Урсула Ле Гуин - Ursula K. Le Guin - The Last Interview and Other Conversations

LE GUIN:Irreverence toward undeserved authority, and passionate respect for the power of the word. Oh, and my books staying in print, too.

Q:Which are your favorite books from your own work?

LE GUIN:I love them all, the flawed little bastards.

The first interview with a writer I can remember reading was a conversation with Le Guin in a science fiction fanzine called Algol in 1975. It was originally a radio interview, and like many of the author’s interviews, she reworked it heavily for print. She had won a Hugo from the science fiction fans for The Left Hand of Darkness, and a National Book Award for children’s literature for The Farthest Shore, the third Earthsea book, and so the interviewer rather crassly asked:

Q:Which would you rather have, a National Book Award or a Hugo?

LE GUIN:Oh, a Nobel, of course.

Q:They don’t give Nobel Prize awards for fantasy.

LE GUIN:Maybe I can do something for peace.

By the time she was in her eighties, they were giving Nobels for fantasy (Portugal’s José Saramago, for one) and she herself was a contender. I told her one year she was given odds of twenty-five to one, and she fired back that she knew what that meant: “All I have to do in the next twenty-five years is outlive the other twenty-four writers.” Le Guin, in retrospect, never had a chance with the Swedish Academy, which was enmeshed in a sexual harassment and abuse scandal that it covered up for years.

Someday scholars will seek out every Le Guin interview in every fanzine and Oregon newspaper. They will transcribe all the Q&As on YouTube and track down the public appearances that are not. The result will be several fat volumes, full of wisdom and other good things. In the meantime, here’s a sampling of some quotes from interviews that did not fit into this volume, but which I found particularly illuminating.

Why even her bleakest stories are interwoven with optimism:

It may just be a refusal to take the counsel of despair. I think to admit despair and to revel in it—as many 20th- and 21st-century writers do—is an easy way out. Whenever I get really really depressed and discouraged about our politics in America and what we are doing, ecologically speaking, globally speaking, [with] our mad rush to destroy the world, it’s very easy to say, “To hell with us. This species is not successful.” Something tells me I have no right to say that. There are good people. Who am I to judge? The problem with despair is it gets judgmental. [2] “Getting Away with Murder,” The Millions, Paul Morton, January 31, 2013. https://themillions.com/2013/01/getting-away-with-murder-the-millions-interviews-ursula-k-le-guin.html .

How she became a feminist in the early 1970s:

It was a real mind shift. And I was a grown woman with kids. And mothers of children were not welcome among a lot of early feminists. I was living the bad dream. I was a mommy. You know there’s always prejudice in a revolutionary movement. I wasn’t even sure I was welcome. And I wasn’t to some of those people. It took a lot of thinking for me to find what kind of feminist I could be and why I wanted to be a feminist. [3] “My Last Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin,” Literary Hub, John Freeman, January 24, 2018. https://lithub.com/my-last-conversation-with-ursula-k-le-guin/ .

The humor in her work that many cannot see:

I roll around laughing sometimes writing it, and then the critics come on and they are so damned serious and talk about Discourses and Epiphanies and Battles of Good and Evil and all that. I remember trying to show the scriptwriter for Lathe of Heaven that the book was essentially comic. His script was quite humorless. Heavy-handed. So the poor guy laboriously stuck in some bad jokes, and we had to take them out again. Humor is a chancy thing; and when it’s an element of a serious book, a lot of people just miss it, perhaps because they don’t expect complexity, and there isn’t a laugh track. [4] “2001 Book Awards”. Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association. Archived from the original on June 21, 2013. Interview by Cindy Heidemann. https://web.archive.org/web/20130621065514/http://www.pnba.org/2001BookAwards.html

On science fiction:

Here we’ve got science fiction, the most flexible, adaptable broad range, imaginative, crazy form that prose fiction has ever attained and we’re going to let it be used for making toy plastic ray guns that break when you play with them and prepackaged, precooked, predigested, indigestible flavorless TV dinners and big inflated rubber balloons containing nothing but hot air? Well, I say the hell with that. [5] On the Media, hosted by Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone and produced by WNYC; broadcast by WNYC; January 26, 2018.

On the unconventional form of her far-future Napa Valley novel Always Coming Home, which reversed her usual method of composition:

You know, a novelist’s job is largely leaving things out. Getting the story flowing clear of all the junk around it—the river banks. Well, in this book, I wanted to include the river banks. Not only the river, but the banks of the river and the bed of the river and the trees over the river. So in some ways I had to unlearn everything I’d learned about writing a book… Stuff has to go down inside of you, get into the dark and turn into something else, before you can use it in art. If you use raw experience, straight experience, you’re doing journalism which is another discipline. [6] Irv Broughton, The Writer’s Mind: Interviews With American Authors, Vol. 2 (University of Arkansas Press, 1990).

Sex in fiction:

I find that as I get older, I write more freely and with more pleasure about sexuality. I don’t write very much about sex, the act of sex itself, because I don’t like to read about it. I have never enjoyed reading about sex. It’s like reading about a football game or a wrestling match. It might be fun to watch or to do but it isn’t any fun to read about. [7] Helene Escudie, Entretein avec Ursula K. Le Guin , in “Conversations With Ursula K. Le Guin,” edited by Carl Freedman (University Press of Mississippi, 2008).

On form:

I don’t feel the short story is a tight form. It can be made so; tight plotters and gimmick-ending writers like it so. But in itself it is potentially immense. To have read Chekhov is to know that as a certainty. It’s like the sonnet. Fourteen lines and a demanding rhyme scheme seems to be a tight, closed form, but Wordsworth got all of London and all the sunrise into it. [8] “An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin,” Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Ramola D, October/November 2003. https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_chronicle_view/2293/an_interview_with_ursula_k._le_guin .

Whether she saw herself as a radical:

Yeah, I do. That’s easy enough. Of course, being a radical in the United States… you can be slightly left of center and you’re immediately called “radical.” I’ve always been something of a socialist in politics and so on, and that’s extremely radical over here. I think some of my writing is radical in a sort of quiet way. I don’t go in for dangerous writing and shocking people and so on. If radical means getting down to the roots of things you write, then I do see that as my job, trying to get down to the roots. [9] “Ursula Le Guin talks Sci-fi Snobbery, Adaptations, & Troublemaking,” Den of Geek , Louisa Mellor, April 7, 2015. https://www.denofgeek.com/us/books-comics/ursula-le-guin/245224/ursula-le-guin-talks-sci-fi-snobbery-adaptations-troublemaking .