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Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221

Interviewed by John Wray

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin

In the early 1960s, when Ursula K. Le Guin began to publish, science fiction was dominated by
so-called hard sci-fi: speculative fiction grounded in physics, chemistry, and, to a lesser extent,
biology. The understanding of technological progress as an unalloyed good went largely
unquestioned; America was enjoying unprecedented prominence in world affairs, and the
science fiction of what has come to be known as the golden age projected this same sense of
exceptionalism onto the cosmos. The space adventures that filled the pages of Amazing Stories
and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction tended to be written by, for, and about white
men, with only occasional nods to racial or gender (or, for that matter, species) diversity. Le
Guins first novel, Rocannons World (1966), which featured a classic man of science as its
hero, did little to upset the status quo. But a sea change was coming.

No single work did more to upend the genres conventions than The Left Hand of Darkness
(1969). In this novel, her fourth, Le Guin imagined a world whose human inhabitants have no
fixed gender: their sexual roles are determined by context and express themselves only once
every month. The form of the book is a mosaic of primary sources, an interstellar
ethnographers notebook, ranging from matter-of-fact journal entries to fragments of alien
myth. Writers as diverse as Zadie Smith and Algis Budrys have cited The Left Hand of Darkness
as an influence, and Harold Bloom included it in The Western Canon. In the decades that
followed, Le Guin continued to broaden both her range and her readership, writing the fantasy
series she has perhaps become best known for, Earthsea, as well as the anarchist utopian
allegory The Dispossessed, to name just a few books among dozens. Her productivity is
remarkable. Lavinia (2008), her most recent novel, was her twenty-third book-length work of
fiction.

Ursula Kroeber was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, the daughter of Alfred L. Kroeber, a
prominent anthropologist, and Theodora Kroeber, the author of a best-selling biography of
Ishi, the Last Wild Indian in North America, who lived out the last years of his life on display
at a museum on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Her childhood was spent in the
company of her large family and their many academic visitors, as well as members of the
Native American community. She went on to study at Radcliffe and Columbia, which granted
her an M.A. in French and Italian Renaissance literature in 1952, at the age of twenty-two. On
a steamer bound for France in 1953, she met the historian Charles Le Guin, whom she married
a few months later.
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For the past half century, Le Guin and Charles, a professor of history at Portland State
University, have lived in a handsome but inconspicuous Victorian on a steep, tree-lined street
just below Portlands Forest Park. The housewhich, appropriately for a writer of science
fiction, appears larger on the inside than it does from withoutharbors a surprise: a veranda
with a view of the ruined cone of Mount Saint Helens. Le Guin received me in the parlor, but
we soon moved out onto the veranda, in part to escape the fierce attentions of her cat.

John Wray



INTERVIEWER

How do you feel about the term science fiction, as connected to your work?

LE GUIN

Well, thats very complicated, Wray.

INTERVIEWER

Im sorry. Are you at peace with it? Do you find it reductive?

LE GUIN

I dont think science fiction is a very good name for it, but its the name that weve got. It is
different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I
can get prickly and combative is if Im just called a sci-fi writer. Im not. Im a novelist and poet.
Dont shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I dont fit, because Im all over. My
tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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INTERVIEWER

Thats how one can identify a sci-fi author, I guesstentacles coming out of the pigeonhole.

LE GUIN

Thats right.

INTERVIEWER

It seems to me there might be authors whose work is more accurately described by the term
science fiction than your ownsomeone like Arthur C. Clarke, for example, whose work is
often directly connected to a specific scientific concept. In your fiction, by contrast, hard
science is perhaps less important than philosophy or religion or social science.

LE GUIN

The hardscience fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and
maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropologythats not science to them, thats soft
stuff. Theyre not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the
social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from
anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at
the complexity of the society Im creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something
like that.

INTERVIEWER

Might that be why your fiction has been more readily admired in so-called literary circlesthat
its more engaged with human complexity and psychology?

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LE GUIN

Its helped to make my stuff more accessible to people who dont, as they say, read science
fiction. But the prejudice against genre has been so strong until recently. Its all changing now,
which is wonderful. For most of my career, getting that labelsci-fislapped on you was,
critically, a kiss of death. It meant you got reviewed in a little box with some cute title about
Martiansor tentacles.

INTERVIEWER

Since were on the subject, what was it like to grow up as the child of a prominent
anthropologist? Did it contribute to your beginnings as a writer?

