An Evening with Ursula K. Le Guin
An evening with Ursula K. Le Guin, science
fiction, fantasy and reality essay author and a wonderful person and wise
raconteur of the human condition. This was the end-of-the-week nighttime
activity and it did a great deal to restore the faith in about sixty people who
showed up at Elliott Bay Book Company's downstairs author stage.
An evening with
Ursula K. Le Guin
at
Elliott Bay Book
Company
(Post-election distraction, Friday evening)
It gets dark here really early now, about 5:00 pm, now that we're back on Standard Time. I'd stopped in Elliott Bay Book Company's wonderful store on Thursday evening after the Art Walk to grab a quick bite (chocoloate, no flour, cupcake) and a cappuccino. While there I also grabbed their monthly newsletter and noted that the very next day their featured author would be Ursula K. Le Guin.
Le Guin is one of my favorite authors. She writes about a lot of things. She's published 20 novels, 11 collections of short stories, 6 collections of poetry, 4 critical feature-length essays, 12 children's books, 7 chapbooks, 4 translations, one screenplay and has edited 4 collections of other people's work. She's received the Nebula and Hugo awards numerous times as well as over 50 additional awards. She was born in 1929 in Berkeley of a writer, her mother, Theodora Kroeber, a writer who documented early California tribes and customs, and an anthropologist, her father, Alfred Kroeber, noted anthropologist who wrote what was considered the greatest text on Anthropology for the period 1923 through the mid-1950's. Her father died in Paris, of a heart attack, in 1960. He had been born in 1876. Ursula herself has a BA from Radcliffe and a Masters from Columbia and was a Fullbright scholar in France where she met her husband-to-be. She married the historian Charles Le Guin in 1953. They have three children and three grandchildren. They live in Portland, Oregon. Ursula limits her appearances to the academic institutions for which she's an adjunct professor or visiting lecturer, which number about 15, and to personal author appearances up and down the West Coast.
To put it mildly, this is one genetically-endowed human being. It's no surprise that she tried to get her first story published in Amazing Stories when she was only 11. Her upbringing and education and travels have equipped her magnificently well to write about societies. Her novels and short stories are as much about anthropology as they are about fantastic places and imaginative societies. She explores the relationships inherent in a wide variety of real and imagined societies with or without the limitations and restrictions of our present "real" societies.
I arrived early figuring that Ursula would draw a rather large crowd. I was right. I got a seat right next to the lectern in Elliott Bay's lower level, adjacent to their cafe and reading room. Management had set up about thirty chairs and by the time it was ten minutes to six, they were bringing out another thirty, completely filling the small reading room which is about 20 by 40 feet. The owner of Elliott Bay Book Company, Walter Carr, came out and spent a short time recounting his and Elliott Bay's long history with Ursula. The book store began their author series in 1979, about six years after the store had been opened and shortly after they had expanded to include the cafe space. Ursula was one of the first authors to trek to Pioneer Square for a reading and she has been back two or three times a year pretty much every year between then and now. In the meantime, Elliott Bay Books has hosted nearly 3,000 other authors in their daily afternoon or evening sessions.
Ursula read from her newly-published set of essays, "The Wave in the Mind," and it was an appropriate piece. It was about oppression, how the oppressed often are stuck in a blind corner where they not only don't see their oppression, but cannot imagine what it might be like to not be in an oppressed state. Oppressed peoples are kept literally "in the dark" because they are denied information about the way things might be elsewise or elsewhere. She cited many examples of this including the former Colonies of America and the complete lack of education for the slaves, the information draught which occurred after Stalin's takeover of the Russian federation, and the more recent phenomenon of restricting readings to a single book, be it the Bible or the Koran, and how that is the most severe form of oppression because it robs individuals of their imagination by denying them access to the thoughts and words of others.
I've always had a great fondness for individuals who can write and allow the reader to imagine inflection and eloquence in their mind as the reader imagines how someone might say or read something the author has written. Ursula, herself, can provide a really powerful voice to her words. She has also done about half-a-dozen "books on tapes" and I'm sure they're great listens just on the strength of hearing her read a few passages from a single essay. She opened the group up to questions after about twenty minutes of reading and commenting on her essay.
