{"id":1434,"date":"2015-06-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/the-storys-where-i-goan-interview-with-ursula-k-le-guin\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:20:56","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:20:56","slug":"the-storys-where-i-go-an-interview-with-ursula-k-le-guin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/the-storys-where-i-go-an-interview-with-ursula-k-le-guin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story\u2019s Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin"},"content":{"rendered":"

When did Ursula Le Guin last cross your radar screen? It could have been her memorable broadside at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony, against Amazon and \u201ccommodity profiteers\u201d who \u201csell us like deodorant.\u201d My favorite line: \u201cWe live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

If you have memories of Le Guin from before that day, they probably include Tenar in the tombs of Atuan and Ged, a goatherd-turned-wizard. Do you also recall a little boat called Lookfar<\/i>, the wizards\u2019 school on Roke, and dragons who can\u2019t lie because they speak only the True Speech? Join the club, comrade: you\u2019re remembering Earthsea, realest land that never was.<\/p>\n

Over six decades, the 85-year-old writer has won a Newberry, five Nebulas, five Hugos, and a raft of other awards for adult and children\u2019s science fiction, fantasy, poetry, and essays. It was between 1968 and 1974, though, that Le Guin vaulted into the hearts of kids everywhere by publishing her first trilogy of Earthsea <\/i>books: A Wizard of Earthsea<\/i> (1968), The Tombs of Atuan<\/i> (1970), and The Farthest Shore<\/i> (1972). A second, equally compelling trilogy followed many years later: Tehanu<\/i> (1990), Tales from Earthsea <\/i>(2001), and The Other Wind <\/i>(2001). It was also between 1968 and 1974\u2014the Nixon administration had to be good for something\u2014that Le Guin turned out a further three science-fiction masterpieces, in three distinct molds. The Left Hand of Darkness<\/i> (1969) is a chilly quest in a world where gender is intermittent and mutable; The Dispossessed<\/i> (1974), a thoughtful anarchist utopia\/dystopia; and The Lathe of Heaven<\/i> (1971) centers on a reluctant dreamer whose dreams can change the world, for better or worse.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This March I climbed toward Portland\u2019s West Hills to interview Le Guin. It was one of those days that begins foggy and rainy, then turns unexpectedly sunny by mid-morning. I crossed a bridge over one of those mossy green gorges no doubt designed to remind us outsiders about Portland\u2019s effortless superiority to, say, frozen gray Boston. Built along a steep hillside, virtually all the houses in Le Guin\u2019s knobby neighborhood look back down across the flats to the gleaming Willamette River. It\u2019s the sort of place where you see an American flag with the 50 stars replaced by a giant peace sign, and a local carpenter\u2019s hand-lettered placard reads: \u201cBy hammer and hand all things do stand.\u201d Her house and the crescent-shaped porch out back radiate permanence and comfort. Inside: Morris chairs and light-drenched rooms, blood-red Bukhara rugs, a cat who played intermittently with a ping-pong ball.<\/p>\n

Over the course of a morning, our conversation ranged widely. Le Guin proposed that fantasy\u2019s power to free the reader\u2019s imagination paradoxically increases when its descriptions are most painstakingly exact; she described her friendship with science fiction great Philip K. Dick and how differently the two of them felt about the I Ching<\/i>. She was eloquent on what she likes and what she distrusts in modern fiction, and she offered a fascinating way to think about the inescapable barrier between the actual and the fantasy realm. She also spoke movingly about what her work owes to anthropology, to science, and to her socialist and anarchist ideals. Le Guin once ended a speech by asking, \u201cNow that we\u2019re free, where are we going?\u201d That\u2019s a question she knows each of her readers will have to answer alone. Still, I left feeling she had laid down a few cairns for us, the hint of a trail to trace.<\/p>\n

\n

I | Names Come First with Me: Fantasy\u2019s Exactitude & the Power of Maps<\/b><\/p>\n

John Plotz (JP):<\/b> When a writer creates an imaginary world, are readers traveling into the writer\u2019s imagination? Or is it more that the book activates the reader\u2019s own imagination?<\/p>\n