LE GUIN

Thats a question Ive been asked about a billion times, and its really hard to answer.
Obviously, my fathers interest and temperament set some kind of ... well, I almost want to say
a moral tone. He was interested in everything. Living with a mind like that is, of course, a kind
of education. His field of science was a human one, and thats really good luck for a novelist.

We spent every summer, all summer, at a ranch he had bought in Napa Valley. It was very run-
down, easygoing, and my parents had lots and lots of guests. My father would entertain his
fellow academics and people from abroadthis was the late thirties, and there were refugees
coming in, people from all over the world. Among the guests were a couple of Indians who had
been informants, as they called them thenthey dont use that word anymoretribal
members my father had come to know as friends through working with them, learning their
language and customs from them. One of them, Juan Dolores, was a Papago, or Oodhamhe
was a real family friend. And he would stay for a couple weeks or a month. So we sort of had
this Indian uncle. Just having these people from a truly other cultureit was a tremendous
gift.

INTERVIEWER

What was the nature of that gift?
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LE GUIN

Maybe simply the experience of the other? A lot of people never have it, or dont take the
chance when offered. Everybody in the industrial nations now sees others on the TV, and so
on, but thats not the same as living with them. Even if only one or two of them.

INTERVIEWER

Youve said that you were raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit. And yet an interest in religion
is present in a great deal of your writing.

LE GUIN

I think I havewell, I cant call it a religious temperament, because the trouble is the word
religion. I am profoundly interested in both Taoism and Buddhism, and theyve given me a lot.
Taoism is just part of the structure of my mind by now. And Buddhism is intensely interesting
to me. But if you dont call it a religious cast of mind, then you have to call it something like
spiritual, and thats woo-woo and wishy-washy. There are these big issues that religion tries to
deal with, and Im quite interested in that.

INTERVIEWER

Could you say a bit more about what Taoism and Buddhism have given you?

LE GUIN

Taoism gave me a handle on how to look at life and how to lead it when I was an adolescent
hunting for ways to make sense of the world without going off into the God business.
Returning to Lao-tzu throughout the years, Ive always foundand findhim offering what I
want or need to learn. My translation, version, whatever it is, of the Tao Te Ching is a by-
product of that long and happy association.
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My knowledge of Buddhism is much scantier and more recent, but its become indispensable
in showing me how to use meditation usefully and in giving a steady north to my moral
compass.

INTERVIEWER

Kurt Vonnegut, in his Art of Fiction interview, in 1977, described anthropology as his only
religion.

LE GUIN

Thats not quite enough for me, but I know exactly what he means, and it is what I fall back on.
If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwinthe size of his mind, which included all that
scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a
genuine spirituality about Darwins thinking. And he felt it, too.

INTERVIEWER

Could it beIm going out on a limb herethat this search for a satisfactory or sufficient
religion might have influenced your direction as a writer? If none of our extant religions satisfy,
in other words, why not invent one yourself?

LE GUIN

Im not a quester or a searcher for the truth. I dont really think there is one answer, so I never
went looking for it. My impulse is less questing and more playful. I like trying on ideas and
ways of life and religious approaches. Im just not a good candidate for conversion.

INTERVIEWER

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What it is that draws you to this trying on of other existences?

LE GUIN

Oh, intellectual energy and curiosity, I suppose. An inborn interest in various and alternative
ways of doing things and thinking about them.

That could be part of what led me to write more about possible worlds than about the actual
one. And, in a deeper sense, what led me to write fiction, maybe. A novelist is always trying
on other people.

INTERVIEWER

When you were starting out, did you know that you wanted to write speculative fiction?

LE GUIN

No, no, no. I just knew from extremely early onit sounds ridiculous, but five or sixthat
writing was something I was going to do, always. But just writing, not any mode in particular. It
started as poetry. I think I was nine or ten before I really wrote a story. And it was a fantasy
story, because thats mostly what I was reading. By then, my brother and I were putting our
quarters together to buy, now and then, a ten-cent magazine called something like Fantastic
Talespulp magazines, you know.

INTERVIEWER

Amazing Stories?

LE GUIN

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Yeah! So the fiction I read, because I was an early beginner, tended toward the fantastic.
Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its
weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.

But when people say, Did you always want to be a writer?, I have to say no! I always was a
writer. I didnt want to be a writer and lead the writers life and be glamorous and go to New
York. I just wanted to do my job writing, and to do it really well.

INTERVIEWER

In relation to other writers?

LE GUIN

How else can you judge? It has to be, in a sense, competitive or comparative.

