as photographed by John K. Hillers in 1879.Short stories
Since publishing Storyteller in the 1980s, Silko has primarily published novels and long works, rather than short stories or collections. "Yellow Woman" and "Lullaby," short stories published within Storyteller, have been widely anthologized.[15]
In The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell: The Power of Women in Native American Literature, Patrice Hollrah noted, "Silko prefers promoting a political agenda through her stories rather than any other format...."[16] In Storyteller Silko addresses social issues resulting from colonialism and colliding cultures, which can be seen in some of the works in the collection such as "Tony’s Story," which in part deals with racial discrimination against American Indian men.[17]
Silko's short stories have been compared to work by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston.[15]