The first question dealt with her approach to writing children's books and came from a teacher. Ursula responded by saying that a writer always had to write "directly to" their reader. The writer had to place themselves into the reader's experience base, their likely level of world knowledge, their age and cultural values, and their likely reasons for reading. In other words, the writer had "to become" the reader and write to that person inside them which was the intended reader. World view images gained from age and experience needed to be placed on a shelf, out of the writer's reach. The writer had to use appropriate imagery and metaphors which would make sense to the intended reader. Of course, she said, that was true for a writer for any genre and any age group, it was just that children's books forced the writer into these frames of mind in a more strictly-defined manner.
Another person commented on how hard it seemed to be to enable non-readers to begin to read and were there any tricks which Ursula had come across which would enlighten or otherwise energize the non-reader. Ursula said there really weren't, that in the world of humans that reading was almost a gift. Sure, everyone could be taught to read and begin to appreciate books and other written works but that a "true reader" seemed to be a very small proportion of the population at large. Readers had a gift which drove them to devour and relish written works. Another person in the audience passed on her experience with a group of inner-city youth she had worked with in South Seattle and how after teaching them some reading basics for half the school year she introduced to them a few books written by others of that same age who were writing about their experiences in the city and with their parents and neighbors. This person indicated that a few in her class had been really taken by these books and once they started reading them, they opened up to more books about more broadly-defined sets of experiences, including fiction. Ursula responded that this method worked well and reflected back on her essay about oppression and how a book or a writing can be a tool of freedom because it shows the reader there is "another" way, a method or manner outside their own experience which is presented to them in a way where they can readily grasp the importance and significance of these new ideas.
I raised my hand and asked if she had thought about ways in which society could hasten the evolution of itself - had she come across any methods where those who might be stuck in their own "blind corner" might be shown a way out - a method which all of the rest of us might apply. I prefaced this question by stating that I thought each of us strived in our own way to improve ourselves and those actions were ongoing but that it seemed society at large sometimes got stuck in its attempts to improve. She responded that my question was not only a good one, but a difficult one because it was something which was almost too broad and deep to have any good answer. But, then she stopped, and said, "well, right off the top of my head, yes. There's a way. The arts. The arts indulge every culture, every frame of mind. If we were to introduce more art, more music and more live theater or drama or interpretive performances like dance, then, yes, art will advance a culture. And, it's something which is easy and we all can get involved in."
That sparked a series of questions and responses which began to explore the notions of how those who are oppressed don't have the tools of the imagination to evolve to a different condition and that the arts could introduce new ideas in a more benign manner, sometimes even cloaked so that the oppressors themselves aren't realizing what is going on but that the oppressed audience will. New ideas need to be introduced into the minds of the oppressed so they will begin to realize there are other ways of doing things. The oppressed, Ursula said, are often not even aware they are being oppressed and will eventually begin to assist their oppressors in their own oppression. At this point both Ursula and the audience began to explore the elements of oppression associated with those of one or another faith who are restricted - oppressed - into reading only one book or set of books and how that limits their imaginations and their world view. Be it the Koran or the Bible, whole societies are restricted to reading one set of writings while considering any other writings to be anathema to their beliefs. One individual in the audience, a thirty-something guy, then spoke up and said that he had been raised in Eastern Washington by very strict and fundamentalist parents and was not allowed to read anything but his textbooks and the bible. He said that in his high school there were some friends who talked about one of Ursula's novels, "The Dispossessed," and how he ought to read it.
"The Dispossessed" speaks to a culture of dystopia, a dark world view with its own beauty and culture and art. The young man said that he would sneak out into his family's garage and read the novel at odd times when he was home and supposed to be doing work for his parents. He said that the book opened his mind and gave him a new reality to ponder. He also allowed as how it freed him from the confines of his fundamentalist upbringing and caused him to eventually leave his parent's faith and set out on his own.
That led to a discussion of how it might be possible to introduce new thoughts and ideas into a culture where books other than the prescribed readings were considered either "sinful" or filled with "evil." Not an easy task, Ursula, allowed. Again, she considered how one might introduce art into such a setting where the art would be acceptable but might also have over- or undertones which spoke to a larger world or more diverse ideas. It's a challenge, she agreed, but one worth our efforts if we could engage in such activities.
After about 40 minutes of interaction, Ursula indicated that it was probably time to end the session and allow those who wanted her to sign books to do so. She set up at a little table near another table completely overflowing with her works. Elliott Bay had set up a little cash register and book mart in the reading room and before anyone realized it, over three-fourths of the audience formed a queue with books they wanted to purchase. I went to the signing table and pulled two of her books out of my pocket, books I'd brought from home - a very used copy of "The Left Hand of Darkness" and an equally used copy of "The Wind's Twelve Quarters," a collection of short stories. I asked her if she would mind signing old books and she said "I prefer old books which have been read, I'd love to sign them." She did and then after talking out of line with some other participants, I went to the book table and knew that the single copy of "The Lathe of Heaven" which had been there would be gone. It was. But, there were two differently-sized paperbacks of "The Left Hand of Darkness," and I chose the smaller sized one to supplant the well-worn copy I had and a copy of "The Dispossessed" and went to the back of the signing line, which was by then where everyone else had queued.
When I got up to the table again, I was the third-from-last in a line which had managed to take about 30 minutes to snake past Ursula. I thanked Ursula for her words and her outlook and told her that I had been re-invigorated and energized by her reading and wished her the best on her sabbatical - she had mentioned earlier that this reading was a bit unusual since she was taking a year off from appearances but had wanted to make some comments following the elections and thought her words might be of good cheer for her friends in Seattle. She signed my two additional books and I headed back up to First Avenue to catch the bus home.
All-in-all it was an optimistic end to what could have been a pessimistic week. No, my candidate did not win. Yes, the country had indicated it preferred a direction for the next four years with which I disagreed - seriously disagreed. But, this is the land of the free and I was going to be free, one way or the other. My freedom to explore, to enjoy art, to schlepp about this beautiful town had not been endangered and by doing what I like for the past two days my energies and spirit had been restored. I'd also learned how much of a restorative impact the arts have - first hand. I was also encouraged by what Ursula had said about freeing oppressed peoples through the arts, through new ideas and through the imagination. Words I happen to agree whole-heartedly with and words which have stood me well in my own life.
Three shots of Ursula K. Le Guin at the lectern in Elliott Bay Book Company's downstairs reading room.
Two images, at eye-level, of Ursula signing books for her fans. She's quite a woman, quite a person, quite
a human. She's got a wonderful voice and an amazing outlook on the world and the lives of it's people.
One of the folks I was talking with offered to snap this shot of Ursula signing my new
copy of "The Left Hand of Darkness." It was a real treat to hear her and I look forward
to her next appearance at Elliott Bay Books.
Cheers,
Chas
(Post-election distraction, Friday evening)
It gets dark here really early now, about 5:00 pm, now that we're back on Standard Time. I'd stopped in Elliott Bay Book Company's wonderful store on Thursday evening after the Art Walk to grab a quick bite (chocoloate, no flour, cupcake) and a cappuccino. While there I also grabbed their monthly newsletter and noted that the very next day their featured author would be Ursula K. Le Guin.
Le Guin is one of my favorite authors. She writes about a lot of things. She's published 20 novels, 11 collections of short stories, 6 collections of poetry, 4 critical feature-length essays, 12 children's books, 7 chapbooks, 4 translations, one screenplay and has edited 4 collections of other people's work. She's received the Nebula and Hugo awards numerous times as well as over 50 additional awards. She was born in 1929 in Berkeley of a writer, her mother, Theodora Kroeber, a writer who documented early California tribes and customs, and an anthropologist, her father, Alfred Kroeber, noted anthropologist who wrote what was considered the greatest text on Anthropology for the period 1923 through the mid-1950's. Her father died in Paris, of a heart attack, in 1960. He had been born in 1876. Ursula herself has a BA from Radcliffe and a Masters from Columbia and was a Fullbright scholar in France where she met her husband-to-be. She married the historian Charles Le Guin in 1953. They have three children and three grandchildren. They live in Portland, Oregon. Ursula limits her appearances to the academic institutions for which she's an adjunct professor or visiting lecturer, which number about 15, and to personal author appearances up and down the West Coast.
To put it mildly, this is one genetically-endowed human being. It's no surprise that she tried to get her first story published in Amazing Stories when she was only 11. Her upbringing and education and travels have equipped her magnificently well to write about societies. Her novels and short stories are as much about anthropology as they are about fantastic places and imaginative societies. She explores the relationships inherent in a wide variety of real and imagined societies with or without the limitations and restrictions of our present "real" societies.