INTERVIEWER

Against whom were you measuring your work?

LE GUIN

Writers Id have liked to be as good as, although not like?

INTERVIEWER

Right.

LE GUIN
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Charles Dickens. Jane Austen. And then, when I finally learned to read her, Virginia Woolf.
Shoot for the top, always. You know youll never make it, but whats the fun if you dont shoot
for the top?

INTERVIEWER

When you began sending your work out into the world, did you have some idea of the writer
you wanted to be?

LE GUIN


I knew by then that my main shtick was fiction, but that I would always write poetry. My first
publications were all poetry, and thats partly because of my father. He realized that sending
out poetry is quite a big job. It takes method and a certain amount of diligence and a good deal
of time. And he said, I could help you do that, that would be fun! He got interested in the
subculture of the little magazines and realized that it is a little world, with rules all its own.

INTERVIEWER

So he studied it anthropologically?

LE GUIN

He was curious about everything! And he actually did some of the mailing-out stuff.

INTERVIEWER

How old were you at the time?
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LE GUIN

I would have been in my twenties. I was also writing fiction and submitting it, and, again, my
father comes into it. The first novel I ever wrote was very strange, very ambitious. It covered
many generations in my invented Central European country, Orsinia. My father knew Alfred
Knopf personally. Id had recorder lessons with Blanche Knopf when I was seventeen.
Blancheshe was a real grande dame, oh God, she was scary. And Id go in with my little
tooter.

INTERVIEWER

Was this in New York?

LE GUIN

This was in New York. When I was about twenty-three, I asked my father if he felt that my
submitting the novel to Knopf would presume on their friendship, and he said, No, go ahead
and try him. So I did, and Knopf wrote a lovely letter back. He said, I cant take this damn thing.
I wouldve done it ten years ago, but I cant afford to now. He said, This is a very strange book,
but youre going somewhere! That was all I needed. I didnt need acceptance.

INTERVIEWER

Im guessing that was not Mr. Knopf s typical response.

LE GUIN

And I dont think he was just being nice to my father, either, because Alfred Knopf was not a
very nice man. My dad called him the Pirate.

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INTERVIEWER

And this Orsinia novel never saw the light of day?



LE GUIN

No, it didnt. May a curse fall upon any academic who digs it out and publishes it.

INTERVIEWER

Youve written that you cant get underway with a project until you have the characters clear
in your mind. But I suspect that some of your books may have begun not with a set of
characters but with an idea you wanted to explore.

LE GUIN

That is probably truest of The Dispossessed. Although it started as a short story. I had this
physicist and he was in a prison camp somewhere. The story just went nowhere, but I knew
that character was real. I had this lump of concrete and somewhere inside it was a diamond,
but getting into the lump of concreteit took years. For whatever reason, I started reading
pacifist literature, and I was also involved in antiwar protests, Ban the Bomb and all that. I had
been a pacifist activist of sorts for a long time, but I realized I didnt know much about my
cause. Id never read Gandhi, for starters.

So I put myself through a sort of course, reading that literature, and that led me to utopianism.
And that led me, through Kropotkin, into anarchism, pacifist anarchism. And at some point it
occurred to me that nobody had written an anarchist utopia. Wed had socialist utopias and
dystopias and all the rest, but anarchismhey, that would be fun. So then I read all the
anarchist literature I could get, which was quite a lot, if you went to the right little stores in
Portland.

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INTERVIEWER

Where you got your books in a brown paper bag?

LE GUIN

You had to get to know the owner of the store. And if he trusted you, hed take you to the back
room and show you this wealth of material, some of which was violent anarchism and would
have been frowned on by the government.

I swam around in that stuff for a couple years before I could approach my lump of concrete
again, and I discovered it had fallen apart. I had my character, and he was a physicist, but he
wasnt who I thought he was. So that book started not with an idea but with a whole group of
ideas coming together. It was a very demanding book to write, because I had to invent that
society pretty much from scratch, with a lot of help from the anarchist writers, particularly
Americans like Paul Goodman, who had actually tried to envision what an anarchist society
might be like.

INTERVIEWER

Its anything but a starry-eyed treatment.

LE GUIN

I was not writing a program, I was writing a novel. After I wrote The Dispossessed, I thought
further about utopia, and I realized that utopia as a concept was dying, that people were not
able to write it. Dystopias all over the place. I did write one other one, in Always Coming
HomeI think thats my best utopia. But its Dispossessed that appeals to the idea-minded.
They see Always Coming Home as a sort of hippie utopia, advocating that we all return to the
teepee. All I can say is, read it a little more carefully, guys!

