Q: Which are your favorite books from your own work?
LE GUIN: I love them all, the flawed little bastards.
The first interview with a writer I can remember reading was a conversation with Le Guin in a science fiction fanzine called Algol in 1975. It was originally a radio interview, and like many of the author’s interviews, she reworked it heavily for print. She had won a Hugo from the science fiction fans for The Left Hand of Darkness, and a National Book Award for children’s literature for The Farthest Shore, the third Earthsea book, and so the interviewer rather crassly asked:
Q: Which would you rather have, a National Book Award or a Hugo?
LE GUIN: Oh, a Nobel, of course.
Q: They don’t give Nobel Prize awards for fantasy.
LE GUIN: Maybe I can do something for peace.
By the time she was in her eighties, they were giving Nobels for fantasy (Portugal’s José Saramago, for one) and she herself was a contender. I told her one year she was given odds of twenty-five to one, and she fired back that she knew what that meant: “All I have to do in the next twenty-five years is outlive the other twenty-four writers.” Le Guin, in retrospect, never had a chance with the Swedish Academy, which was enmeshed in a sexual harassment and abuse scandal that it covered up for years.
Someday scholars will seek out every Le Guin interview in every fanzine and Oregon newspaper. They will transcribe all the Q&As on YouTube and track down the public appearances that are not. The result will be several fat volumes, full of wisdom and other good things. In the meantime, here’s a sampling of some quotes from interviews that did not fit into this volume, but which I found particularly illuminating.
Why even her bleakest stories are interwoven with optimism:
It may just be a refusal to take the counsel of despair. I think to admit despair and to revel in it—as many 20th- and 21st-century writers do—is an easy way out. Whenever I get really really depressed and discouraged about our politics in America and what we are doing, ecologically speaking, globally speaking, [with] our mad rush to destroy the world, it’s very easy to say, “To hell with us. This species is not successful.” Something tells me I have no right to say that. There are good people. Who am I to judge? The problem with despair is it gets judgmental.[2]
How she became a feminist in the early 1970s:
It was a real mind shift. And I was a grown woman with kids. And mothers of children were not welcome among a lot of early feminists. I was living the bad dream. I was a mommy. You know there’s always prejudice in a revolutionary movement. I wasn’t even sure I was welcome. And I wasn’t to some of those people. It took a lot of thinking for me to find what kind of feminist I could be and why I wanted to be a feminist.[3]
The humor in her work that many cannot see:
I roll around laughing sometimes writing it, and then the critics come on and they are so damned serious and talk about Discourses and Epiphanies and Battles of Good and Evil and all that. I remember trying to show the scriptwriter for Lathe of Heaven that the book was essentially comic. His script was quite humorless. Heavy-handed. So the poor guy laboriously stuck in some bad jokes, and we had to take them out again. Humor is a chancy thing; and when it’s an element of a serious book, a lot of people just miss it, perhaps because they don’t expect complexity, and there isn’t a laugh track.[4]
On science fiction:
Here we’ve got science fiction, the most flexible, adaptable broad range, imaginative, crazy form that prose fiction has ever attained and we’re going to let it be used for making toy plastic ray guns that break when you play with them and prepackaged, precooked, predigested, indigestible flavorless TV dinners and big inflated rubber balloons containing nothing but hot air? Well, I say the hell with that.[5]
On the unconventional form of her far-future Napa Valley novel Always Coming Home, which reversed her usual method of composition:
You know, a novelist’s job is largely leaving things out. Getting the story flowing clear of all the junk around it—the river banks. Well, in this book, I wanted to include the river banks. Not only the river, but the banks of the river and the bed of the river and the trees over the river. So in some ways I had to unlearn everything I’d learned about writing a book… Stuff has to go down inside of you, get into the dark and turn into something else, before you can use it in art. If you use raw experience, straight experience, you’re doing journalism which is another discipline.[6]
Sex in fiction:
I find that as I get older, I write more freely and with more pleasure about sexuality. I don’t write very much about sex, the act of sex itself, because I don’t like to read about it. I have never enjoyed reading about sex. It’s like reading about a football game or a wrestling match. It might be fun to watch or to do but it isn’t any fun to read about.[7]
On form:
I don’t feel the short story is a tight form. It can be made so; tight plotters and gimmick-ending writers like it so. But in itself it is potentially immense. To have read Chekhov is to know that as a certainty. It’s like the sonnet. Fourteen lines and a demanding rhyme scheme seems to be a tight, closed form, but Wordsworth got all of London and all the sunrise into it.[8]
Whether she saw herself as a radicaclass="underline"
Yeah, I do. That’s easy enough. Of course, being a radical in the United States… you can be slightly left of center and you’re immediately called “radical.” I’ve always been something of a socialist in politics and so on, and that’s extremely radical over here. I think some of my writing is radical in a sort of quiet way. I don’t go in for dangerous writing and shocking people and so on. If radical means getting down to the roots of things you write, then I do see that as my job, trying to get down to the roots.[9]
Why the map of Earthsea came before the stories:
At first the map could be adjusted to fit the story. This is the beauty of fantasy—your invention alters at need, at least at first. If I didn’t want it to take two weeks, say, to get from one island to another, I could simply move the islands closer. But once you’ve decided that the islands are that far apart, that’s it. The map is drawn. You have to adjust to it as if it were a reality. And it is.[10]
How being a Westerner influenced her work and career:
Being far from the centers of commercial publishing and the ingroups and the anxieties and influences of East Coast literary circles, where the big question is, Am I with it?—we left-edgers, boondockers, prairie chickens, etc., often have an attitude which is more describable as, Oh, the hell with it. This is healthy. I don’t think it’s ever really healthy for a writer to be an insider.[11]
The reality of made-up things:
It has something to do with the very nature of fiction. That age-old question, Why don’t I just write about what’s real? A lot of 20th century—and 21st century—American readers think that that’s all they want. They want nonfiction. They’ll say, I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real. This is incredibly naive. Fiction is something that only human beings do, and only in certain circumstances. We don’t know exactly for what purposes. But one of the things it does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
2
“Getting Away with Murder,” The Millions, Paul Morton, January 31, 2013. https://themillions.com/2013/01/getting-away-with-murder-the-millions-interviews-ursula-k-le-guin.html.
3
“My Last Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin,” Literary Hub, John Freeman, January 24, 2018. https://lithub.com/my-last-conversation-with-ursula-k-le-guin/.
4
“2001 Book Awards”. Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association. Archived from the original on June 21, 2013. Interview by Cindy Heidemann. https://web.archive.org/web/20130621065514/http://www.pnba.org/2001BookAwards.html
5
6
Irv Broughton,
7
Helene Escudie,
8
“An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin,” Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Ramola D, October/November 2003. https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_chronicle_view/2293/an_interview_with_ursula_k._le_guin.
9
“Ursula Le Guin talks Sci-fi Snobbery, Adaptations, & Troublemaking,”
10
Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory,