Ursula Le Guin
December 13, 2013 5:16 AM   Subscribe

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction Interview at The Paris Review: "It’s like working in any form—in poetry, for example. When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always—I think any poet who’s worked in form will agree with me—is that the form leads you to what you want to say. It is wonderful and mysterious."
posted by dhruva (22 comments total) 61 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is great, thanks!
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:30 AM on December 13, 2013


ohgodohgodohgod

the way things are going, i saw the name and was sure this would be an obituary. i just finished reading The Word for World Is Forest so i could teach it next semester, so... well.

thank you universe. thank you.

and *thanks*, dhruva, for the link!
posted by allthinky at 5:48 AM on December 13, 2013 [10 favorites]


Lovely.

It's sort of fascinating to hear that she's only recently been delving into Buddhism, but it does give me hope about my own lifelong learning! Even an incredibly learned person can still be inquisitive at age 84.
posted by selfnoise at 5:54 AM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


@ allthinky that book is fantastic. I think I first heard of it on this site in a post about Avatar (could be way off) and how that was one of the storylines that was reworked into James Cameron's movie.
posted by GrapeApiary at 6:13 AM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm so glad this isn't an obituary post. Many years ago, I wrote Le Guin a letter praising her Catwings children's books, and she sent me a lovely response. I'll have to see if my mother knows where it is.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:41 AM on December 13, 2013 [2 favorites]


I managed to get hold of a secondhand copy of The Language Of The Night, her book of essays, and my goodness it's amazing. She articulates some quite recondite points with remarkable lucidity and enthusiasm and makes me feel excited and energised about reading SF. I read The Left Hand Of Darkness and The Earthsea Quartet this year and loved both - The Dispossessed has disappeared somewhere in my office and may be the thing that finally spurs me into a big clean up. I can't wait to read it.
posted by RokkitNite at 6:44 AM on December 13, 2013 [3 favorites]


I managed to get hold of a secondhand copy of The Language Of The Night, her book of essays, and my goodness it's amazing. She articulates some quite recondite points with remarkable lucidity and enthusiasm and makes me feel excited and energised about reading SF.

I'm only now delving into really exciting sci-fi, after finishing the heartbreaking James Tiptree, Jr.,The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. It has snippets of discussions between Sheldon and Le Guin, amongst other notable authors, which makes me all the more interested in reading those authors' works.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:02 AM on December 13, 2013


Very interesting interview, but when she says of The Dispossessed, "And at some point it occurred to me that nobody had written an anarchist utopia" she's wrong: Huxley had published Island a decade earlier, in 1962.
posted by shivohum at 7:05 AM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


Goodness, I love UKLG.

I'm glad to see this interview now because I just shoved The Dispossessed and Changing Planes into a friend's hands. I still call The Dispossessed the best text on anarchism that exists" because it just seems so honest - successes, failures, and the complexity of 'utopia.' The struggle for utopia.
posted by entropone at 7:12 AM on December 13, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm on and off reading Four Ways to Forgiveness right now. It's kind of not amazing in the sense that the stories themselves aren't super compelling, but the background worlds are so deep and strong, and with Le Guin, even her more middling stories are very readable. It's kind of an interesting exercise.
posted by latkes at 7:19 AM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


I regularly reread The Lathe of Heaven like it's the Bible. I really miss the era of writers who could get so much storytelling into less than two hundred pages, in books that you can reread a hundred times and still find something new.

Plus, if you're a writer, her carrier bag theory of fiction will turn you inside-out.
posted by sonascope at 7:52 AM on December 13, 2013 [7 favorites]


Could you supply a reference to the 'carrier bag theory of fiction' please? Is it in the OP interview, or elsewhere?
posted by newdaddy at 8:36 AM on December 13, 2013


A google search for the phrase turns up the text of the original essay as the first result. It is good reading, but be prepared to mull it over for a while, it's deep.
posted by mittens at 8:44 AM on December 13, 2013


The record is called Music and Poetry of the Kesh. It was composed by Todd Barton, who was the music director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He and I made it with some of his singers. It’s all in fourths, fifths, and ninths, and things like that, because that’s how the Kesh would do it. We had a hell of a lot of fun making that album, and then we wanted to copyright it. We heard back from the copyright office, and they said, You cannot copyright folk music. It’s the music of an indigenous people. So we had the pleasure of saying, Well, we made up the indigenous people.
That's hilarious. Also, wait a minute, do you mean this actually exists?
posted by nangar at 8:46 AM on December 13, 2013 [2 favorites]


Could you supply a reference to the 'carrier bag theory of fiction' please? Is it in the OP interview, or elsewhere?


A google search for the phrase turns up the text of the original essay as the first result. It is good reading, but be prepared to mull it over for a while, it's deep.


Linked for the lazy and potential future browsers.
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:51 AM on December 13, 2013 [6 favorites]


Thanks thanks for the reference and the link. Embarrassed I didn't google it myself first.
posted by newdaddy at 8:55 AM on December 13, 2013


That's hilarious. Also, wait a minute, do you mean this actually exists?

Until my tape player in my car broke, we listened to this tape all the time for some reason. It's very pleasant, monotonous in the way folk chant and singing can be.
posted by latkes at 9:12 AM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]


Embarrassed I didn't google it myself first.

Well, you're a newdaddy, so you probably have a lot of distractions right now. ;)
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:13 AM on December 13, 2013


obMetafilterTrope
Metafilter: tentacles coming out of the pigeonhole
posted by kokaku at 9:23 AM on December 13, 2013 [2 favorites]


I can heartily recommend her translation of the Tao Te Ching. She worked a *long* time on it, and it's refreshing and gives a wonderful perspective. (I haven't heard the audio cd's, so I can speak to them).

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Index-LaoTzu.html
posted by el io at 2:20 PM on December 13, 2013 [4 favorites]


I'll second the recommendation of her version of the Tao Te Ching, but I'm pretty sure it's an interpretation -- I don't think she did the actual translation work from ancient Chinese herself, but rather re-imagined the texts of other translations in a way that seems more true to the spirit of the original (not that I can read ancient Chinese either).

Also, while her more typical "genre fiction" work is indeed exceptional, and I continually fail to understand why Harry Potter is so much more popular than the Earthsea trilogy, I think her writing in Always Coming Home is her most groundbreaking work. It does veer pretty wildly from a standard novel format and reading it did leave me a bit shaken. Probably doesn't help that I was fasting on a solo backpacking trip when I really dug into it.
posted by viborg at 2:57 AM on December 14, 2013 [1 favorite]


I found an audio interview with Le Guin here - it includes some of the Kesh music mentioned above.

I love her writing. It's been hugely important to me for years. My first date with my husband happened when I called him to see about borrowing Le Guin's book The Wind's Twelve Quarters, having discovered that he had it and I hadn't read it. Years later our daughter, a fantasy writer herself, asked Le Guin to sign that battered copy (which she had stolen from us) as well as a newly purchased copy of the current book for which the signing event was happening. She told Le Guin the story of the impact of the book. The store owner hustled up and said surely you'd rather have a new copy and our daughter and Le Guin said NO in one voice.
posted by leslies at 7:22 PM on December 14, 2013 [4 favorites]


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