This piece was featured first on Oct 22 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.
It was Ursula K Le Guin’s birthday yesterday. She would now be 97 years old. I can’t believe this. When I read her work, I feel a consciousness that is startlingly contemporary. So much of what she had to say is relevant to our precise moment in history. How can she have been born three days before Black Thursday, which rang in the Great Depression?
She is, of course, a product of Berkeley High School. Her father was a storied and now controversial anthropologist, who spent much of his career documenting California tribes. She, eventually, found her way to Portland, Oregon, where she made a career writing fantasy and science fiction novels.
For most of that time, she was a very popular, very well respected writer, for someone who wrote genre books. Most of the literary establishment did not consider her to be in the realm of literary stuff.
She stopped writing novels around 2010, though, and started writing other things. Poems, speeches, little essays. Her reputation started to change. Over the last five years, nine new books of her writings and poems have been released or rereleased including a Library of America edition of her Collected Poems, the tremendous books Words Are My Matter and The Wave in the Mind, as well as Conversations on Writing, a fascinating slim volume of her edited interviews with David Naimon.
Pick something she’s written about anything and you will be enriched by her writing on the topic. She had thoughts on political theory, environmental observation, civic action, women in the canon, motherhood, fandom, the rhythm of poetry, the state of California, anthropology. Her mind was wide-ranging and, especially in her essays, I think we see a model for how to engage with one’s own self as it grapples with a complex, contradictory world.
I got a chance to talk with David Naimon yesterday at Local Economy in Oakland about Conversations About Writing. He said many fascinating things, but this was my favorite: He described how Le Guin wrestled with her own thoughts and opinions and biases as vigorously as anyone else’s, which led her to evolve. Maybe not quickly with respect to some topics, but with seriousness and integrity.
It reminds me, too, of a line from her poem “Contemplation at McCoy Creek”: “Contemplation / shows me nothing discontinuous.” This world is built on every world that came right before, just a second ago. This self is built on all the selves you’ve been, all the way back to the start.
This is not an argument against change, that we cannot set the world (or ourselves) going in a new direction. Quite the opposite! As she said in one popular 2014 speech, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
She thought about so many things, but I do think she had one crucial theme: freedom. What is it to take seriously the idea of freedom? One must look at the conditions that enable freedom, the courage to enact freedom, the differences in our access to freedom, the history of freedom. As she said in that 2014 talk, she saw hard times coming, and in the face of them, she said, “We will need writers who can remember freedom.”
I leave you with an excerpt from her poem, “Werewomen,” tackling the theme from a slightly different angle.
“But listen there’s a moon out there
And I don’t want sex and I don’t want death
And I don’t want what you think I want
Only to be a free woman.
What is that, a free woman?
A young free woman?
An old free woman?
Asking for the moon.”
That is the kind of sci-fi Ursula K Le Guin wrote. She wanted us all to have the moon.
Happy birthday, Ursula. And thank you.
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum
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