American Sci-fi / Speculative Fiction writer, Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Marilyn Powell (CBC Ideas) in Toronto in 2000.
In October of 2000, Ursula K. Le Guin sat down with CBC's Marilyn Powell to discuss her novel, The Telling. Listening to their conversation now feels like opening a time capsule – one that paradoxically contains prescient observations about how we both preserve and erase our past. Le Guin speaks of editing with razor blades, of physically cutting away words from paper – a practice that feels almost mythological in our age of ephemeral keystrokes and vanishing digital drafts. Yet within this seemingly dated discussion emerges a timeless truth: that our past exists only through the artifacts and stories we choose to keep. As she weaves between discussing myth-making and the tactile nature of writing, Le Guin reveals how community-held stories become the framework through which we understand our history. These aren't just tales, she suggests, but rather the very architecture of human memory, the scaffolding that holds our collective past in place. There's something haunting about hearing the author, now herself part of our literary past, contemplating how we maintain connections to what came before. Yet in her voice, we hear not anxiety but wonder at how each generation finds new ways to tell its stories, to make sense of where it's been.
Perhaps that's the most enduring message from this conversation across time: that while the tools we use to record and share our stories may change, the essential human need to weave meaning from memory remains constant, evolving and adapting like a living thing.
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The audio recording of Ursula Le Guin in conversation with Marilyn Powell was recorded on stage at in Toronto in October of 2000 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.
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Works by Ursula K. Le Guin:
The Telling (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Lathe of Heaven (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Left Hand of Darkness (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Word for World is Forest (ebook)
Other works about Le Guin and other materials mentioned:
Ursula Le Guin: the Last Interview and Other Conversations (print edition)
Ursula K. Le Guin and the Ambiguous Utopia (emovie)
Earthsea, 2005 (DVD)
TPL Blog piece from 2018 on Le Guin and her legacy (link here)
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, produced by the Toronto Public Library and in association with the Toronto Festival of Authors. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Ursula K. Le Guin talks about hunting cats and jazzercise, as ways to tell stories to withstand the organized forgetting that governments and other large impersonal forces try to impose on us.
Teaser: The way we hold onto the past is usually by telling stories about it, right? We don't have the past anymore. All we have about it is our stories or maybe pictures of it, which become more and more imaginary as it recedes. But that is what we have. And if we don't have it, we have no past, which is a very bad situation to be in…If you don't have an artifact from the past, that's all we have is the artifacts and the stories.
RANDY: I recently heard legendary Canadian publisher and editor Louise Denys reflect on the first time she met the British children’s writer Rosemary Sutcliff, the author of books she adored. Denys was a schoolgirl at the time, and described herself as being profoundly surprised by the gap between the actual person she met, and the person she had in her head. In turn, she felt electrified by this gap, by the expanse between person and imagination and what this meant about the writing life. I’m glad I heard this anecdote before listening to this interview with Ursula Le Guin. I know Le Guin by reputation, as easily one of the most important speculative and science fiction / fantasy writers in modern literature, and more so through her books, specifically the magnificent and sprawling, fantastical Earthsea series and, of course, through her best-known short story, the dystopian fable “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In listening to her, in conversation with Marilyn Powell, I guess I was expecting – and this is terrible, I know – but I guess I was expecting something like a wise and wizardy-sounding sage, elusive, esoteric, authoritative all at once. Instead, Le Guin is openly self-effacing, cerebral, and penetratingly particular in her claims for literature. Okay, there is at least one reference to green skin, and wonderful observations about the need and nature of mythology and likewise about the importance of reading a book generously within its genre, which makes sense, given the long time it took before the larger literary and more so academic world recognized her standing. That said, she spends much more time than you might expect, telling us about how she learned how to be human by reading classic 19th century English novels, a capacity she balances against the powerful predations of the modern state, evident in her novel The Telling and many others, the predations of the state as it creates conditions for what she calls “Organized Forgetting.” She is also plainspoken about the constancy of her commitment to writing itself, blaming in part her Germanic heritage for never stopping work, but she’s equally plainspoken about how that work happens. It involves a great deal of patience and silence and then sudden leaps into character and event, a sequence she likens to what a cat does while hunting. Elsewhere, Le Guin talks about the relationship between physical and spiritual health, invoking, perhaps predictably given the religious and spiritual textures of her work, Taoism, but also, jazzercise. Yes, Ursula Le Guin makes a case for jazzercise. That someone capable of such otherworldly creations as Le Guin was, throughout her long and storied career, was also clearly as keyed into the time and place where she was, should remind us that her work set elsewhere was always already about our here and now. That can be unsettling, especially in the darker moments in her stories, but take comfort in the lightness of Le Guin’s voice, the delight she takes in words, ideas, pictures. Listen in, and even if, given her reputation today, it’s hard to be surprised by whatever you encounter in one of her books or stories, you’ll still be surprised by the author herself, by how she comes across, off the page.