Ursula Le Guin (UL):<\/b> Both things happen, particularly with kids, which is why I think it\u2019s important that kids get imaginative literature. As a writer I feel I\u2019m taking the reader with me into this world that I see and discover, but of course I discovered that the readers make that world their own, and it\u2019s sometimes quite, quite different from what I imagine. This comes out very clearly when I work with illustrators, and try to say, \u201cNo, no, that\u2019s not what a dragon looks like!\u201d You know, not my<\/i> dragon. There always has to be a compromise.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> So the imaginary is a very definite place to you, with its own set of rules.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> I\u2019m very strong on accuracy and exactitude. You can\u2019t describe everything\u2014that would be very boring. With an invented world, though, you have to describe more than a realist does. Of course, you have to leave out an enormous amount, too, and the leaving-out is half the art. There the reader is free to supply whatever they want to supply, to fill in all those white spaces that you leave.<\/p>\n

I think sometimes in science fiction, more than in fantasy, the author wants you to see it just exactly the way the author sees it. Some people like to be coerced when they read, but I\u2019d rather be given latitude. Tolkien is really such a master there. You know where you are, you know what the weather is, from what direction the wind\u2019s blowing. He tells you what he can about it\u2014but the rest of it\u2019s up to you.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> I was reading a funny Tolkien letter recently. He was worried that the moon phases were working differently for characters in different parts of Middle-earth: Bilbo had a full moon the same night that Aragorn saw a crescent.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> That would be very distressing to me, too. Jane Austen apparently mapped out the rooms, and the Bront\u00ebs always wanted to know distances. My kind of novelist thinks that way.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> There\u2019s a map at the front of the Earthsea books: you can find the Dragon\u2019s Run near Selidor, and Atuan far off in the East. Did that map come to you before you wrote the books themselves?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> I wrote a couple of short stories that took place on islands that had wizards. Then I was asked by a publisher to write\u2014we didn\u2019t even have the word \u201cyoung adult\u201d then\u2014to write a fantasy for older children. I thought, \u201cOh no, I can\u2019t do that. I\u2019ve never written for children. I don\u2019t know how to do that.\u201d Still, I went home and thought about it; how does a wizard become a wizard? He goes to wizard school? Wouldn\u2019t that be fun? So there I went, and then I thought, \u201cOK, where? Oh, it\u2019s those islands where those other stories are.\u201d But I needed to know more about them. So I did literally sit down and draw a big map with lots of islands<\/a>, about which I knew nothing at that point. I named them, happily. For the rest of the six books I could just travel around and find out what they were like.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> I have such strong associations with the island\u2019s names: Roke, where the wizards\u2019 school is; Havnor, at the heart of the kingdom; Gont; Vemish \u2026 I could go on! Were all the names there to begin with?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Names come first with me. I can\u2019t write about a character if he or she doesn\u2019t have a name. The right name. So I had to name all of the islands right away. Isn\u2019t that weird? I have no understanding what the process there is.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

II | Blundering Toward a Transition: SF vs. Fantasy, Gender vs. Sex <\/b><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> I think you once said, more or less, that fantasy is the inward life, and science fiction the outward life.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> That\u2019s kind of crude, a bit judgmental, maybe, but I know what I meant. Fantasy tends to arise from somewhat unexplored sources within. Science fiction depends on what Chip [the science fiction writer Samuel R.] Delany called \u201cwhat is known to be known.\u201d Meaning science, technology, various kinds of knowledge. It uses those imaginatively. So in that sense it is more outward.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> And has it always been clear to you which category your books fall into?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Oh no. When I started it was all mushed up together! My first three novels are kind of science fantasy. Rocannon\u2019s World<\/i> (1966) is full of Norse myth barely disguised. But I began to realize there was a real difference between these two ways of using the imagination. So I wrote Earthsea<\/i> and Left Hand of Darkness<\/i>. From then on I was following two paths.<\/p>\n