INTERVIEWER

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Whats it actually doing?

LE GUIN

Offering a completely different way of lifenot as a blueprint, only as a visionto a civilization
more and more intent on one costly and destructive kind of progress.


INTERVIEWER

Didnt you publish a version that came with a cassette tape that actually re-created some of
the folk songs from the novel?

LE GUIN

The record is called Music and Poetry of the Kesh. It was composed by Todd Barton, who was
the music director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He and I made it with some of his
singers. Its all in fourths, fifths, and ninths, and things like that, because thats how the Kesh
would do it. We had a hell of a lot of fun making that album, and then we wanted to copyright
it. We heard back from the copyright office, and they said, You cannot copyright folk music. Its
the music of an indigenous people. So we had the pleasure of saying, Well, we made up the
indigenous people. Can we copyright them, too?

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever catch yourself thinking about potential book sales when you were considering a
project?

LE GUIN

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Early on. It took me so long to get my fiction publishedyears and years of submitting and
rejection, submitting and rejectionthat I was getting a little desperate. I was beginning to
wonder, Am I just writing for my attic? And I deliberately wrote a fantasy story, a genre story,
to see if I could sell it. There was some impulse like that behind April in Paris, which was one
of the first stories I sold.

INTERVIEWER

April in Paris is barely a genre story, isnt it?

LE GUIN

Its fantasy, time-travel fantasy. And the very same week it was accepted, An die Musik,
which is an Orsinian tale and realistic, although set in an imaginary country, sold to a little
literary magazine. You asked about sales? Well, the little magazine gave me five copies as
payment. I think it was Fantastic that took April in Paris, and they paid me thirty dollars,
which is about like three hundred now. Pretty good for a short story.

INTERVIEWER

Is it true that you were your own agent at the beginning of your career?

LE GUIN

Yes, I sold my first three novels to Don Wollheim, at Ace Books. They were doing these Ace
Doubles, two short novels upside down from one another. Kind of a cute idea. Then I wrote
Left Hand of Darkness, and I realized it was of a slightly different order than my first three
science-fiction novels.

INTERVIEWER

So, when youd finished Left Hand of Darkness, you sensed that it was
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LE GUIN

Bigger.

INTERVIEWER

Bigger in what sense?

LE GUIN

It took on a lot more intellectual and moral ground, and it was quite experi- mental, after all. A
novel about people with no gender is not your typical Ace Double. But I came into science
fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more
experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasnt all imitation Heinlein or
Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

INTERVIEWER

Who were some of the writersmen or womenyou admired at the time?

LE GUIN

What do the names matter now? That was nearly fifty years ago. Id have to explain who so
many of them were, and still nobody would know who I was talking about. The point is that,
whoever opened them, the doors were being opened. A narrow, defensive branch of literature
was enlarging itself to contain multitudes.

INTERVIEWER

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I imagine that few genres of literature, at least in the twentieth century, were more male than
sci-fi during that era.

LE GUIN

Women had to pretend to be men, or just used their initials.

INTERVIEWER

Your work has sometimes been called a counterpoint, or even a corrective, to the
testosterone-steeped science-fiction scene in America in the sixties and seventies. Philip K.
Dick, for example, was a direct contemporary of yours. The worlds he creates can, at times,
feel oppressively masculine.

LE GUIN

Yes. And his stylehes a real puzzle stylistically. But oh man, of course he was a huge
influence on me.

INTERVIEWER

What was it about Dicks work that caught your attention?

LE GUIN

Partly it was that he and I had similar interests in certain things, such as Taoism and the I
Chingafter all we were both Berkeley kids of exactly the same generation. And then, his sci-fi
novels were about ordinary, unexceptional, confused people, when so much sci-fi consisted of
Campbellian or militaristic heroes and faceless multitudes. Mr. Tagomi, in The Man in the High
Castle, was a revelation to me of what you could do with sci-fi if you really took it seriously as a
novelist. Did you know we were in the same high school?
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INTERVIEWER

You and Philip K. Dick? Really?

LE GUIN

Berkeley High, thirty-five hundred kids. Big, huge school. Nobody knew Phil Dick. I have not
found one person from Berkeley High who knew him. He was the invisible classmate.

INTERVIEWER

That could almost be taken from one of his novels. So you didnt know him at all?

LE GUIN

No! We got into correspondence as adults. But I never met him physically.