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Speaker 1: Please welcome our interviewer, writer, broadcaster and producer for CBC Radio One's Ideas, Marilyn Powell.
[applause]
Speaker 1: And from the United States of America, the author of The Telling, Ursula Le Guin.
[applause]
MP: Well, it's a great pleasure to be here and to be interviewing you. I have many of your books on my shelf, and I wanna begin by, if I may, using a term that you used on CBC Radio in an interview. You talked about dancing in air, your own craft as dancing in air, and I just wonder if you'd expand a little bit on that and explain what you meant.
Ursula Le Guin: I wonder what I was talking about. [laughter]
MP: Well, how you do what you do.
UG: I suppose that... I suppose maybe what I meant, who knows, was the fact that once you start spinning a yarn, once you start telling a story, in a sense, you are dancing on air. The story has to sort of hold itself together and fly of its own strength, and you can't keep tying it down to earth. You sort of have to let it go. So, possibly that's what I meant.
MP: What do you mean by tying it down to earth?
UG: Well, it seems to me that if you have too clear a program in your head about what your story is going to mean and what message you want to give and so on, that you are certainly going to give a message, but you're not really going to write a story, that a story is an entity with a kind of will of its own, really, even when it's one of the old stories, particularly. In fact, all stories are old stories basically, I suppose. But anyway, there comes a point when you're working on telling a story, when you really have to sort of let the story tell itself. And a story that won't tell itself probably has something wrong with it. And you have to sit back and wait and be patient until the story knows where it wants to go, or the character says what they need to say. So it's sort of a matter of not pushing the rivers, as the Buddhists say.
MP: That's a lovely, lovely image. At the risk of a personal problem, which I think I began talking to about in the Green Room, but I've got a point mentioning this. I had... At work, at CBC, I had a disaster with computers, which we now use to edit radio programs. We digitally edit. And it struck me because I had just finished your latest novel, The Telling, that we have nothing in our hands anymore. We have... Maybe we have floppy disks, but when you think, as you present it in your novel, of the richness of libraries and what it means to hold on to old text, old pages, artifacts. I don't know whether any of this was in your mind when you were writing this or not, but what have we lost? Were you talking about that?
UG: Not really. I was just talking about letting go anything important that one has. The way we hold onto the past is usually by telling stories about it, right? We don't have the past anymore. All we have about it is our stories or maybe pictures of it, which become more and more imaginary as it recedes. But that is what we have. And if we don't have it, we have no past, which is a very bad situation to be in. So what I was talking about in the book is more what Milan Kundera calls the method of organized forgetting, where the government forgets everything for you, [laughter] but I realized at a certain point that the book could be read as some sort of standing up for not only written telling, but oral telling. Because the people in the book do both. They tell stories, they write stories, they read stories… they are... But because they did not have computer technology until very recently and under a different government, they're not putting these things into the net so much as it were, which probably simply reflects my life experience. This technology is five or six years old, basically. So, it's at the very end of my life that it comes into... So it doesn't weigh as heavy for me as it does for somebody born in 1960.
MP: I'm gonna pursue this a little further though, because if one thinks about holding or seeing the manuscripts of great writers from the past, and actually seeing their handwriting, and when they scratched things out, and sometimes when they've been desperate and even made holes in the paper, all of that's gone, isn't it?
UG: Yeah. I have a friend who said, "When you press delete, where does the word go?" [laughter] I thought about where does it go? And I was thinking the way you edit now, the way you edit a tape, you know, we used to use razors and cut out little pieces of tape and then splice, and you knew where what you took out went. In fact, somebody wrote a story of cuttings from the floor. But now it's gone, and boy, is it gone. So it... Yeah, there's this quickness and fragility about this literary technology, which is kind of scary.
MP: Means our loss of the past has speeded up.