In Left Hand of Darkness<\/i> I was using science fiction to come at a problem that I realized was very deep in me and everybody else: what is gender? What gender am I? A question we just hadn\u2019t been asking. Look at all the answers that are coming out now. We have really deconstructed it. We really didn\u2019t even have the word \u201cgender\u201d back then. Just, \u201cWhat sex are you?\u201d So in some respects we really have come a long way, and in a good direction, I think.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> You described feminism then as waking up from a very long nap. I guess it\u2019s really woken up now.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Yeah, and there are a lot of people trying to put us back to sleep.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> I think you once wrote that while writing Left Hand of Darkness<\/i> you would forget what gender your characters were.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Well, I was trying to get inside the Gethenian body and viewpoint, in which gender happens once a month and is an event, and then they just go back to being human.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Do you think that\u2019s true now, that gender is something that only intermittently matters?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> No, gender still is the first thing people want to know about the baby.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> In writing the later Earthsea books, did you feel that you needed to tell the story of gender in Earthsea in a different way from the earlier trilogy?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> I had been writing like a man. I was writing adventure fantasy in a grand old tradition, and it was all about men and what men did. I just needed to write like a woman, write as<\/i> a woman. I was learning how to write as a woman in Tehanu<\/i>, and it was very important to me to do so, to me personally, and for moral justice. I had been unjust to women in the books.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> And do you include Tombs of Atuan<\/i> in that? As a kid, as a boy reader, I remember thinking that Tenar, the girl priestess, was a new kind of character for me.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Her appearance of having power and being actually totally powerless is a paradigm of a woman\u2019s position. But I was still operating there in a man\u2019s world, and some of my feminist friends were cross. They say, well, Ged comes and gets her out. And I said, \u201cNo! He can\u2019t get out without her and she can\u2019t get out without him.\u201d And I do think that\u2019s true. So I was beginning to blunder towards a transition. But the next book is totally male.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

III | A Rule of the Imagination: Moving the Boundary with Elfland<\/b><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Is The Beginning Place<\/i> [a 1980 novel about two teenagers who cross back and forth between reality and a fantasy world] meant to be set in Portland?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> No. Actually, I had more like a middle-sized Midwestern city in mind. Cincinnati, possibly, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> That book seems to have a lot of real-world problems in it: drugs, urban infrastructure. Very 1970s, American cities in trouble. I\u2019m not saying that it sounds like a John Updike novel, but \u2026<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Since then there\u2019s this whole genre of urban fantasy, as they call it, which has gone all sorts of different directions. One of the first ones I read was Megan Lindholm\u2019s Wizard of the Pigeons<\/i>. It\u2019s a Seattle novel, a terrific urban fantasy, with street people. As I recall, the wizard is a guy who was damaged in Vietnam and is living on the street, as so many people were and still are.<\/p>\n

In Beginning Place<\/i> I was kind of trying to see if you could move the boundary between the real world and Elfland, as it were. And I couldn\u2019t. They could go down to the Beginning Place by the little stream, and go through, but the doorway is always there.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> You once said, \u201cWe have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time.\u201d But you\u2019re saying that the two have to be unmistakably separated? Like an atomic rule?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Yeah, it\u2019s a rule of the imagination. I think you could possibly say, \u201cIf you break the rule, if you transgress, you are playing with insanity.\u201d You are allowing the unreal into the real in a dangerous way.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Lathe of Heaven<\/i> is a dangerous book in that way, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Oh yeah, there\u2019s dreams coming true. I\u2019m totally with George, the protagonist of the novel, who fears his reality-altering dreams. I don\u2019t want it to happen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

