Q: Why is Ursula Le Guin my favorite author?
A: A few years back, our book group discussed a novel by Ursula Le Guin, and someone asked me that question. I was stumped, and I had to think about it for a few years before I could figure it out. There is no one novel or story or essay that I can point to as my "aha" moment. I've been reading her since I was a teenager (that's about twenty years ago).
And over time, she grew on me. I read and love her novels and stories, but I think it was the forewords that really drew me in. I remember reading something about how she had changed her thinking since writing
A Wizard of Earthsea. She had originally thought that it made no difference whether the main character was a man or a woman, but later understood why it did indeed matter. I liked that she was willing to admit mistakes, and it taught me something about feminism as well. Over time, she's told me a lot of things about feminism, too, most recently about respecting the work I do in the home and with my children. Things you can't hear too many times, because so many voices are shouting the opposite.
Then I read her books of essays
The Language of the Night and
Dancing at the Edge of the World. Fantasy, sci fi, feminism, Jung, wow. She put words to things I had been feeling, taught me things I needed to know. In particular, when I took my first college writing classes and heard disparaging remarks about fantasy and science fiction, I
REALLY needed her voice telling me that fantasy and science fiction is serious literature - not only that, but necessary for our understanding of ourselves as human beings. From her essay "The Child and the Shadow (1974)":
"The great fantasies, myths and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious - symbol and archetype. Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the truths that lie too deep to utter."
and, more simply,
"Fantasy is the language of the inner self."
Carl Jung's work is central to my world view - the unconscious, the collective unconscious, symbol, archetype, shadow, and dreams. When a story speaks to me, I know why. It's because it's gone down into that deep place, what I think of as my inner landscape, and touched something that had been needing it. When the aftermath of 9/11 hit and people started fearing "terrorists," I knew which part of that was fear of the shadow. When I have a particularly strong dream, I know well enough to write it down. When my son started drawing self-portraits of monsters, I knew he was expressing something from his own deep place, and I knew well enough not to tell him to stop.
But who goes down the street chatting about the collective unconscious? Who comments on the shadow over their breakfast cereal? Let me know, I'd be curious to meet them. In the meantime, I can always turn to Ursula Le Guin's essays in order to put voice to my own thoughts and feelings. And I can always turn to her novels for that deep archetype groove.
Speaking of Jung, there is a relationship between the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious. The art we all make is a wellspring from one that flows to the other. And so when I read someone's story, my unconscious, or my inner landscape, or just plain "that deep place," touches hers, lives in her world. And as everyone's different, each author's unconscious has an entirely different feeling. Everything we've done or felt or read, all the authors we've loved, make our way in there. And the inner landscape I enter when I read her stories feels so much like the one I live in, so much like home. Which is the other reason she's my favorite author.
I feel like I should put a big section in here about what I like about her novels, but instead I want to skip on ahead to the next bit, the last reason she's my favorite author.
She's respectful and kind. To her characters, her readers, her writing students. You can't say that about every author, no matter how famous. I used to admire all the authors whose books I enjoyed. But then I got to noticing that sometimes, they were entirely self-absorbed. Sometimes, they liked to have a good laugh at somebody else's expense. Ever met anybody like that? But I have found Ursula Le Guin to be consistently thoughtful of the larger community we live in. And, speaking of the larger community, she's been so supportive of science fiction and fantasy, and especially science fiction and fantasy by women.
Even in Australia.
(That was both homage to Judith Viorst and a reference to a writing workshop that Ursula Le Guin held in Australia way back when.)
So there is a difference between liking to read an author and liking an author as a person, and from what I know of Ursula Le Guin, I like her
as a person.
There used to be this wonderful writing workshop for women, Flight of the Mind. It was on an old monastery in the middle of Oregon, and you stayed there for a week and walked in the forest and ate delicious vegetarian meals and wrote. I was lucky enough to take a workshop from Ursula Le Guin. I didn't write anything particularly good there, which was a shame, but the experience will stick with me for a lifetime.
Especially the way she workshopped. There aren't any photocopiers in old monasteries, so we read our work out loud. Now, I have taken a lot of writing classes and then gone and gotten an MFA, and my experience with workshops is that you get a photocopy, you look over it, you make your comments, and you try really hard to find something to praise, in order to balance out your criticisms. The trouble is, you can't always like every piece. And finding something to praise often feels false to me, even if it isn't.
But this is what she did instead. She listened intently, and respectfully, and from that deep place, to what we read. She closed her eyes when we read our stories, and she nodded, with a genuine smile on her face. There were no judgments on whether a story was good or bad. There was only a story, and a teller, and a listener. And that's what matters.
Tags: ursula le guin, writing
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