UG: Well, it could be speeded up very easily. Yeah. If you don't have an artifact from the past, that's all we have is the artifacts and the stories. And if you don't... Yeah. It is easier to delete these days.
MP: Yes. Inadvertently... [chuckle]
UG: Oh no, that's not what happened, is it... [laughter]
MP: No. Fortunately, I can say it was a technological breakdown. Honest folks...
UG: Oh, what fun. Yeah. [laughter]
MP: Is there something else involved here that if you lose the past, your memory of the past, the capacity to summon it up again, that the myths go... Depart as well, the gods leave? Certain kinds of stories go, is what I'm getting at.
MP: Yeah. After all, I don't know exactly what myths are in the modern world, but traditionally, a myth is sort of your people's memory of their past and of the direction that they've been going and should go. Maybe creation myth or religious myths or whatever. But myths are the stories that sort of tell a people who they are and where they're going and where they ought to go. And if you lose that, you've got a lot of bewildered people.
MP: Which is us now?
UG: To some extent, I think. Of course, there's lots of myths around. Well, maybe we got a few too many myths floating around.
[laughter]
MP: What were you thinking of? What kinds of myths?
UG: Well, I was talking earlier today about mythology, and what I came up with was a very bad example, but it is a true example of a myth. It's what Hitler gave to the German people as the truth about themselves, Hitler's myth of a thousand-year Reich and of who the Germans were. And that was a real bad news myth. And it didn't last very long. It lasted surprisingly a short time, actually. But when you get told lies about yourself that you want to believe, then you're in trouble. The word myth has definitely got two edges, one good and one very dangerous.
MP: Yes. So, certain kinds of tellings can be very dangerous too. Communal myths we're talking about.
UG: I think that's what myth is. I think myth is a communal story. A private myth really is just... I don't know quite what that would mean. I guess you could make up a myth of your own life, sort of, the myth of the hero or whatever.
MP: That was a communal myth though, too. I thought you were referring to Joseph Campbell, that was definitely...
UG: Yeah. No, but I mean, there's some people who are definitely the heroes of their own myth, you know. [laughter]
MP: Would you... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt the laugh. You're very funny. It's a delight to talk to you. Would you say what you do is create new old myths?
UG: No, I just tell stories.
MP: That's modesty, I think. But you use a lot of stories that are mythical in their echoes of reverberation.
UG: I think our literature and our films and our plays, all ours arts, but keeping on the word "arts," this may be what we have replaced mythology with. I mean, I know that I learned... A lot of how I learned how to be human was by reading novels. Largely 19th century novels at that, which probably weren't the best training for being a 20th century human, certainly not a 21st century one. I wasn't thinking about that. I was just trying to be an honest woman. The great novels and the poets tell you how, they show you how it's done. Kind of. And if that's a mythology, it's very different from what anybody else has had. But it's certainly an interesting one.
MP: What I was thinking is that's what we say, they tell us how it's done. But what do they tell us? How do they tell us how it's done?
UG: Well, every novelist tells it differently. Jane Austen tells it one way and Virginia Woolf tells it a really different way. And yet, they are all talking about what it is to be human and what human relations are. And then there's always, always in the novel an implication of what they might be or possibly ought to be.
MP: Maybe, would you say they deepened our understanding of human psychology, so we can pick and choose our own path?
UG: Exactly. I think one thing that fiction particularly offers the reader is options. If you read a novel, you're trying on somebody else's skin, and it may be a really... It can be green, if you read Science Fiction... [laughter] Oh, you can have big ears, you know? [chuckle] But, and... I think... And fiction to me is much more important on this level than film, because I think the reader has to work much harder to make the book than the viewer does to make the film. Basically, as a viewer, I know I'm pretty passive. I just watch and it happens and I'm lost in it. But a reader's working pretty hard. A reader has to use their imagination or somebody listening to the radio, to a story on the radio.
MP: When The Left Hand of Darkness was adapted for television, did it change substantially?
UG: It was The Lathe of Heaven that...
MP: Oh, I'm sorry.
UG: Was made into a film. Well, yeah, because a film is so enormously different from a novel.
MP: Was it a shock to you?
UG: Well, no, because I was in on the process from beginning to end. And we stuck to the plot. But it was very interesting to see that something which had been all words, how do you make it be something which is basically all images? It's just fascinating. It's a wonderful... It's a magical transformation. Very difficult.
MP: Did it change emphases?
