Up close and personal with a famous author -- does being in the audience count as up close?

What I have always loved about the city is the opportunities to see amazing theatrical performances, hear live music and listen to talented authors. We certainly got talent in Cambridge, but there’s a lot more of it in the Twin Cities.

Recently I had the opportunity to hear Leslie Marmon Silko speak, the author who wrote “Ceremony,” which has sold 1 million copies. (I want to write a book that popular some day!) She read the audience at the Central Library in downtown Minneapolis excerpts from her newly released memoir, “The Turquoise Ledge.” 

Silko told the packed room that she agreed to write a memoir before realizing what the genre had become. After doing some research she decided to do things differently. “It looked like the genre needed help,” she remarked. So she made her memoir into an article of history. It has lots of rattlesnakes and few humans. “I was a bit tired of humans at the time,” she admitted.

She realized that one of the most disturbing things in writing about your own life is learning “the bald facts” about one’s own family. That’s why she typically writes fiction.

Silko reminisced about how some called her book, “Almanac of the Dead,” prophetic after the Zapistas revolted just as she’d written years earlier. She was interviewed by her local television station. “As if I knew anything. I’m just a novelist,” she stated.