Echoes of Le Guin, Part III: Recommendations and Insights

Echoes of Le Guin Part III: Recommendations and Insights

Happy June! It’s summer and there is no better time to relax in a lounge chair while soaking in the sun and enjoying a good read. With that in mind, I’ve asked five of The Burning Hearth’s authors to share some of their UKLG recommendations and to comment on their choices; and I asked biographer, Julie Phillips, to share a few things she thought might be important for people to know about Le Guin.

Yielding insightful responses from the authors for Ursula’s work, Part III is intended to offer those who might not be as familiar with the massive output that is Le Guin’s oeuvre a place to begin in reading her work. But even if you’re a highly read, Ursula enthusiast, you will enjoy reading these authors’ comments, which are coupled with insight, provided by Julie, into Ursula’s feelings towards home.

Before launching into their recommendations and insights, I have the pleasure of presenting Part III’s featured author, Isaac Yuen. In many ways, Isaac is the reason this series is even happening. In March of 2022, Isaac was the guest on David Naimon’s Crafting with Ursula podcast. In April of 22, while rearranging my bedroom (funny how life can be one big metaphor), I decided to revisit this podcast to keep me company while sitting on the floor, pushing my bed around my room with my feet, attempting to decide on its final resting spot. Somewhere in the middle of the podcast, and while placing the head of my bed in front of an east-facing window (it’s still there today), Isaac said something that made me stop. I haven’t gone back to find that “something” for fear that somehow the magic in the moment might be lost. But his “something” made me ask this question of myself. “Why am I writing realism, when every story in my head that I really want to write is speculative by its nature?”

I decided two things that day. One: To focus on speculative writing going forward, both in my writing and on my website. Two: To somehow, someway, interview David Naimon and Isaac Yuen. And folks, here we are.

So without further ado, I present to you the thoughtful and most generous, Isaac Yuen.

Isaac Yuen

BH: Let me start by saying you have a beautiful website. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the environment and speculative literature. Why the speculative with the environment? What is it you believe this pairing affords the writer that perhaps, realism does not?

Isaac: Thanks so much for visiting my corner of the internet. Ekostories began a decade ago as a space for me to cultivate a regular writing practice, and now it’s grown into a living archive for my explorations on themes around nature, culture, and identity.

Why the speculative with the environment? That’s a good question. When I first began my foray into creative writing, I wanted to understand the stories that shaped my own mindset and taste. Why was a particular novel good? How did this one film send shivers down my spine? What made a particular narrative woven into a game, or an artist’s work, or a piece of music resonate with me?

Through these questions I delved into my inclination for the speculative, which wasn’t a surprise. Like so many (and like Ursula with her Fantastic Tales), I grew up on science fiction and fantasy stories. For me, they were not only formative from an imaginative sense, but also on a language level. As a first-generation immigrant, I learned a lot of English through reading books like A Wrinkle in Time and watching shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation. Naturally, exposure to the speculative had a big influence on me. Even today I can still trace those throughlines in my creative processes: Thought experiments, what-if scenarios, science metaphors, and morality plays all continue to shape how I think and what I like to write.

I feel this familiarity with the speculative made me more receptive towards a diverse range of narratives. There’s almost an improv mentality at work here, of embracing the “yes, and…” notion when coming across an unusual structure or conceit instead of dismissing it because things might not match a specific register or not considered “realistic.”

In some sense, at least growing up, the situations portrayed in many works of realistic fiction seemed just as fanciful as any speculative fiction. Maybe it came down to a matter of being able to relate. Plus realistic fiction as it is perceived now, has not always been the norm. Long before its prominence and still around the world today, there existed and continue to exist fairy tales, folk lore, and myths that meld the fantastical with the quotidian. I feel like more and more fiction is blending the real and the unreal together in interesting ways. Perhaps the distinctions are blurring as genres evolve and voices diversify. So much that is set in stone or taken for granted as is not so sound in this world anyways, so this is wonderful.

I feel the ability to speculate, to envision alternate modes of being, lies at the heart of environmentalism. If our current way of doing things got us into our present-day predicament, imagining new scenarios (or rediscovering old paths that have been ignored or erased) to get ourselves to a better spot is not only sensical, but vital. A lot of the stories I have featured in Ekostories over the years emphasize these other pathways, different vantage points on scales grand and small, all striving to achieve healthier and more sustainable relationships with the earth and its other inhabitants.

BH: You state in your “About” section that you draw inspiration from the author who has brought us all together. How so?

Isaac: It’s not hyperbole to say that Ursula’s stories literally kickstarted my creative writing journey. (I’m reminded of one of her essays in The Language of the Night, where she sincerely hoped that young writers knew what they’re getting themselves into.) Not that I ever aspired to write the way she did, but I felt that her work was tapping into some element I couldn’t get anywhere else. It was through this interview she did in Harper’s that got me rereading her work:

“If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”  — “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” —Harper’s Magazine, February 2008

I realized how her Earthsea books had worked this way for me. They were this fun fantasy series I read while growing up, but they transformed into these beautifully wrought, deeply meaningful touchstones when I came back to them as an adult. Not many stories survive this journey through adolescence—as someone who is both wary and enamored by the power of nostalgia, I like to check! Naturally I wanted to understand how she accomplished this, and that initial motivation served as the impetus for exploring the power of stories for affecting personal and societal change. What were the devices used to make a narrative “sticky”? What insights can only be conveyed indirectly? What role does rhythm and cadence of language play in storytelling? How can the conceptual be incorporated into the creative in an artful way? These are things I continue to learn from Ursula’s oeuvre of essays, poems, and stories, even as she drew upon anthropology, science, philosophy, literature, political theory, and much more.