UG: Not much. You have to simplify. You can't say as much in most films as you can in most novels. Words can just... They can go so many different ways at once, and images basically can't. Unless you're Kurosawa.
[laughter]
MP: You've said that you are very influenced by Taoist philosophy in your life and in your work. You wanna talk about that a little bit?
UG: It's so hard to talk about.
MP: Yes.
UG: Taoism is the philosophy you can't talk about, [laughter] which is kind of convenient.
MP: They tell stories. They told stories, right? The Taoists told stories.
UG: Yeah. There's lots... Yes, Zhuang Zhou, of course, really his book is just a series of stories, parables and so on. And because Taoism is not a belief you arrive at, but it's just a way to go, it's very hard to say anything about it. And that is of its essence. Unfortunately, it eludes the way I'm eluding.
[laughter]
MP: Yes. Now the question is, should I pursue you on this?
[laughter]
UG: Well, it does show up in my books all the time. I think both in the fact that my books do tend not to really arrive at any fixed point, and in a... There's obvious value in all my books, for balance. And a belief that if something goes very far one way, it is just by nature going to have to go back the other way, which creates a... Not a static balance, but the live balance of somebody walking where your weight's always between your two feet. But if you stop on one foot, you fall over.
[laughter]
MP: In the new book, you have yoga, you have people doing yoga.
UG: It's more like Tai chi. Well, it's Tai Chi yoga... Everybody does exercises, I think.
MP: But these are spiritual exercises. These are not just physical exercises. That's clearly important...
UG: Aren't good exercises always? Don't they have a spiritual dimension?
MP: I don't think so. Aerobics, I find... That's hard for me to think of them spiritually, but these are...
UG: Aerobics, you are moving too hard and fast to get spiritual, I guess.
MP: Yes. [laughter]
UG: If you could slow them down.
[laughter]
MP: Change the music too.
UG: Yeah, I have a friend who does that Jazz dancing, Jazzercize. Wow, can she move. But I don't think she has much time to think spiritual thoughts, but she's in great shape.
[laughter]
MP: And therein lies the entire goal of aerobics, right? I've done it too, so I know. Does it help you with writing, the writing process? I know writers always are frightened of writers block, and I just wonder if that in any way plays into, assists, opens doors or ducts or whatever it is that you need to open in your mind.
UG: As I get older, I've found both simple meditation, just sitting. That kind of meditation where you sit. And that's all there is to it. It's incredibly difficult. And Tai Chi. Yeah, they sort of bring... If you are distressed, stuff's on your mind, your mind is full of stuff, you know, these are old tried sound techniques for just clearing the passages. Sort of like an inhaler if you have a cold. And they work. They work. You can quiet yourself down, because writing does come for me, from a still pool. I have to be able to have some silence around me. I don't mean literally. I used to be able to write in my college dormitory with people making out on the sofa. [laughter] But again, as you get older, your energy's less, you need a little more protection maybe, and you need more... To put the world away a little farther. And that's what such techniques do. And I think a lot of writers do use some kind of... It may not be a formal meditation technique, but some way of collecting themselves.
MP: Is it daily practice, if you don't mind my asking, that you do this?
UG: I'm not that methodical. Nothing is daily with me except feeding the cat. [laughter] And that's 'cause the cat is right there clawing my leg.
MP: I think most people in the audience will identify with that as well. [laughter] It's the animals that keep us sane.
UG: Yes. By clawing our leg. Yes. [laughter]
MP: You've been doing this, you've been writing for a long time.
UG: Oh, forever. Yeah.
MP: Since you were nine?
UG: Five.
MP: May be... [laughter] What were you writing at five?
UG: Poetry. [chuckle]
MP: Wow. I just wonder what keeps you going? There clearly is some tremendous optimism in you to get up and to write another novel, another short story, another poem.
UG: It's more primitive than that. I like it. [laughter] I like doing it. It's what I like to do best. I would rather be writing a story than doing anything else.
MP: No anxiety in the writing?
UG: Not if the story is going.
MP: And if the story isn't going?
