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

Why the map of Earthsea came before the stories:

At first the map could be adjusted to fit the story. This is the beauty of fantasy—your invention alters at need, at least at first. If I didn’t want it to take two weeks, say, to get from one island to another, I could simply move the islands closer. But once you’ve decided that the islands are that far apart, that’s it. The map is drawn. You have to adjust to it as if it were a reality. And it is. [10] Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, Alive and Writing: Interviews With American Authors of the 1980s (University of Illinois Press, 1987).

How being a Westerner influenced her work and career:

Being far from the centers of commercial publishing and the ingroups and the anxieties and influences of East Coast literary circles, where the big question is, Am I with it?—we left-edgers, boondockers, prairie chickens, etc., often have an attitude which is more describable as, Oh, the hell with it. This is healthy. I don’t think it’s ever really healthy for a writer to be an insider. [11] “An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin,” AWP, Ramona D, October/November 2003.

The reality of made-up things:

It has something to do with the very nature of fiction. That age-old question, Why don’t I just write about what’s real? A lot of 20th century—and 21st century—American readers think that that’s all they want. They want nonfiction. They’ll say, I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real. This is incredibly naive. Fiction is something that only human beings do, and only in certain circumstances. We don’t know exactly for what purposes. But one of the things it does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

This is what a lot of mystical disciplines are after—simply seeing, really seeing, really being aware. Which means you’re recognizing the things around you more deeply, but they also seem new. So the seeing-as-new and recognition are really the same thing. [12] “Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221,” The Paris Review, John Wray, Fall 2013, Issue 206. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/ursula-k-le-guin-the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin .

Learning to argue with Tolstoy:

Q:You said you used to be too respectful to disagree with Tolstoy but after you got into your sixties your faculty of respect atrophied and you began to ask rude questions of Tolstoy. What were they?

LE GUIN:“Why did you say ‘all happy families are alike’?” You know, the famous beginning of Anna Karenina. What a ridiculous thing to say. Show me two happy families that are alike. Show me two happy families.

Q:That’d be a good start, to find them and compare them!

LE GUIN:Right, yes. There are families that are happy from time to time, I grew up in one. But the idea of them being “a happy family” or a family that is continuously happy… what are you talking about, Tolstoy? I think he got a good first sentence, it sounded good, he couldn’t let it go. [13] The Book Show , hosted by Ramona Koval and produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission; broadcast by ABC Radio National; May 4, 2008.

How our uncertain reality requires new storytellers:

One of the American science-fiction writers I admire most is Philip K. Dick, and Philip K. Dick’s world involves immense tracts of pure insanity. It’s a world which is always in danger of falling to pieces. It is an accurate picture of what is going on in a lot of people’s heads and how the world actually does affect us—this weird, disjointed, unexpected world we’re living in now. Well now, Phil Dick reflects that by using a sane, matter-of-fact prose to describe the completely insane things that happen in his novels. It is a way of mirroring reality. [14] Irv Broughton, The Writer’s Mind: Interviews With American Authors , Vol. 2 (University of Arkansas Press, 1990).

As she grew older, she became even more irreverent. Here, a year before her death, she takes on a question from the Times Literary Supplement, “What will your field look like 25 years from now?”:

My field? What is my field, I wonder. My favorite field is the one below the barn at the old ranch in California. I hope in twenty-five years it looks just the way it does now, all wild oats and chicory and foxtail and voles and jackrabbits and quail. [15] “Twenty Questions with Ursula K. Le Guin,” The Times Literary Supplement, March 4, 2017. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/twenty-questions-ursula-le-guin/ .

Life is a journey back to where you started from, Le Guin always said. True voyage is return. When you get there, you might know a little more than when you began.

Isn’t the real question this: Is the work worth doing? Am I, a human being, working for what I really need and want—or for what the State or the advertisers tell me I want? Do I choose? I think that’s what anarchism comes down to. Do I let my choices be made for me, and so go along with the power game, or do I choose, and accept the responsibility for my choice? In other words, am I going to be a machine-part, or a human being? [16] Jonathan Ward, “Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin,” Algol No. 24, May 1975.

I’m reading A Wizard of Earthsea again, this time aloud, to my nine-year-old daughter. I still have the same well-traveled copy of the book I bought in 1975, although it is beginning to disintegrate. We’ve made it to the part where Ged, whose arrogance has caused him to let loose a monstrous shadow creature on the world, is sailing to confront the dragon. Lily wants to know why Ged has to fight the dragon instead of making friends with it, and why all the wizards are men. I tell her Le Guin eventually had the same questions, and that the sequels show a different picture of life in Earthsea.

The book has shifted for me again. As a teenager I saw it as a heroic adventure tale. During my brief stint as a war correspondent it was a parable of power. Now it is a book about reckoning with oneself, about how to live fully and honestly. Ged’s only hope for survival is to turn the tables on his shadowy pursuer, to hunt the hunter, to take back the world. It is a message that seems particularly potent at this troubled moment in our country, one that Le Guin echoed in her 2014 National Book Foundation lifetime achievement acceptance speech:

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Interview conducted by Karen McPherson, Peter Jensen, Alison Halderman, David Zeltzer, and Karen Kramer

PETER JENSEN:You write science fiction. Do you have any particular vision of the future?

URSULA K. LE GUIN:The thing about science fiction is, it isn’t really about the future. It’s about the present. But the future gives us great freedom of imagination. It’s like a mirror. You can see the back of your own head.

KAREN MCPHERSON:You’ve said that writing science fiction is sometimes like performing “thought experiments.” You establish a set of conditions and then see where they lead. For instance, in The Dispossessed you set up the conditions of an anarchist society, almost as though you’re working in a laboratory. Can you actually learn about anarchism from this—whether and how it could work? Its strengths and problems?