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

HUBER:Your mother started writing late in life.

LE GUIN:She started writing about the same time I did, professionally speaking. She got published first. And of course she got a bestseller —Ishi was UC Press’s first bestseller. She said, “Oh, I always wanted to write, but I didn’t want it to compete with bringing up the kids, so I had to get you all out from under.” That’s how she felt. And once she started writing, I think she wrote most every day. She loved doing it. Both my parents wrote every day. I don’t; I’m lazier. [ Laughs ]

HUBER:Your mother sounds like a very feisty and independent, unconventional woman, especially for her era. How did she shape the kind of woman you became?

LE GUIN:It’s so complicated. My mother didn’t call herself a feminist, but she gave me Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas to read when I was fourteen maybe. Those are very powerful books to give a girl. My mother was a freethinking person. She thought for herself. She read and thought and talked, she was intellectual, so I think what my mother gave me was just the example of a woman with a free mind who chose to be a wife, mother, housewife, a hostess—the conventional life of a middle-class woman. She liked it, very much. If she hadn’t, I don’t think she would have done it. Her mother was a very independent Wyoming woman. My great-aunt was a strong influence on me, and she was very much an independent Western woman who went her own way. That side of my family, they were strong Western women. There was a lot of independence there.

HUBER:Where do you think that your feminist consciousness came from, then?

LE GUIN:In my generation, it was beginning to grow everywhere, and I was even kind of slow catching up to the early feminist movement. But there came a point in our lives when it was kind of a matter of survival. Again, it’s so complicated, but there has been a very large revolution in thinking during my lifetime. I think we won’t go back to where we were when I was born, which was a man’s world. And, you’re talking to a writer here. Literature was so much a man’s world. And it still is. Look at who the prizes go to. It’s a very slow revolution, and it doesn’t involve blood and killing people and burning bras and all that stuff. It’s just, it’s going to happen. It’s happening.

HUBER:You have written about the way that you balanced your writing career with raising your three children, and it sounds like…

LE GUIN:To call it a balance… It seemed kind of like a madhouse sometimes.

HUBER:How did you and your husband share this work of childrearing?

LE GUIN:That was really the secret, that I had this guy who could do his job and let me do my job, and then we did our job together, which was bring up the kids. And keeping a house—like my mother, I enjoy it. I don’t think I kept the house very well, but I could keep things going and write.

HUBER:And so, when your children were small, would you write at night?

LE GUIN:Yeah, that’s kind of all you can do. If you’re home with the kids, you’ve got to be on duty. Unless you have servants or something.

HUBER:I want to ask you about a particular poem in Finding My Elegy , “Song for a Daughter.” It begins:

Could you just tell me about what inspired that poem?

LE GUIN:What’s going on in that poem? Well, when your daughter has a daughter, and her daughter’s giving her trouble, you think, “Oh, boy.” It’s a wheel going around. And the way you feel about an angry four-year-old: You want to wring their neck, and you love them very much… and just kind of watching the generations repeat the pain and the love that we give each other, and the fact that the kid never can do anything right, and they also never can do anything wrong. That’s the way it came out in my head. So that is a grandmother poem. It’s got three generations going, and of course it involves my mother, and how I’m sure she felt sometimes, that I never could do anything right. But she never said so. She let me feel that I was doing okay.

HUBER:Do you feel more or less hopeful about the future now than you were when you began your writing career?

LE GUIN:Old age does not tend to make you very hopeful. It’s not a hopeful time of life. Youth is. It has to be. And old age—you have seen enough things go to ruin that it gets a little harder to be hopeful. And when you’re watching your species destroy their habitat, as we are doing, it is quite a job to remain hopeful. But then I also have realized, like we were talking about these huge social changes in gender and the relative positions of men and women. The changes are painfully slow, but they have happened, and they are continuing to happen. So there’s hope.

HUBER:What are you working on now?

LE GUIN:I’m not writing much fiction now. I published one story this year, I think. Mostly doing poetry, and I do enjoy writing a blog on my website, which is kind of a new idea for me. There’s a lot to keep up with, and at my age, I haven’t got the energy I had, so I can’t do as much as I used to. I do regret that, but that’s just life.

HUBER:What do you like about writing a blog?

LE GUIN:I got the idea of doing it from the Portuguese Nobel Prize–winner, José Saramago. When he was eighty-five and eighty-six, he was writing blogs. And they’re wonderful. Some of them are political and some of them are just kind of thoughtful. And I thought, “Well, wow. It’s a very short form, and it’s very free. Maybe I could do that.” A blog can be anything you want it to be, so it’s good for this condition I’m in of not having the energy to write a novel. You need a lot of strength to write a novel, honestly. It’s a huge job. And even a short story takes a kind of a big surge of energy, and in your eighties, you tend to just kind of run out of that stuff. It just isn’t there anymore. So you parlay what you’ve got. And then there’s poetry, which is always a blessing. And I’ve written poetry all my life, so I’m glad it’s still with me.

HUBER:Have you ever thought about writing a memoir?

LE GUIN:Memoir? No. I’m like my father: I’m not interested in talking about who I was. I’m much more interested in finding out who I am. [ Laughs ] Going ahead.

Ursula K. Le Guin lived in exactly the kind of Portland neighborhood you would expect. There were marvelous coffeehouses, a library, the offices of a literary magazine, a self-consciously weird shop called The Peculiarium, a grocery co-op, friendly bars, and affordable restaurants—all the comforts of civilization presented at human scale. Le Guin’s street started at the river, traversed the commercial center, rose sharply past a sign warning NO OUTLET, and crossed a gorge too deep for trolls before arriving at her house. Built in 1899, it felt bigger inside than it looked on the outside. The forest was only steps away, the largest urban wilderness in the country. I would smell the roses, take heed of the hand-printed sign imploring PLEASE DON’T LET THE CAT OUT!!, knock on the lion’s-head door knocker, and be granted admission to the living room. The neat shelves held a complete set of Dickens, her beloved Calvino’s Cosmicomics, an oversize tome titled Beyond Time and Space, and an Ovid with four hundred years of student scribbles. The walls displayed landscapes instead of award citations. The windows showed landscapes too—the Willamette River and then beyond to Mount St. Helens. It was a well-ordered but somewhat austere room, with polished wooden floors, beams of morning light, and no technology beyond the lamps.