UG: You talked about writer's block, which is an interesting thing because I, I am... They're kind of two kinds of writer, and one of them is... Talks about writer's block and the other kind doesn't. [laughter] Because to me, a block... I have to... Of course I've been blocked and I've been miserable because as I say, I'm happiest when I'm writing and I'm, I get cross when I'm not. And my husband would much prefer that I were…writing. [laughter]
UG: And I get sort of twitchy, and so on. But sometimes if I can't write, I have to sort of back off and look at myself and say, "Okay, you're not ready. It isn't ready to be written yet." Writing is largely patience after all. All arts consist largely of patience and then of leaping when the moment comes, it's cats again. It's like a hunting cat who will wait for an hour without moving, and then boom. But it's the readiness, readiness is all, and I think it comes back to pushing the river again if you think you ought to be writing all the time. And I really do sort of think that I'm... I have this Germanic work ethic... I ought to be working. If I'm not doing it, I have to remind myself that it probably means that whatever it is I have to write isn't ready to be written yet, but it will be. So, it's not optimism, but it is an act of faith or trust. You just have to trust that when the story is ready, it will come to you and you will be able and ready...
MP: How does it...
UG: To accept it.
MP: How does it start for you? Is it an image? Is it something in the news that you see or you hear or how does it start?
UG: In any and all ways. Every story starts differently.
MP: Can you give an example?
UG: Well, The Left Hand of Darkness started as a sort of vision of two people pulling a sledge across the snow. And I recognized easily enough that that came from having read Captain Scott and Shackleton and those people for years. But these were, different people. I knew that, and I wondered who they were. So my job was to find out who these characters in the snow were. And that got tangled up with a lot of other ideas. A novel accretes itself, I think, often for quite a long time, semi-consciously, the images begin tangling and tying together and lumping and clumping. Until you have this... You suddenly realize you've got this thing weighing in your head that that is the center of a big story. But you may not know what the plot is yet. You may or may not have some characters, You know, it's always different.
MP: I remember talking to E. L. Doctorow about Ragtime, and he said he began by starting, he had a block. He was one of the writers who have a block, and he began to write about the house that he was living then in New York, on the edges of New York. And as he wrote his way through what he was looking at, he knew where he was, and he hit the beginnings of Ragtime. And then he said there was this old car coming up at the door in his imagination. So I understand very well what you say when you, the image, that lovely image of the people pulling the sled. Is there anything that comes in your imagination as you're about to write or you're writing that frightens you and you back off from?
UG: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
MP: Like, I am pumped. [laughter]
UG: Well I wrote a book called, The Word for World is Forest, in which one of the voices telling the story. And the first, the first voice that speaks in the story is a man whom I detest and who represented … it was written during the Vietnam War. And it was very much a protest book. And in a sense, this guy was speaking for the other side from the one I was on, and I had to speak in his voice. And it was very disagreeable and chastening for me to realize that he was me. That after, all I was writing him, he was alive in my imagination. He came to me and talked through me. He is me. So I had to be Don Davidson, and I didn't like it at all. And it frightened me. And when I write violence and other women writers, I've never heard this from a man, but I'm sure some of them feel the same. Sometimes you have to write a violent scene. I don't go much for violence, but, things happen and, it's... It is frightening. You realize the potentiality for violence in yourself here. You're writing this all out and you're living it, you know, and it's not quite as if you were beating somebody up, but you're playing at it.
MP: And you'll follow it, of course, because of your own integrity as a writer. Are you surprised where these things lead?
UG: Oh, yeah. Well, it's always a surprise where stories lead. Sometimes nice surprise, sometimes not nice surprise. [laughter]
MP: I'm gonna say again, like. [laughter]
UG: Well, nothing really comes to mind at the moment, but I can't think of a good example.
MP: It's going into a very special place. As you said, it's a pool. These things come up from below. I don't know if we have the terms for what this activity of writing is. I mean is it subconscious? Is it unconscious? I mean, do you ever think or do you not think deliberately, so you can just go on doing it? I think I answered my own question. [laughter]
MP: Let me put that simply. Where do you think the images come from?
UG: From experience, obviously they have to. That's all we have. And with a writer who is writing directly describing her own experience, of course, that they simply get processed more intellectually and artistically, but a novelist who is not writing their own life experience, you have to... All this stuff has to get Gary Snyder's word is "composted." [chuckle] You take it all in and you compost it and it vanishes, and it turns into this dark stuff, and then all of a sudden here's a seedling sprouting up. And it is not anything you recognize from all those melons and cucumbers and roses and things. You know, What's this? It's a new story, but it's growing outta that compost.
MP: You know, you make it sound like fun, right, [laughter]?
UG: Well, it is.
MP: Discover whether you have a flower or a weed.
