Yellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit

Silko states that she once accidentally took a class on Victorian-era nonfiction essays in college and finds nonfiction the most difficult to master, especially when law school sucked “the life out of my imagination and out of my writing” (193). Except for letters, which she loved to write since she was six, she only wrote poetry and fiction. When she moved to Alaska, she used letter-writing as a means to avoid isolation. When she moved to Tucson, she also wrote letters to poet Jim Wright to combat feelings of loneliness, and she was devastated when he died before he was ever able to read their published book of correspondence. She finds letters as well as nonfiction readings to be integral to the development of her own nonfiction prose. In 1980, while Silko was writing Almanac of the Dead, she began writing about rocks and rain and taking photographs, often putting these notes aside to work on her novel. She would agree to write requested essays, but often “regret that I had ever agreed to write nonfiction and I would swear off nonfiction prose forever” (194). The photographs turned into Sacred Water:“The Pueblo people and the land and the