It's no surprise that Ceremony doesn't neatly fit into any one category or genre. After all, Leslie Marmon Silko is pretty much the most hipster author this side of the Mississippi. She didn't give her novel chapters because she didn't want it to conform to the standard format of the novel. So it makes sense that Silko would try to avoid other Anglocentric conventions, like that of "genre," in the telling of this Laguna story.

But one of the obvious challenges when teaching Ceremony is this seemingly endless multitude of different narrative styles. From poetry and magical realism to folklore, there's a lot going on in the space of some two hundred and sixty pages. Silko keeps us guessing.