UG: Sometimes raking through the compost for a story is not such fun. [laughter] You know, there's nothing but sort of melon rinds, you know? [laughter] Oh, I mean, there definitely are low points to this whole profession. [laughter]
MP: I don't know whether you would agree with this, but let me try it out. It seems to me that particularly in the new novel, The Telling, that there's a kind of, I'll try this word and then you can see what you think about it. Reserve in the description of personal or private things about the characters. They interact in an intense way, but we don't really know a lot about their past. We know some things, and I just felt that you wanted us to see them through God.
UG: That's very interesting. You... You're right. The book is told entirely from one point of view, Sutty. And Sutty is a deeply damaged and reserved person. And she's not the person that I thought was going to tell the story. I tried... I started this novel several times. It was a real bear. It was a very difficult book to write. It was known as the horrible story in the household. [laughter], I'm going back to the horrible story. No, I think that's... [laughter] This one was not a lot of fun. And part of the trouble getting it started was I knew all too clearly what I wanted to write about this sort of general subject of this, the organized forgetting of a couple of different kinds. But, okay, whose story was it? And I thought I knew who the main character was, and I would start writing. And she was... She's just sort of a brash perky young thing.
UG: And she was... She wouldn't write, the story wouldn't go. It just... So I would have to sit back and practice patience, put it away and say, "Okay, whose story is this?" And make another false start. And then finally, when I really was kind of in despair about it, here's this little person in my head saying, "I'm Sutty and I was born in India and this is my story and you have to listen to me." And I did, but she would only tell me what she told me. And there is... There... It's because of Sutty's character, not mine. I think that there is a sort of a certain distancing in the book, which I think some readers might feel as a coldness. Sutty is intensely self-protective because she's been so badly hurt.
MP: I didn't feel it as a coldness. I, I felt what a relief after a... Living in a culture which is so saturated by personal revelations. Every time you turn around in any of the media, we have a complete digest of someone's life. Many of the parts we don't want to know. There was something really very nice about the reserve of your character, of withholding her secrets, of telling only what she wanted to tell.
UG: Well, and not being able really to tell herself, in a sense is her problem.
MP: Because of her being damaged.
UG: Only at the end is she able to tell herself, as well as the person she's talking to, her story.
MP: And we won't tell the end of the novel for those people who haven't read it. [chuckle]
UG: But it does end with two people telling each other their story and both of them able for the first time, obviously to do so.
MP: And both damaged.
UG: Both. Yeah. From damaged people from damaged worlds. Yeah. So my optimism is somewhat superficial, actually. [laughter] As an optimist I'm kind of a bust. But... [laughter]
MP: With that sense of humor, I don't think so. But you would say that this is just this novel and you might launch it...
UG: I think so.
MP: To another one where you are buoyantly optimistic … your characters.
UG: Or more outgoing. Yeah. It may also, you know, it may be an effect of age. I think as people age, they get it... There's a slight remove. The passions are more contained.
MP: Which was my next question. [chuckle]
UG: Or controlled. I don't know. But that might have something to do with it.
MP: What comes with it? That's good? That...
UG: All right. Okay. I don't have to talk about the bad stuff about getting old [chuckle] 'cause we don't wanna talk about that. Oh, well, the good stuff about getting old is that as you've made it that far. [laughter]
UG: And you do, you're carrying an awful lot of luggage by the time you're 70, but, and you've dropped an awful lot of it too. Boy, have I lost a lot of luggage. But it tends to be interesting luggage and it does give you a sense that you may be you know a little bit about the way the next step or two along the way, which is probably an illusion. And I think you often, if you haven't totally lost patience with everybody, you tend to be more patient with people. It's kind of one or the other. You know, either you're gonna snarl at everybody from now on or you've kinda, "Okay. You know? Yeah. You know, been there, done that." [chuckle]
MP: You know, that you've used several terms about your own writing and I just wonder if they still apply or whether at 70 you get impatient with literary terms, which are just that after all literary terms, speculative fiction, magical realism, utopian writing. Are any of those or do you use those still?
UG: They're all useful terms if they're used descriptively and not judgmentally, but as soon as, you know, if you mention any genre to, with the meaning that it is less worth reading than some other genre. Then I reject that use of the term, but to use a genre like Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Western, Realism, whatever, to use it as defining a certain type of literature and a certain way of reading, that's absolutely valid. You know, you couldn't teach English Lit without it.