I arrived early figuring that Ursula would draw a rather large crowd. I was right. I got a seat right next to the lectern in Elliott Bay's lower level, adjacent to their cafe and reading room. Management had set up about thirty chairs and by the time it was ten minutes to six, they were bringing out another thirty, completely filling the small reading room which is about 20 by 40 feet. The owner of Elliott Bay Book Company, Walter Carr, came out and spent a short time recounting his and Elliott Bay's long history with Ursula. The book store began their author series in 1979, about six years after the store had been opened and shortly after they had expanded to include the cafe space. Ursula was one of the first authors to trek to Pioneer Square for a reading and she has been back two or three times a year pretty much every year between then and now. In the meantime, Elliott Bay Books has hosted nearly 3,000 other authors in their daily afternoon or evening sessions.
Ursula read from her newly-published set of essays, "The Wave in the Mind," and it was an appropriate piece. It was about oppression, how the oppressed often are stuck in a blind corner where they not only don't see their oppression, but cannot imagine what it might be like to not be in an oppressed state. Oppressed peoples are kept literally "in the dark" because they are denied information about the way things might be elsewise or elsewhere. She cited many examples of this including the former Colonies of America and the complete lack of education for the slaves, the information draught which occurred after Stalin's takeover of the Russian federation, and the more recent phenomenon of restricting readings to a single book, be it the Bible or the Koran, and how that is the most severe form of oppression because it robs individuals of their imagination by denying them access to the thoughts and words of others.
I've always had a great fondness for individuals who can write and allow the reader to imagine inflection and eloquence in their mind as the reader imagines how someone might say or read something the author has written. Ursula, herself, can provide a really powerful voice to her words. She has also done about half-a-dozen "books on tapes" and I'm sure they're great listens just on the strength of hearing her read a few passages from a single essay. She opened the group up to questions after about twenty minutes of reading and commenting on her essay.
The first question dealt with her approach to writing children's books and came from a teacher. Ursula responded by saying that a writer always had to write "directly to" their reader. The writer had to place themselves into the reader's experience base, their likely level of world knowledge, their age and cultural values, and their likely reasons for reading. In other words, the writer had "to become" the reader and write to that person inside them which was the intended reader. World view images gained from age and experience needed to be placed on a shelf, out of the writer's reach. The writer had to use appropriate imagery and metaphors which would make sense to the intended reader. Of course, she said, that was true for a writer for any genre and any age group, it was just that children's books forced the writer into these frames of mind in a more strictly-defined manner.
Another person commented on how hard it seemed to be to enable non-readers to begin to read and were there any tricks which Ursula had come across which would enlighten or otherwise energize the non-reader. Ursula said there really weren't, that in the world of humans that reading was almost a gift. Sure, everyone could be taught to read and begin to appreciate books and other written works but that a "true reader" seemed to be a very small proportion of the population at large. Readers had a gift which drove them to devour and relish written works. Another person in the audience passed on her experience with a group of inner-city youth she had worked with in South Seattle and how after teaching them some reading basics for half the school year she introduced to them a few books written by others of that same age who were writing about their experiences in the city and with their parents and neighbors. This person indicated that a few in her class had been really taken by these books and once they started reading them, they opened up to more books about more broadly-defined sets of experiences, including fiction. Ursula responded that this method worked well and reflected back on her essay about oppression and how a book or a writing can be a tool of freedom because it shows the reader there is "another" way, a method or manner outside their own experience which is presented to them in a way where they can readily grasp the importance and significance of these new ideas.
I raised my hand and asked if she had thought about ways in which society could hasten the evolution of itself - had she come across any methods where those who might be stuck in their own "blind corner" might be shown a way out - a method which all of the rest of us might apply. I prefaced this question by stating that I thought each of us strived in our own way to improve ourselves and those actions were ongoing but that it seemed society at large sometimes got stuck in its attempts to improve. She responded that my question was not only a good one, but a difficult one because it was something which was almost too broad and deep to have any good answer. But, then she stopped, and said, "well, right off the top of my head, yes. There's a way. The arts. The arts indulge every culture, every frame of mind. If we were to introduce more art, more music and more live theater or drama or interpretive performances like dance, then, yes, art will advance a culture. And, it's something which is easy and we all can get involved in."