INTERVIEWER

Was he already a published writer when you began?

LE GUIN

Yeah, I think Phil got published earlier than me. But he never hit it. I think he was the typical
exploited genre writer, you know? I think he found he couldnt publish his non-science-fiction
books, his realistic novels, so he tried science fiction. Obviously he had a gift for it. But his
career was very unrewarding. He did get noticed by the French while he was still alive and
working. The French developed a huge respect for him. I dont know how
much it meant to him. He was busy with what was going on inside his head.
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INTERVIEWER

On the subject of being a woman writer in a mans world, youve mentioned A Room of Ones
Own as a touchstone.

LE GUIN

My mother gave it to me. It is an important book for a mother to give a daughter. She gave me
A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas when I was a teenager. So she corrupted me
thoroughly, bless her heart. Though you know, in the 1950s, A Room of Ones Own was kind of
tough going. Writing was something that men set the rules for, and I had never questioned
that. The women who questioned those rules were too revolutionary for me even to know
about them. So I fit myself into the mans world of writing and wrote like a man, presenting
only the male point of view. My early books are all set in a mans world.

INTERVIEWER

And featuring male protagonists.

LE GUIN

Absolutely. Then came literary feminism, which was a tremendous problem and gift to me. I
had to . . . handle it. And I wasnt sure I could, because Im not much good on theory. Go away,
just let me write. But the fact is, I was getting stuck in my writing. I couldnt keep pretending I
was a man. And so feminism came along at just the right moment for me.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say that the womens movement compelled you to change?

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LE GUIN

It said to me, Hey, guess what? Youre a woman. You can write like a woman. I saw that
women dont have to write about what men write about, or write what men think they want
to read. I saw that women have whole areas of experience men dont haveand that theyre
worth writing and reading about.

So then I went back and really read Virginia Woolf, and then I read all the books that the
feminists were offering to us, books that other women had been writing for centuries. I saw
that women can write like women, that they can write about different things than menwhy
not? Duh! It took me years, really, to climb on board.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think it took you a while to adapt?

LE GUIN

These ideas may seem commonplace now. They werent forty years ago. They were radical. A
few people accepted them quicklymany were slow, like me. In fact, many readers, writers,
and critics still havent accepted them.

INTERVIEWER

Which book of yours reflects this change most clearly?

LE GUIN

The breakthrough was unconscious. Its a short book, published in 1978, called The Eye of the
Heron. Its about two colonies on another planetone of them is a bunch of pacifists,
Gandhian types. The other one is a criminal colony sent mostly from South America. The two
places are side by side. My hero was from the Gandhian society, a nice young man. And then
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there was a girl, the daughter of the boss of the criminal society. And the nice young hero
insisted on getting himself shot, about halfway through the book. And I said, Hey, you cant do
that! Youre my protagonist! My own unconscious mind was forcing me to realize that the
weight of the story was in the girls consciousness, not the boys.

INTERVIEWER

What led you to set The Left Hand of Darkness in a world where gender is fluid?

LE GUIN

That was my ignorant approach to feminism. I knew just enough to realize that gender itself
was coming into question. We didnt have the language yet to say that gender is a social
construction, which is how we shorthand it now. But genderwhat is gender? Does it need to
be male, does it need to be female? Gender had been thrown into the arena where
science fiction goes in search of interesting subjects to revisit and re-question. I thought, Well,
gee, nobodys done that. Actually, what I didnt know is that, slightly before me, Theodore
Sturgeon had written a book called Venus Plus X. Its worth checking out, a rare thing, an early
male approach to considering gender asat least partlysocially constructed. Sturgeon was a
talented, warm-hearted writer, so its also interesting in itself. Stylistically, he was not a great
writer, but he was a very good storyteller and a very good mind. But I, of course, went off in a
different direction. You could say I was asking myself, What does it mean to be a woman, or a
man, male or female? And what if you werent?

INTERVIEWER

Or, in the novel, what if you sometimes were one gender, sometimes the other, and most
often neither?

LE GUIN

Well, you had to be sometimes, because thats sexuality. I thought people would hate the
book, particularly men. And it was the men who loved it!

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INTERVIEWER

Why do you suppose that was?

LE GUIN

I have never understood that. The women, many of whom were a little further along in their
thinking than I was, said, But she calls them all he! And theyre quite right, I did call them all
he, and defended doing so for some while, until I realized that wouldnt wash, either.

INTERVIEWER

Since youre a Virginia Woolf fan, I have to ask about the significance of Orlando to Left Hand
of Darkness.