IV | Madness Is a Kind of Irresponsibility: Philip K. Dick<\/b><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Were you thinking about Philip K. Dick while writing Lathe of Heaven<\/i>?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Oh yeah. It\u2019s sort of an homage to him.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Was it something you shared with him and discussed with him?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> We wrote letters back and forth some. We never met. I was rather scared of Phil. He was very heavily into drugs, and drugs do scare me. I had three kids at home, and was not enthusiastic about having a real\u2014not a pothead but a heavy drug user around. Phil went off the rails periodically, and so I was not really looking to meet him. But we did correspond, very friendly, for some while. We seemed to respect each other\u2019s writing, were interested in what each other was trying to do.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> I read you had gone to high school together. That\u2019s not true?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> That is so weird. Yes, we were complete contemporaries at Berkeley High School, but he\u2019s not in the yearbook. His name is in the yearbook, but there is no photograph. I think Phil dropped out before graduation.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know many people anymore that were at Berkeley High with me. When there were more of us alive we tried to find out anything about him. Nobody remembers him. Not one person in this group remembered him physically. He worked at a store where I bought records when I had the money, so I might have met him there. But what he looked like then, as a teenager? [Shrugs.<\/i>] He is absolutely the invisible man at Berkeley High.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> He clearly thought about you a lot.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Yeah, apparently I shook him about women particularly. He realized his women were kind of odd creatures.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> He also invokes you when he\u2019s worried about his mental health.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> I didn\u2019t know that he ever admitted that.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> He thought of you as a person who worried that he might be mentally ill.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Well, he wrote to me while he was having his visions and so on. Once he wrote to me very touchingly, because he was so happy. Was it a phone call? We did talk on the phone sometimes. He had been conversing with St. Paul in Greek, although he didn\u2019t know Greek, and he was just so happy about all this information he was getting from St. Paul. I think I just played along with it, but I suppose a certain amount of withdrawal or horror or something on my mind he might have felt. Because, yeah, I am afraid of madness. It\u2019s scary.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> I think that\u2019s something that comes through in Lathe of Heaven <\/i>\u2026 On the one hand, there\u2019s this immense power, imagination\u2019s power to reshape the world. But on the other hand, who wants<\/i>
\nthat? That\u2019s terrifying.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Right. And the thing is, with power comes responsibility, in my world. Just, they\u2019ve got to go together, and once you separate them bad things are going to happen. And that\u2019s the trouble: to me, madness is a kind of irresponsibility. It may not be desired or wanted at all, but all the same. A mad person is irresponsible, and is usually treated as such. So if he\u2019s got power, well, look at Stalin.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

V | Make the Work Good Enough: Politics, The Dispossessed<\/i>, & the Scholars<\/b><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> The Dispossessed<\/i> works through its political ideas very openly.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> It\u2019s my political book: anarchy, socialist anarchy, pacifist anarchism. The ideal is people can work freely together, can choose to work together. That\u2019s the anarchist ideal, such a lovely ideal. I know William Morris had it. Make the work good enough and people will want to do it and do it together.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Were you tempted to write other books like that?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> That book took a long time to prepare for and get ready to write, and it was hard to write. I asked help on it from Darko Suvin [leading theorist and critic of science fiction as a genre, and first editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies<\/i>]. It is very rare for me to ask for any help. We were in moderately close epistolary touch at that point. And I rather nervously sent it to him, because \u2026 Darko can be very drastic.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> I was going to ask about him.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Darko has a very, very warm heart and a very good mind. And he\u2019s a Marxist, and an anarchist needs a Marxist to remind them of certain truths. And vice versa. So Darko read the book in manuscript, and he said two things I remember. He said, \u201cYou\u2019ve given it a closed ending. You can\u2019t do that, you can\u2019t close your circle. You\u2019re an anarchist!\u201d And he said, \u201cIt has 12 chapters. It has to have 13.\u201d<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> When I read Suvin or Fredric Jameson praising your science fiction, especially The Dispossessed<\/i>, I feel them mobilizing you for a political cause.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> I would agree that I felt that a little and pulled away. And Darko would love to turn me into a Marxist, but there\u2019s no hope, and he knows it.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Why is there no hope?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Marxist? I\u2019m a socialist, maybe, but \u2026 no, Marxism was tried and failed rather grandly, decisively.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> State power, is that what failed?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> The Soviet Union was a major experiment, and it went wrong from the start.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> What did you hope The Dispossessed<\/i> would do<\/i>: change minds? Make anarchists?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> It\u2019s pretty much a thought experiment. \u201cWhat if we did it this way?\u201d What if we tried anarchism, and what if there was a place it could be tried? Which is not going to be on Earth because there\u2019s always a neighboring state.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> There\u2019d be someone you\u2019d need to dispossess?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Or someone would come and invade you. They did try anarchism in Spain: kind of misguidedly, perhaps.<\/p>\n

Otherwise, I don\u2019t think any of my other books are particularly political, because the next big book I wrote after Dispossessed\u00a0<\/i>is probably Always Coming Home<\/i>. It\u2019s a utopia of sorts too, but not a political one. It\u2019s a social one.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Do you see The Left Hand of Darkness<\/i> as a political book, because of what it does with gender?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Yeah, well, you know, that was the old feminist slogan: the personal is the political. But only in that sense. The people [who are androgynous 27 days of the month, and then briefly assume either male or female characteristics before returning to androgyny] are physiologically enormously different from us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VI | Story vs. Plot, the Perils of the Present Tense, & Fantasy\u2019s Pitfalls<\/b><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> You once wrote, \u201cActually I\u2019m terrible at plotting, so all I do is sort of put people in motion and they go around in circles and they generally end up where they started out. That\u2019s a Le Guin plot. I admire real plotting, but I seem not able to achieve it.\u201d<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> To me, the thing is the story. Story just starts here and goes there. The story is something that moves. Or maybe it starts here and ends up here. It has a shape, a trajectory.<\/p>\n

And a plot is, to me, basically sort of complicating the trajectory. It\u2019s complications and additions and backtracks and all that. It is wonderful. You know, a good Dickens plot: We\u2019re reading Bleak House<\/i> aloud, and watching him get that enormous plot into motion, wow! You know, I\u2019m awed. But I can\u2019t do that. And all the same, it really isn\u2019t the plot of Bleak House<\/i>, it\u2019s the story that is important to me. So OK, I\u2019m not a plotter, and I cannot even follow a really complex plot, like some mysteries. I just get lost\u2014who cares? But the story\u2019s where I go. So I just accept that. And people who want to read for plot are not going to read me.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Not only does Bleak House<\/i> have all of that plotting and backtracking, but it\u2019s also narrated half by an omniscient storyteller and half by the heroine, Esther.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> He\u2019s taking a real risk in doing that. Reading it aloud is very interesting, shifting those voices. Every now and then you can hear Dickens coming through Esther. But the other voice, the one that\u2019s always in the present tense\u2014probably the first three times I read the book, I didn\u2019t even notice that.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s very unusual in 19th-century writing. But it\u2019s become such a habit now. I\u2019m sick of books in the present tense, which is a very restrictive tense. It\u2019s not as flexible as the past tense.<\/p>\n

Writing in the past tense you have total freedom to move forward and back. I\u2019ve thought about this a lot. Trying to think why the present tense, which never bothered me until it became a sort of habit of the modern novel, why it now bothers me so much. <\/u><\/p>\n

My metaphor is it\u2019s a flashlight. It illuminates only a moment, and it moves with the moment, the present tense does. And the past tense is like sunlight, you can see everything all at once. And I think it\u2019s the focus that a lot of modern novelists love in the present tense: this tight focus, like a camera eye. But like a narrow-focus camera eye. I think this phenomenon of writing in the present tense is very strange, actually, a little unnerving.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Does it connect to that weird phenomenon of writing in the second person? \u201cYou do this,\u201d \u201cyou merge onto the freeway.\u201d You\u2019re covering your face with your hands. That\u2019s bad, right?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> I\u2019ve tried and tried to read second-person narrative and it is so self-conscious. There was also\u2014we\u2019re coming out of it now\u2014there was quite a long time when poets used \u201cyou\u201d when they meant \u201cI,\u201d but didn\u2019t want to say so. \u201cYou walk down the street and you feel \u2026\u201d No, I don\u2019t! Talk about yourself! Don\u2019t dump it onto me.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> And how about modern fantasy? I gather that you distrust stories with angelic heroes and easy-to-spot bad guys?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> This whole battle of good and evil thing \u2026 oh, man have they driven that into the ground! And all these Tolkien-derivative imitation things with the orcs against the elves. It\u2019s so simplistic and it\u2019s so childlike\u2014childish<\/i>, rather.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Kazuo Ishiguro recently remarked that fantasy is mainly about dragons and pixies. Your response was that you are on the side of the dragons but not really on the side of the pixies.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> There haven\u2019t been pixies, except maybe in Disney, for quite a while now, so what is he actually talking about? I don\u2019t go for pixies. They\u2019re sort of detestable.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Because they\u2019re cute.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> They\u2019re cute, sentimental, yeah. Whereas dragons are kind of amazing because so many different cultures have some version of the dragon. And, you know, you have to take them seriously. I wrote that piece called \u201cWhy Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?,\u201d and they still are.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Does that mean that you think that sweetness or sentimentality doesn\u2019t belong in fantasy?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Well, sweetness and sentimentality are two entirely different things. Sentimentality to me simply means a false emotion, whatever it is. It\u2019s just sort of the sweet side of cynicism. But it\u2019s false, detached. But sure, it\u2019s the cute, sentimental, and trite thing that fantasy falls into so easily. That\u2019s not where I want to go. But I do want to go where the dragons are. And I\u2019m not sure Mr. Ishiguro really does. [In his recent novel The Buried Giant<\/i>,] <\/i>his dragon never even woke up, the poor thing. It got its head cut off while it\u2019s asleep, which is kind of humiliating.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VII\u00a0<\/b>| You Look for It Where You Find It: Growing Up amid Anthropologists<\/b><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Your parents were the eminent anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and Theodora Kroeber, who wrote Ishi: Last of His Tribe<\/i>.Can you talk about the influence of anthropology on your work?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Well, it was sort of osmosis. I didn\u2019t read my father\u2019s kind of anthropology\u2014what\u2019s often dismissed as \u201ccultural relativism\u201d\u2014until I had been writing for some while. In Berkeley during the \u201930s and \u201940s, though, I grew up in a household with refugees from Europe: intellectuals, anthropologists coming from exotic places to visit, and more Indians than most little white middle-class girls would have seen in their life. It made a difference.<\/p>\n

I also think I inherited some of my father\u2019s proclivities, as he might say. Some of his temperament. We\u2019re just interested. An interest in the way people do things. And if they\u2019re different from the way we do them, that\u2019s fine<\/i>. It shocked me to realize that a lot of people don\u2019t want to know how other people do things, because it\u2019s wrong. \u201cWe do it right, and they don\u2019t.\u201d I just didn\u2019t get that as a kid.<\/p>\n

JP: <\/b>Isn\u2019t there tension between that kind of cultural relativism and your idea about the \u201ctrue name of things\u201d in the Earthsea books\u2014the idea of an underlying order in the universe?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Yes, there\u2019s a lot of tension. If you\u2019re completely culturally relativistic, what do you do with morality? Well, you do with it what you can. And you look for it where you find it. That\u2019s where I feel that I was given a genuine freedom of the intellect: I don\u2019t have to look in any particular place for what I want. I can look anywhere, and hope to find what I want.<\/p>\n

I became a Taoist in my teens because Lao Tzu\u2019s Tao Te Ching<\/i> was in my father\u2019s bookcase. I saw him reading it\u2014a beautiful little book. And I said, \u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d And he said, \u201cChinese stuff.\u201d I read everything\u2014at 13, 14, or 15\u2014so I read it, and thought, \u201cOh, this is wonderful!\u201d From then on, I went back to that book, and all the different translations of it, which vary so much\u2014eventually I made my own.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Is that book something you and Philip K. Dick talked about?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> As I think about it, looking back, I don\u2019t think Phil read Lao Tzu the way I did, with passionate interest. Phil was interested in the I Ching<\/i>. He wrote The Man in the High Castle<\/i> by throwing the yarrow sticks. And then he turned against it, and suddenly when he started talking to St. Paul, the I Ching<\/i>
\nbecame the Book of Evil. I think he had some sort of bad trip with it.<\/p>\n

Well, I use I Ching<\/i> a lot to make certain decisions. But I just threw the coins. I couldn\u2019t bother with the yarrow sticks.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Six coins?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> With coins you need three, but with the yarrow sticks you need 50, and it takes a long time, which of course gives you time to think about what\u2019s your right question. But with three kids I couldn\u2019t do the yarrow sticks. There were time constraints, you know?<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> So you used the I Ching<\/i> for writing?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> For practical decisions. Someone wants me to go speak somewhere. Should I do it or not? And it always gave me good advice, because I was finding out what I wanted to do. <\/u><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> But you were never tempted to use it in writing, like in a decision about writing?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> No, no, that was up to me. Kind of a matter of responsibility.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VIII | The Beauty of Science, Trying Not to Write Angry<\/b><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> I think you have a soft spot in your writing for scholars and scientists.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Oh yeah. I knew them. I grew up amongst them. Yeah, and I love<\/i>
\nscience as a human undertaking, as much as I love art. Science rightly done is so beautiful. I can\u2019t understand math. I know it\u2019s probably the most beautiful, but \u2026 [chuckling<\/i>]<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Yeah, my wife teaches math, so I have that experience a lot.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> I believe what they say, but I can\u2019t see<\/i> it.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> I watch her eyes light up, but I\u2019m not sure why they\u2019re lighting up.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Thank you for telling me that. But geology, for instance, oh my Lord, it\u2019s all poetry. It\u2019s amazing. And I lived through that great revolution in geology where we discovered about plate tectonics. And that was so exciting to watch it happening, and the new article would come out, oh my God, look at that! Oh my God! It\u2019s right under Oregon!<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> In your Earthsea books, the wizard school could become a site of evil\u2014magicians as mad scientists\u2014but it never quite turns out that way.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Okay, but how come no women? How come no sex for the men? What\u2019s wrong? Something has gone wrong here. It ain\u2019t natural.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> But you\u2019re gentle on the all-male wizard school, aren\u2019t you?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Well, people make mistakes, for heaven\u2019s sake. You can\u2019t get my age without realizing people make mistakes, and blaming them for it, what good does that do?<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Your writing is always willing to point out things that can go wrong, but it doesn\u2019t come across on the page that you\u2019re angry about things very much.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> I do get very angry, but I don\u2019t find anger a very \u2026 I think you have to get angry and be angry, and not dwell on it, not nurse it. You have to get past it. So yeah, I would say I try not to write angry.<\/p>\n

Since we talked about Taoism and anger, I should mention that later and much much later in my life I also have been fairly deeply influenced by certain forms of Buddhism. Buddhist thinking; not the practice, but the religion\u2014by the Buddhist idea that if you deny suffering, you\u2019re denying everything.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

IX | Final Thoughts: Energy, Opportunity, & What Worked Out<\/b><\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> Are there any books that you could have written at some moment and didn\u2019t write? Or books you regret writing?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> No, neither one. I wish could have gone on after Lavinia<\/i>, but I just didn\u2019t. It\u2019s just a matter of physical energy, really, I think. But I envy Jos\u00e9 Saramago, who wrote that lovely Elephant\u2019s Journey<\/i>, like, oh my God, I think he was 85, which is what I am now. Wow. Lucky him.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> What is the energy that writing takes?<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Oh, physical. Every \u2026 physical, mental, spiritual, you name it. It just calls upon one entirely. That\u2019s why I couldn\u2019t write when I was responsible for looking after my children. Because that is also a total commitment. And I just couldn\u2019t do two full-time things at once, so I had to get them to bed. They were really good about that.<\/p>\n

JP:<\/b> That\u2019s Virginia Woolf, isn\u2019t it? The room of one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

UL:<\/b> Yes, my room of my own was only after nine o\u2019clock, once the kids were in bed either asleep or reading. But it worked out. It does work out.<\/p>\n

  1. For a transcript and a link to video of the speech, see \u201c\u2018We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom\u2019: Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards,\u201d<\/a> November 19, 2014. \u21a9<\/a><\/li>
  2. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way<\/i>, translated from the Chinese by Ursula K. Le Guin, with J. P. Seaton (Shambhala, 1997). \u21a9<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    When did Ursula Le Guin last cross your radar screen? It could have been her memorable broadside at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony, against Amazon and \u201ccommodity profiteers\u201d who \u201csell us like deodorant.\u201d My favorite line: \u201cWe live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.\u201d1 If you have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2863,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1193],"tags":[70,89,17,19,206,20,46,272],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1866],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-1434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-fantasy","tag-feminism","tag-fiction","tag-gender","tag-interview","tag-literature","tag-science-fiction","tag-ursula-k-le-guin","section-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Story\u2019s Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When did Ursula Le Guin last cross your radar screen? 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