MP: You say a way of reading, You mean that if we, if you know, you're reading this kind of fiction, you read it differently?
UG: Yeah.
MP: That's really interesting.
UG: Yeah well sure. I think one reason that a lot of English professors have trouble reading Science Fiction is that they don't know how. They know how to read realism, which is the only thing they've ever taught and read. And they haven't branched out. I don't... I think most English profs don't know how to read a Western. A lot of them know how to read mysteries. That's very cerebral. But, yeah, any genre has its own vocabulary and certain trophies and movements and you need some experience in reading it. Like any great writer.
MP: And coming to your writing, what do you need?
UG: Oh gosh. [laughter]
MP: Big question. I know.
UG: Well, you need not to want a lot of plot. [laughter] Because I never could do plot. Plot is mysterious and awesome to me and I can't do it.
MP: You are very honest. You could have said it's deliberate. The lack of plot, right? [laughter],
UG: I guess I don't wanna do it. I love story, but story to me is something totally... Plot is just a complicated form of story. Usually kind of symmetrical and, almost geometrical. But I think plot can ruin a story. I think some of Thomas Hardy's novels, the plot takes the story over and wrecks it. It becomes predictable and kind of mechanical. And this is true with... This is where I don't enjoy mysteries, is when they depend entirely on the plot. So, you know, if you like a lot of scenery, you're probably gonna like me [laughter] and my people maybe.
MP: And language.
UG: And language. Yeah. 'Cause I know how to do language.
MP: You sure do. I can remember reading Always Coming Home and being fascinated by the, extent to which you had imagined a world, the way people speak. Not just the way they speak, but the things that would've existed in this world. And with the help of a composer, the music, the singing they would've done. It's quite extraordinary. What's left, what worlds are left to imagine? Doesn't that take an optimist to imagine more worlds?
UG: Oh, no. I mean, look at the pictures from Hubble. There's an awful lot of world out there. I mean, [laughter] So what if 99% of them are uninhabited? That leaves... As Carl Sagan, You say billions and billions. [laughter] of worlds. I mean, literally, literally there are endless worlds. And of course, in the imagination why, what's to, what boundary is there?
MP: When you look out on the real world, many of the things that you talk about and write about are just reality now. I've, that's hard for me to see optimistically actually, not because of your writing, but because some of the things that you've dealt with are troubling, disturbing that we find our worlds resembling what you were imagining.
UG: I wasn't really imagining, my kind of Science Fiction, and I think most Science Fiction is not about the future at all. We use the future as a metaphor for now. It's just a way of simplifying issues, clarifying and embodying, and getting away from the tendentiousness and the ignorance that are always going to accompany your writing if you're writing about what's going on right now. You can't help, you can't help your writing mean totally opinionated and probably kind of ignorant because who's to know what's really going on right now? But if you take the big issues and you put them a little bit in the future, and then they may be political issues, religious issues, personal issues, moral issues, anything. You have this wonderful richness of metaphor in Science Fiction and in Fantasy too, in a slightly different way to talk about things that are forever important.
MP: Which is what good storytelling is.
UG: Absolutely. I think that's its job.
MP: Regretfully, we have to close the conversation. I just wanna say for everyone, I hope you will go on beguiling and challenging and teasing us with remarkable fiction for a long time to come. And it's been a great pleasure to talk to you. Ursula Le Guin, thank you.
MP: Thank you.
[applause]
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RANDY: Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Beverly, California, in 1929. She studied French at Radcliffe College and Medieval and Renaissance romance at Columbia before going to Paris, on a Fulbright, where she met her husband, Charles A. Le Guin, in 1953. They settled in Portland, Oregon, in the late 1950s, and she began publishing novels by the mid-1960s, with the first volume of the Earthsea series appearing in 1968. She received the National Book Award for Children’s Literature in 1973, the same year that she published her best-known short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” She was named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress in the year 2000, by which point she had published some twenty novels, hundreds of short stories, and several works of non-fiction, and was both beloved by ordinary readers and admired and studied by fellow writers and academics. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She died in 2018, at the age of 88, in Portland.
The audio recording of Ursula K. Le Guin in conversation with Marilyn Powell was recorded on stage at in Toronto in October of 2000 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives is produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, graphic design by Amy Haakmat and research support from Greg Ellis.
For more about Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. You can also listen to all 26 episodes of season one as well interviews and readings by Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Kramer, Lee Maracle and many, many more. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives.