Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

“Introducing Myself,” copyright © 1992 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared in Left Bank .

“My Island,” copyright © 1996 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared in Islands: An International Magazine .

“On the Frontier,” copyright © 2003 by Ursula K. Le Guin; an earlier version of this essay entitled “Which Side Am I On, Anyway?” appeared in Frontiers , 1996.

“All Happy Families,” copyright © 1997 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review , Winter 1997.

“Things Not Actually Present: On The Book of Fantasy and J. L. Borges,” copyright © 1988 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared as the introduction to the Viking edition of The Book of Fantasy .

“Reading Young, Reading Old: Mark Twain’s Diaries of Adam and Eve ,” copyright © 1995 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared as the introduction to The Diaries of Adam and Eve in The Oxford Mark Twain.

“Thinking about Cordwainer Smith,” copyright © 1994 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared in the Readercon 6 program book.

“Rhythmic Pattern in The Lord of the Rings ,” copyright © 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared in Meditations on Middle Earth .

“The Wilderness Within: The Sleeping Beauty and ‘The Poacher,’” copyright © 2002 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore their Favorite Fairy Tales , 2d ed.

“Off the Page: Loud Cows: A Talk and a Poem about Reading Aloud,” copyright © 1992 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first read at the National Council for Research on Women Awards and appears as the frontispiece of The Ethnography of Reading , ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 1994.

“Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty,” copyright © 1992 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared in Allure .

“The Writer on, and at, Her Work,” copyright © 1991 by Ursula K. Le Guin, first appeared in The Writer on Her Work , vol. 2.

All other essays are copyright © 2003 by Ursula K. Le Guin and appear for the first time in this volume.

URSULA K. LE GUIN is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Gandalf, Kafka, and National Book Awards. She is the author of many short stories and more than fifteen novels, including The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed . She is also an honored author of children’s books, poetry, and criticism.

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© 2004 by Ursula K. Le Guin

Cover photograph by John Brown/Getty Images

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929–

The wave in the mind: talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination/Ursula K. Le Guin—1st ed.

p. cm

eISBN 978-0-8348-2563-5

ISBN 978-1-59030-006-0 (alk. paper)

1. Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929– 2. Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929—Authorship. 3. Science fiction—Authorship. 4. Science fiction—History and criticism. I. Title.

PS3562.E42 W38 2004

813′.54—DC21

200301931

I want to thank Dell Hymes for giving me the whole idea of reading prose this way—though of course he bears no responsibility for my extensions and misuses. His work with the written version of oral narrative is stunning in its revelation of complex, conscious, formal pattern in Native American narratives long considered “artless,” “primitive,” etc.