LE GUIN

I read when I was a freshman in college. I just got drunk on it. I adored itthe language and
the picture of Elizabethan England. That was when I first fell in love with Woolf. And of course,
I saw the strangeness and brilliance of what she did there, of that sex shift.
So you could say that she gave me permission, the way a great writer does.

INTERVIEWER

Its also distinctive within her body of work.

LE GUIN

All her books are different from one another. Have you read Flush? Its about Elizabeth Barrett
Brownings dog and is from the dogs point of view. Its very short, very light, and
unforgettable.
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INTERVIEWER

Your mother also wrote.

LE GUIN

My mother had always wanted to write. She told me this only after shed started writing. She
waited until she got the kids out of the house, until she was free of responsibility for anybody
except her husband. Very typical of her generation. She was in her fifties when she started
writingfor kids, which is how women often start. Its not threatening to anybody, including
themselves. And she published a couple of lovely little kids books.

She wanted to write novels, and she did write a couple, but they never found a publisher. But
what happened was that she got asked to write the biography of Ishi. Of course they asked my
father and he said, No way, I cannot handle that story. Hed lived that story and didnt want to
write it. He wasnt a reminiscer. He said, I think you might ask my wife, shes a good writer.
And they did, and she did it. So her first published adult book was a best seller, which was
wonderful for her! She was in her sixties then. I would get letters from people who said, I read
your mothers book and it made me cry! That pleased her enormously. She would say, Thats
what it was supposed to do.

It was also interesting because my mother and I were almost working together trying to get
published.

INTERVIEWER

What an unusual beginning, for both of you.

LE GUIN

She beat me to it! Which is cool. Because I was late and slow. A slow learner. But not as late as
her. I love to tell her story because peopleparticularly womenneed to hear that you can
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start late. She figured she could put it off, which shocked the strong feminists of twenty or
thirty years ago. I dont know if anybody gets shocked anymore. But a lot of people dont
realize how strong the social pressure was on women.

INTERVIEWER

Maybe theyve forgotten, or never knew.

LE GUIN

The young ones never knew. They cant imagine what was expected of their grandmothers,
their great-grandmothers. Theres been a huge change in my lifetime.

INTERVIEWER

And yet the debate seems to persistthis tendency to view things in a binary way, either
family or work.

LE GUIN

It never goes away. The fact is, there is a problem there. My personal solution to it involves the
man I married. Our solution was that one person cannot really do two full-time jobsthat is to
say, bring up a family and be a novelist, or bring up a family and be a full-time professor, like
Charlesbut two people can do three full-time jobs! And they canwe did.

I was just incredibly lucky in that sense. I married this guy who was willing to work that way.
And I took it for granted! Neither of us knew what we were getting into. So I lived off him for
at least twenty years, because I wasnt making anything. Then I began to be the breadwinner,
the real moneymaker. Great! Its all one balance, one bank account.

INTERVIEWER
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I want to ask about a sentence from your book of essays The Wave in the Mind Narrative
fiction has for years been going slowly and vaguely and massively in one direction, rejoining
the ocean of story: fantasy. Remember writing that?

LE GUIN

No! I wonder when I wrote that. But what I must have meant is that we could no longer
believe that realism was the only literary form for fiction.

INTERVIEWER

It seems as though the trend in literature in recent years may have borne you out.

LE GUIN

At the time I was probably thinking of writers like Calvino or Borges, whereas genre writers
deliberately cultivated an attempt to be styleless, to write a very flat, journalistic prose.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think that was?

LE GUIN

I rather suspect it had to do with the temperaments of the men writing it. And also the fact
that they would probably admire the ostentatiously clear, flat style of someone like
Hemingway as quintessentially masculine.

INTERVIEWER
25


Many readers with a snobbish attitude toward sci-fi use the question of style to justify their
snobbery.

LE GUIN

And in some ways theyre right. Or they were. Particularly in the thirties and forties, science
fiction could be embarrassingly badly written. Shamelessly badly written.

INTERVIEWER

Because the books were vessels for ideas.

LE GUIN

Thats it. And when I came into the field, some of the older men still prided themselves on
writing that way. They were idea writers and they werent going to fiddle with the feminine
frippery of style. To me the style is the book, to a large extent. Take Borges. When he
experiments with ideas, he is experimenting with form, too. He was as much a poet as he was
a prose writer.

INTERVIEWER

Has Borges been important for you?

