Ursula Major

Edwards Award winner Ursula K. Le Guin talks about her celestial body of work

By Francisca Goldsmith -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2004

It's hard to imagine a more remarkable writer than Ursula K. Le Guin—or a more deserving recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime contributions to young people's literature. During the past 40 years, Le Guin has written more than 60 books, including 20 novels, 13 books for children, six volumes of poetry, and four volumes of translation, as well as countless essays, criticism, and screenplays. And her latest novel, Gifts (Harcourt), is due out in September.

Le Guin's superb science fiction has attracted a following that would make any writer envious. In fact, looking at her vast readership of children, teens, and adults, it's tempting to think that the term "crossover artist" was coined just for Le Guin. But she wasn't always interested in writing for such a wide-ranging audience. For years, Le Guin wrote adult science fiction. That changed in 1967, when she received an invitation from Herman Schein, publisher of Parnassus Press, to create a story for kids. Le Guin says she "wrote the whole book in five or six weeks," and it was soon published "with only a little gentle editing." With its black heroes, white villains, exotic archipelago setting, and mythic culture, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) resembled no other book published for young adults. The coming-of-age fantasy earned its creator the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and Le Guin's career as a writer was off and running.

Since then, the 74-year-old author has seldom stopped to catch her breath, winning a National Book Award and a Newbery Honor in 1972, five Nebula awards, a handful of Hugos, and a slew of other literary honors. Her many redoubtable titles include The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), and Tehanu (1990, all Atheneum), all part of the Earthsea saga; The Left Hand of Darkness (Walker, 1969); and The Beginning Place (HarperCollins, 1980; o.p.).

Le Guin can still remember every one of the 57 stuffed animals she had as a girl, growing up in Berkeley, CA. Her father, Alfred Kroeber, was an anthropologist, and her mother, Theodora, became a writer a few years before her daughter's career took flight. Le Guin graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951, and a year later, earned a master's degree in French and Italian literature from Columbia University. She and her husband, historian Charles Le Guin, have three children and three grandchildren. Le Guin now lives in Portland, OR, and is actively involved with her local library, an institution that has befriended her since childhood. Although she recalls high school as a "living death," she says, "Stopping at the library on my way home saved me." I interviewed Le Guin in late March.

Growing up in a family where anthropology was a lively topic, did you think about the possibilities of life in alternative worlds?

Being the anthropologist's daughter, I was living in the household of a person who didn't prioritize one culture over another. He didn't have a hierarchy—a "the way we do it is right and the way other people do it is wrong." Of course, I didn't know that that was unusual. I just thought that was the way things were. And the thing is, my father was interested in absolutely everything, he had that scientific curiosity, that lively inquisitiveness about how people do things. Material culture, technology, and social institutions—all that was just presented to me as being extremely interesting, and so I found it so. That's why I write about it. But I do it in fiction. He had to deal with the real world, which is somewhat harder, I think, in some ways.

Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?

It was about a man—a writer—who is in an upstairs room writing. Some evil elves are trying to get in through the keyhole. In the end, they get him. It didn't have a happy ending…. I was about nine or 10, and it was meant to be a picture of a man going mad. I bet I'd been reading Saki [by H. H. Munro]!

What else did you read?

When I began writing as a kid, I was reading lots of folk and fairy tales because they were all over the house—the Grimm brothers, [Hans Christian] Andersen, as well as some [American] Indian stories, which weren't so common then. [Will James's] Smokey the Cow Horse, Bambi —those were great animal books. I read the children's classics, like [Kenneth Grahame's] The Wind in the Willows, and [Lewis Carroll's] Alice in Wonderland. Reading Lord Dunsany was an enormous revelation to me at 11 or 12. I opened the little leather volume of A Dreamer's Tales and whoosh!

Tell us about your struggles as a writer before the success of A Wizard of Earthsea?

I had been writing both prose and poetry ever since I was a kid, a little kid, I mean. I started seriously to try to get things published in my twenties. I got poetry published, which you can do if you just keep at it, because there are a lot of little poetry magazines. But the prose fiction got nowhere for eight or 10 years. I wrote a good deal that never has been published. You know, you go on.

I was submitting novels and so on, and my first two publications were almost simultaneous. One was in a little magazine, a literary magazine. The other was in a science fiction magazine. I realized that the editors of the science fiction magazine weren't as puzzled by what I was doing as the editors of the literary magazines often were. I was always writing about things with an offbeat quality, things that were out of the ordinary. So I sort of drifted into science fiction because they would buy my stuff. I published a few stories and [a novel] Rocannon's World [Garland, 1975; o.p.] and two small science fiction stories that followed it. Then I wrote Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea within a couple of years there. I was beginning to hit my stride.

What's your writing routine nowadays?

I'm not very methodical. If an idea gets me then I try to make time and room to work on it. Of course, I do have a place in the house, a study. And the last 18 years or so we've had a little beach house, which is a wonderful place to go to hide. As life goes on, one does have to run away from even the nicest demands on one's time. To make room and time to work you have to make time to be alone. I'm a morning person. The earlier I get up, the better it is for work. And if there's work to be done, I will try to get to it. But, you know, you don't always have a story to write, so you sort of have to hang around waiting. A lot of what artists do is wait. I think people don't always realize it; they call it writer's block. But what's happening is you're just waiting for the well to fill or the story to come.

Are you a compulsive reviser?

It utterly depends on what I'm working on. My poetry I have to wrestle with a lot. Some stories come as if they've been dictated. I just type them up neat on the computer and they're ready to go. Others have to be thought over and wrestled with a long time. I do write in notebooks, by hand, because I love to write outdoors when the weather's nice. Then often I will shift over to the computer. It doesn't matter to me where I write. I can write in a notebook or on a computer. I can compose anywhere, but the computer is such a blessing for revising.

What do you enjoy reading?

I have been just an absolute fiction addict all my life. I can't imagine going anywhere without a couple of novels, because I'm a very fast reader so one won't do usually. I do enjoy popular science, and science made simple, or history. Of course, the pleasure of learning languages and reading in a foreign language I learned very early. And that's still with me. I learned Spanish about 10 years ago just for the fun of it. And now I'm trying to do my Latin again. It was hard when I was 12, and it's hard now but very satisfying. Virgil is worth it…, but people say, "What are you doing that for?" …My great discovery of the last couple of years would be José Saramago, who got the Nobel Prize [in Literature in 1998] and [Rohinton] Mistry, the Indian author.

How has reading influenced your writing over the years?

I think the one big shift may have been in the '70s and '80s, when the second wave of feminism came along. I learned how to both read and write as a woman rather than as a sort of genderless receiver of almost entirely male literature. It sounds like a narrowing but, of course, it was a great expansion of my sort of receptivity to books. I read a whole lot of women authors whom I'd never read before, and [now I] continue often to look to see "What are the women doing?"

Back when I [first] was making this discovery, I read the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women from cover to cover. So many people in it were new to me. I was sort of ashamed of that and also delighted to discover them. A lot of them are old, you know, 19th-century writers, early 20th-century writers. Women [authors] tend to be discarded much more quickly than men. Even someone like Edith Wharton, I didn't know much about.

I know that you're opposed to limiting kids' access to information. As a parent, what advice did you offer your own children when they were selecting books?

Really, I just shoved the books at them. There were no boundaries and no censorship. I have a strong sense that kids need roughage in their reading diet. It's not going to hurt them to read the cruddier kind of children's lit. And it's not going to hurt them to try something that's way over their heads, [such as] adult books. We did a lot of reading aloud, too. Reading aloud was an evening thing. We read to the kids until they got to be 11 or 12. I think once I was reading Jane Austen to the girls and we sort of looked at each other and [they] said, "This is silly. We could do this ourselves."

What do you hope young people come away with after reading the Earthsea saga?

I see myself as a storyteller and the story, in a sense, tells itself. I am responsible for telling it right and if I'm writing for children, particularly for young children, I am certainly responsible for not hurting or frightening those kids with the story. That to me is simply wrong. For a message or inculcating values, I don't think this stuff out; I don't put it into words. The words that I work in are the words of the story. I'm not a philosopher. I'm not a moralist. If my story seems to begin preaching, I make it stop, if I notice it. I'm not a preacher either. This sounds a little irresponsible. I don't think it is. My responsibility is to my art and to the people who perceive it, the readers. That's an aesthetic responsibility and if it's aesthetically right, then it will probably also be morally right. I'm saying what Keats said. I'm saying "Truth is beauty and beauty is truth." That's a very rash statement. But it goes so deep in me that I just can't get around it.

Do you get a lot of letters from young readers?

Since I started, with great trepidation, writing for young adults, I have found them to be the most wonderful readers and responders. Oh, the letters that come—from little children also, but from teenagers—are so moving. They read so hard and with such passion. This is a wonderful bunch of people to write for.

Little kids usually write to me about Catwings [Scholastic, 1988]. They're making an immediate response and that's a joy! It's like reading to a kid and watching them be interested in what you are reading together. The ones from teens are on Earthsea and are generally more troubling because the letters often say the books got them through a hard time. Often, these are boys writing: "I just had a horrible year and A Wizard of Earthsea got me through it." It's a big mistake to dismiss books and literature. Art can get you through bad times and adolescents can have such horrible black times.