That sparked a series of questions and responses which began to explore the notions of how those who are oppressed don't have the tools of the imagination to evolve to a different condition and that the arts could introduce new ideas in a more benign manner, sometimes even cloaked so that the oppressors themselves aren't realizing what is going on but that the oppressed audience will. New ideas need to be introduced into the minds of the oppressed so they will begin to realize there are other ways of doing things. The oppressed, Ursula said, are often not even aware they are being oppressed and will eventually begin to assist their oppressors in their own oppression. At this point both Ursula and the audience began to explore the elements of oppression associated with those of one or another faith who are restricted - oppressed - into reading only one book or set of books and how that limits their imaginations and their world view. Be it the Koran or the Bible, whole societies are restricted to reading one set of writings while considering any other writings to be anathema to their beliefs. One individual in the audience, a thirty-something guy, then spoke up and said that he had been raised in Eastern Washington by very strict and fundamentalist parents and was not allowed to read anything but his textbooks and the bible. He said that in his high school there were some friends who talked about one of Ursula's novels, "The Dispossessed," and how he ought to read it.
"The Dispossessed" speaks to a culture of dystopia, a dark world view with its own beauty and culture and art. The young man said that he would sneak out into his family's garage and read the novel at odd times when he was home and supposed to be doing work for his parents. He said that the book opened his mind and gave him a new reality to ponder. He also allowed as how it freed him from the confines of his fundamentalist upbringing and caused him to eventually leave his parent's faith and set out on his own.
That led to a discussion of how it might be possible to introduce new thoughts and ideas into a culture where books other than the prescribed readings were considered either "sinful" or filled with "evil." Not an easy task, Ursula, allowed. Again, she considered how one might introduce art into such a setting where the art would be acceptable but might also have over- or undertones which spoke to a larger world or more diverse ideas. It's a challenge, she agreed, but one worth our efforts if we could engage in such activities.
After about 40 minutes of interaction, Ursula indicated that it was probably time to end the session and allow those who wanted her to sign books to do so. She set up at a little table near another table completely overflowing with her works. Elliott Bay had set up a little cash register and book mart in the reading room and before anyone realized it, over three-fourths of the audience formed a queue with books they wanted to purchase. I went to the signing table and pulled two of her books out of my pocket, books I'd brought from home - a very used copy of "The Left Hand of Darkness" and an equally used copy of "The Wind's Twelve Quarters," a collection of short stories. I asked her if she would mind signing old books and she said "I prefer old books which have been read, I'd love to sign them." She did and then after talking out of line with some other participants, I went to the book table and knew that the single copy of "The Lathe of Heaven" which had been there would be gone. It was. But, there were two differently-sized paperbacks of "The Left Hand of Darkness," and I chose the smaller sized one to supplant the well-worn copy I had and a copy of "The Dispossessed" and went to the back of the signing line, which was by then where everyone else had queued.
When I got up to the table again, I was the third-from-last in a line which had managed to take about 30 minutes to snake past Ursula. I thanked Ursula for her words and her outlook and told her that I had been re-invigorated and energized by her reading and wished her the best on her sabbatical - she had mentioned earlier that this reading was a bit unusual since she was taking a year off from appearances but had wanted to make some comments following the elections and thought her words might be of good cheer for her friends in Seattle. She signed my two additional books and I headed back up to First Avenue to catch the bus home.
All-in-all it was an optimistic end to what could have been a pessimistic week. No, my candidate did not win. Yes, the country had indicated it preferred a direction for the next four years with which I disagreed - seriously disagreed. But, this is the land of the free and I was going to be free, one way or the other. My freedom to explore, to enjoy art, to schlepp about this beautiful town had not been endangered and by doing what I like for the past two days my energies and spirit had been restored. I'd also learned how much of a restorative impact the arts have - first hand. I was also encouraged by what Ursula had said about freeing oppressed peoples through the arts, through new ideas and through the imagination. Words I happen to agree whole-heartedly with and words which have stood me well in my own life.
Three shots of Ursula K. Le Guin at the lectern in Elliott Bay Book Company's downstairs reading room.
Two images, at eye-level, of Ursula signing books for her fans. She's quite a woman, quite a person, quite
a human. She's got a wonderful voice and an amazing outlook on the world and the lives of it's people.
One of the folks I was talking with offered to snap this shot of Ursula signing my new
copy of "The Left Hand of Darkness." It was a real treat to hear her and I look forward
to her next appearance at Elliott Bay Books.
Cheers,
Chas
Posted: Sun - November 7, 2004 at 10:08 AM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM