GILBERT: What has been the reaction of readers to those myths, in particular?
LE GUIN: Any novel reader or science fiction reader who is strong on fantasy is particularly fond of that element of the book, because that’s where it does run off into myth and fantasy. So those people like it particularly. I think that some of the others wonder what that stuff’s in there for.
GILBERT: Yes: I wondered if you got comments like, “I particularly liked the myth of the two young men on the hut on the ice,” or “Why do you stop your story and tell us these things?”
LE GUIN: Most of the reaction have been favorable. Most people seem to like those myths, or, if they don’t, they’re polite and don’t tell me.
GILBERT: I am, I must tell you, particularly moved by that myth of the two young princes on the ice. There’s the terrifying and beautiful legend of the person who meets the ghost of his brother inside the blizzard; and then there’s the legend of the two lovers on the ice.
LE GUIN: That’s kind of central to the book. After all, the book is a kind of re-telling of that legend, you see.
GILBERT: Yes. And then the long and dangerous trip over the ice, at the end of the book, is so fascinating. Where you see the old legend evolving again, as if there is an enormous cycle in the culture of the planet Winter and the people in that region of Karhide.
LE GUIN: Yes, that was great fun to write.
GILBERT: Had you thought of the androgynous beings before? How did that idea come to you?
LE GUIN: It came as I was working out this culture which I wanted—one of the original ideas for the book was, I wanted a planet with a lot of cultures on it, a lot of civilizations, a long history, that had never had a major war. This was actually how it began, and the androgyny came secondary to that, to begin with. Then that became a very minor element, once I got the idea that these were androgynes. I wrote a short story about the planet Winter, “Winter’s King”; I didn’t know yet they were androgynes, when I wrote that.
GILBERT: I’ve read the most recent version of that story.
LE GUIN: Yes, now I know about the androgynes, and I can put the pronouns into the feminine.
GILBERT: I want to ask you about that. I read that story after I read The Left Hand of Darkness, and when I read the novel, I was very much struck by these very convincing people, and I would not have known that a novelist could portray androgynes so convincingly, and I was fascinated. Then I read the story, in which you used the feminine pronoun for the people. It worked for me. I had wondered about using the masculine pronoun, and I guess I thought, as you did, that there was no way around it, other than making up artificial pronouns.
LE GUIN: Which I think you can get by with in a short story; and apparently they don’t bother some people; but at the length of a novel, and a serious novel, which is trying to make some point beside feminism—and I was—I just think it would drive a normal reader mad. I really do. And I think it would really weaken the book. It weakens the language. You have to work with the language you’re given. And thank God it’s English. But I’m sorry we don’t have a generic pronoun. It makes a great deal of difference. We’re trapped with this he. Thank goodness for one. And you can use they a good deal —and I don’t mind they, I don’t care what the English teachers say. I think they is often a good road out—instead of he or she—but you can’t always use it.
GILBERT: Can you say something about where you feel your work is going now?
LE GUIN: I have no idea. My most recent book is A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else, or Very Far Away from Anywhere Else. There was a slight mistake in the title.
GILBERT: Which is the real title?
LE GUIN: The title was meant to be A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, and I simply didn’t get it straight with Atheneum. It’s not their fault at all, it’s my fault. I sent them a preliminary title and didn’t realize… So in England it’s A Very Long Way and here it’s Very Far Away. But it’s the same book. It’s just a story for young adults, I guess—no fantasy, no science fiction at all. It’s just a very short—well, sort of a love story. It’s about a high school boy who’s bright, which is not a very fashionable subject. But it’s very difficult to be bright in high school. And it’s about a high school girl who wants to be a composer. And they kind of find each other—you know, how some time along in high school you find another person like yourself. But then there are problems, they have to work out their relationship. And that’s all there is to it. It’s very short. And it’s absolutely straightforward realism, I suppose you’d call it. So, I didn’t expect that, I didn’t plan to write that, no publisher particularly asked for me to write anything like that. It just happened. I like it. I think it came out rather nice. But what happens next, God knows.
GILBERT: Do you like that feeling?
LE GUIN: Yes. Yes. I cannot write to order. I cannot make a deal with a publisher until I can send him a completed manuscript. I can write essays and stuff to order; I learned how to write term papers in college. But writing fiction—I can’t. I have to just wait and see what happens.
GILBERT: Have you ever tried to write to order?
LE GUIN: Well, no; I’ve tried to force myself to write. Just because I wasn’t writing, and it was time I wrote something. Well, it was a disaster. It has to come. Some of us are just at the mercy of our unconscious, I guess. And of course you control it, and of course you get work habits, and you learn that there is a tap you can turn on; you can sit down at your desk and you can write, if you’re working on something already. If the initial gift has been given you, then it’s your job to write, and that’s work, and it takes discipline and so on. But with me, it is a gift, it isn’t just something I invent by myself. I wish I could. It’d be nice.
GILBERT: Do you work at home? Do you have a regular schedule?
LE GUIN: Oh, yes. I’ve met one other professional writer who didn’t, and that’s Harlan Ellison, because Harlan can write anywhere, anytime, anyplace. You know, in shop windows, at a big New Year’s party—Harlan doesn’t need a schedule, because he has such enormous energy. And he’s free, too. Anyone with the usual commitments and so on—you have to have a schedule. When the kids were little, I worked at night. When they were babies, after they were in bed. When they started going to school, it was while they were at school. So it’s sort of nine to one, or nine to twelve.
GILBERT: Do you feel that it has been hard for you to be a writer and, at the same time, fulfill your obligations to your family? Have you found it hard to devote your energies to raising children and to writing?
LE GUIN: Well, yes. There are times, like when I read about Lady Antonia Fraser, with her big books and her five children and fifteen nursemaids or whatever it is, that I feel a profound and evil envy. Or when I hear about some man who has quit a paying job to “devote himself to writing full time”—I get mean. I think, oh buddy. I wrote when I had jobs I got paid for; when I quit those, I still had a fulltime job, the kids and the house, and I still wrote. Who is doing your work for you, Mr. Fulltime Writer? Mrs. Fulltime Writer? And where are her novels? But all this is mean, as I said. The fact is, I’m married to a man who has for twenty-four years ungrudgingly shared the work: the kids, the house, the whole schmeer. Two people can do three fulltime jobs—teaching, writing and family. And when pressed I will admit that I think this sort of sharing arrangement is better, though much more tiring, than the fifteen nursemaids, or than hiring help in any way. If I was “free,” as so many male writers have been free, I would be impoverished. Why should all my time be my own, just because I write books? There are human responsibilities, and those include responsibilities to daily life, to common human work. I mean, cleaning up, cooking, all the work that must be done over and over all one’s life, and also the school concert and the impossible geometry homework and so on. Responsibility is privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you’ve copped out of the very source of your writing, which after all is life, isn’t it, just living, people living and working and trying to get along.