LE GUIN

I feel like Ive learned from the old guy all my life. It was Borges and Calvino who made me
think, Hey, look at what theyre doing! Can I do that? Theyre the door-openers among my
contemporaries. They sent me away from the United States.

26

INTERVIEWER

As a reader, you mean?

LE GUIN

As a reader. Because nobody here was doing anything like thatexcept in genre. One science-
fiction writer whos still only known inside science fiction, as far as I know, is Cordwainer
Smith. He had a very big influence on me. He was a conscious literary writer with a nice prose
style and a strange imagination. I think he worked for the State Department. Cordwainer Smith
is a nom de plume.

INTERVIEWER

Wasnt he connected to Chiang Kai-shek in some way?

LE GUIN

He did highly secret stuff in China. A very strange man. And one nice thing about science
fictionI think its still true, it certainly was when I came into the fieldwas that we could
steal from one another quite freely, not in the plagiarizing sense, but in the ideas and how-to-
do-something sense. What I always compare it to is baroque composers, who used to pass
their ideas around all the time, even pass tunes around. Its a kind of inter-inspiration. Youre
all working at the same thing.

INTERVIEWER

Who formed that sort of network for you?

LE GUIN

27

They were mostly the writers of my generation. A lot of them are younger than me, actually,
but we came into the field at the same time. Some of them I really didnt
have very much in common with as a writer, like Harlan Ellison. But he had that kind of
inventive spark I was looking for. And then there were women coming inlike Vonda
McIntyre, considerably younger than I amwho were pushing the boundaries of the field and
breaking the walls down and writing stuff that was much more interesting to me than the so-
called golden age of science fiction.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a sense, among your contemporaries, of being in it together? Did you regard
yourselves as fellow travelers?

LE GUIN

I was glad to find the small native community of science-fiction and fantasy authors generally
welcoming, though intensely argumentative and liable to furious divisions and explosions over
aesthetics, government policy, and gender politics. I made dear friends there, but took small
part in the meetings and conventions, not networking at all in the modern sense.

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my careermy agent Virginia Kidd.
From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I
could send her an utterly indescribable story, and shed sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law
Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorkershe knew where to take it. She never told me what
to write or not write, she never told me, That wont sell, and she never meddled with my
prose.

INTERVIEWER

Whatever resistance there may have been to genre, youve had a lot of fans among literary
writers. John Updike praised your work, for example.

LE GUIN

28

Updike did a beautiful review of a young-adult novel of mine, The Beginning Place, in The New
Yorker. He was always a generous reviewer. And Harold Bloomhes put in a really good word
for me. Its funny, The Anxiety of Influence came out at just the time that women were
discovering other women writers and saying, Hey, we have influences! We never did before!
Here were all the men worrying about the anxiety of being influenced and the women were
going, Whoopee!

INTERVIEWER

In your essay Telling Is Listening, you write that a genre novel fulfills certain generic
obligationsits going to take the reader in a certain direction, it will likely have a certain story
arc, it will touch on certain things that she or he has come to expect.

LE GUIN

Thats right, it will fulfill certain expectations, certain definite expectations. Thats what makes
it generic.

INTERVIEWER

In the essay youre talking about the appeal of genre for readers. What is the appeal of genre
for a writer?

LE GUIN

Somewhat the same. Its like working in any formin poetry, for example. When you work in
form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you
have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, alwaysI
think any poet whos worked in form will agree with meis that the form leads you to what
you want to say. It is wonderful and mysterious. I think something similar happens in fiction. A
genre is a form, in a sense, and that can lead you to ideas that you would not have just thought
up if you were working in an undefined field. It must have something to do with the way our
minds are constructed.

29

INTERVIEWER

In Steering the Craft, you sayand you seem to be speaking as both a reader and a writerI
want to recognize something I never saw before.

LE GUIN

It has something to do with the very nature of fiction. That age-old question, Why dont I just
write about whats real? A lot of twentieth-century and twenty-first-centuryAmerican
readers think that thats all they want. They want nonfiction. Theyll say, I dont read fiction
because it isnt real. This is incredibly naive. Fiction is something that only human beings
do, and only in certain circumstances. We dont know exactly for what
purposes. But one of the things it does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

This is what a lot of mystical disciplines are aftersimply seeing, really seeing, really being
aware. Which means youre recognizing the things around you more deeply, but they also
seem new. So the seeing-as-new and recognition are really the same thing.

INTERVIEWER

Could you elaborate on this idea just a little?

LE GUIN

Not adequately! I can only muddle at it. A very good book tells me news, tells me things I
didnt know, or didnt know I knew, yet I recognize them yes, I see, yes, this is how the world
is. Fictionand poetry and drama cleanse the doors of perception.

All the arts do this. Music, painting, dance say for us what cant be said in words. But the
mystery of literature is that it does say it in words, often straightforward ones.

INTERVIEWER
30


You seem, over the past few decades, to have grown more interested in fiction directly
informed by history. Lavinia, your most recent novel, is clearly set in a recognizable period of
human historyItaly in the era of Virgil. And your novella The Wild Girls has that historical
quality as well, though perhaps its set in an alternate universe.

LE GUIN

No, The Wild Girls is very strongly based on the Mississippian culture of America. Some of the
peoples down there had a caste system thats very like the one in the story. I took an
anthropological study that Id known about for a long time and thought, That would make an
interesting basis for a story. What would it be like to live in a culture like that? Man, I didnt
like it one bit! I was glad to get out.

INTERVIEWER

Its a brutal story.

LE GUIN

Yes, its a kind of hateful story. My late short stories began getting kind of dry and stony and
hard that way. Im not particularly fond of them. But Lavinia is just the opposite. Its anything
but dry and stony and hard. Its very playful. It came to me while I was working on trying to
read Virgil in Latin. It resulted from being very absorbed in that pursuit. Here I am, living in
Virgils world already, and here comes this kid, this girl, who is going to tell me her story.
Actually, a few pages into the novel, Lavinia addresses the reader directly. I wrote that down,
and I just thought, Uh oh, I cant write a novel about Bronze Age Italy! What the hell do I know
about Bronze Age Italy? Well, what the hell does anyone know about Bronze Age Italy?

INTERVIEWER

Was it akin to creating a society on another planet?

31

LE GUIN

Of course. Historical novels and science fiction are very close. Youre either re-creating
something or modeling itits very much the same process. And I did do research, as people
who dont write novels love to call it. There were some things I really needed to know about
Bronze Age Italy, or early, early Rome. I had a lot of fun at the bottom of the stacks of the
Portland State library, digging out these books that were tremendous imagination-feeders
about early Roman religion and stuff like that. But basically, this book is a bit of an act of
ventriloquism. Lavinias telling me what to write.

INTERVIEWER

This was a classic example, then, of what you discuss in one of your essays in The Wave in the
Minda novel beginning with a clear sense of one character.

LE GUIN

With a voice. With a voice in the ear. That first page I wrote, which the novel progressed from,
is simply Lavinia speaking to usincluding me, apparently.

INTERVIEWER

If theres one clear development that I can detect in your work, its a shift toward economy.

LE GUIN

Well, Ive had a very long career. What Im aware of is that Ive eased up on the formality of
the prose. I like using a more colloquial voice to write in these days.

INTERVIEWER

32

Why do you think that is?

LE GUIN

In the sixties and seventies, the language of serious fantasy was still based largely on the styles
of writers of earlier generationsTolkien, of course, but also Dunsany, Eddison, MacDonald,
clear back to Malory. As I began to depart from the heroic or adventure tradition of fantasy, I
found a less formal vocabulary and a cadence better suited to what I had to say.

As for my writing voice in general, well, you get old and your language gets like your shoes or
your kitchen gearyou dont need fancy stuff any more. Youve learned how to just say it.
Rereading some of my earlier novels, I often think to myself, I didnt need all that stuffI
didnt have to say that much. I could cut that whole bit. Cut!

I want the story to have a rhythm that keeps moving forward. Because thats the whole point
of telling a story. Youre on a journeyyoure going from here to there. Its got to move. Even
if the rhythm is very complicated and subtle, thats whats going to carry the reader. This all
sounds a little mystical, I suppose.

INTERVIEWER

It also sounds musical.

LE GUIN

The whole process of getting oldit could have been better arranged. But you do learn some
things just by doing them over and over and by getting old doing them. And one of them is,
you really need less. And Im not talking minimalism, which is a highly self-conscious mannerist
style I cant write and dont want to. Im perfectly ready to describe a lot and be flowery and
emotive, but you can do that briefly and it works better. My model for this is late Beethoven.
He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the
late quartets. He knows where hes going and he just doesnt want to waste all that time
getting there. But if you listen, if youre with it, he takes you with him. I think sometimes about
old paintersthey get so simple in their means. Just so plain and simple. Because they know
they havent got time. One is aware of this as one gets older. You cant waste time.