Another source of inspiration that came from Ursula stemmed from her Daoist influences. I definitely felt a kind of kindred connection there, with her reaching from the West to the East while I came from the East to the West. The way she wove this philosophy into her literature and her way of being in the world moved me; I began to see how this lifelong influence created ripples in the core current running through all her work, how it helped her stay grounded, avoid being pigeonholed, so that she could both find and forge her own way. She mentions this in an interview with The Paris Review, that Taoism is just “part of the structure of her mind.” I feel the same. So you can imagine my delight, Constance, when you asked all of us to read and comment on passages on Ursula’s rendition of the Tao Te Ching, which as she noted, served as “the deepest spring.”

BH: I noticed that you have an upcoming collection titled Utter Earth to be published Spring of 24. What, if anything, can you share with us about it?

Isaac:  Yes, thanks for asking. Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World is my debut essay collection that’s forthcoming with West Virginia University Press. Here are some one-line pitches I’ve come up for the book: An animal book designed for animal-loving adults. A sort of improvised jazz riffing around life on Earth. A self-help guide drawing upon lessons found in nature. A celebration of this planet’s riotous wonders through wordplay and earthplay.

I hope at least one of those makes sense.

So much writing about nature and the environment these days is dour and sobering, and justifiably so, because the issues surrounding those topics are heavy and complex. But having explored environmental issues most of my academic, professional, and personal life, I want to contribute to the conversation now through highlighting joy and lightness. What are the things we are fighting so hard to protect and why are they worth saving? Wonder is key for me, and also levity. So essays in the collection are about topics like, what creatures would be best to invite to your next party? Or, which lifeforms would provide good career advice? Or, how one can imagine a beast in their mind the same way they can build a bear at one of those mall workshops? I’m inspired by the stylings of writers like Amy Leach, Brian Doyle, and Ross Gay, all of whom like to go romping and traipsing through the more-than-human world with lush sentences, strange connections, and unforgettable descriptions.

But at the same time, I recognize the need to balance light-hearted fare with a sense of poignancy; the work can’t be all facts and fluff. Toward that end I found myself returning to Ursula’s work, for a certain quality embedded in her worlds and words. In the grace of trees and animals in her realm suffused with magic. In the contentment of seeing dragons dancing on the other wind. In the making and remaking of myths across planets that seems so alien to ours yet are not. Ursula had this knack for having a foot in the natural world while weaving deeply human tales. Utter, Earth draws from this core philosophy, straddling between the human and more-than-human, rooted in the sounds and rhythms of language, attempting to emulate Ursula’s skill to wield words with precision while being mindful of the power of their absence. I hope it’s as fun and meaningful to read as it was to write!

“Echoes of Le Guin” Part III: Recommendations and Insights

BH: According to the Ursula K. Le Guin website, she published 23 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 11 volumes of poetry, 13 children’s books, five collections of essays, and four works of translation. The amount of Le Guin’s output and the range of topics she explored are remarkable, to say the least.

I think we probably all agree that The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, Earthsea, and The Lathe of Heaven are her most recognized works. With the exception of these four, please share three to five writings from UKLG’s oeuvre that you feel are must reads, along with descriptions why. Here, I’m going to direct this question in a slightly different way to Julie. As her biographer, what are three to five things you feel are important for people to know or understand about Ursula and why?

Susan Defreitas

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” paints a portrait of people who enjoy a life of beauty and ease by ignoring the suffering of one abused and neglected child. The child at the center of TEHANU may as well be that child—and to make such a person the hero of a book, along with the old woman who protects her…I just think it’s tremendously subversive. It is very much the opposite of “the killer story.”

VOICES is a revolution against the hard fist of colonialism, as a native people rise up, and claim as their greatest power…poetry. As far as I’m concerned, to have a climax as tense, as vivid, an as engaging as the one in this novel, in a way that completely avoids violence, is truly visionary—a game changer. This is a text I think is especially useful for writers of fiction, for that reason: it models a different sort of climax, a “velvet revolution.”

In ALWAYS COMING HOME Le Guin left us music (literally), but also figuratively, I think. Kim Stanley Robinson noted in a conversation with David Naimon that he wished Le Guin had told us more about how the Kesh people got to where they are, as a sustainable culture—but to my mind, this book is like a pitch pipe left lying on the ground, the artifact of an ancient/future people. We don’t know how they made it, but it we pick it up and blow through it, we’ll get that exact tone, that perfect pitch: What a truly sustainable human culture might be like. What we might evolve toward as a species, I think—something to shoot for. The Kesh are us, but a version of us that has learned to curtail its own most destructive impulses, and to embrace the mystery at the heart of existence, while truly making ourselves at home here on earth.

Kyle Winkler

1. Words Are My Matter – a collection of nonfiction published by Small Beer Press. It’s an incredibly solid collection on language. 

2. Language of the Night – her most classic collection of speeches, essays, including “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?”

3. Dancing at the Edge of the World – maybe a collection that folks will miss, but shouldn’t, because it has “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in it. A must-read for Le Guin fans.

William Alexander

William: Cheek by Jowl, a slender and often overlooked book of essays, is essential reading for every unrealist, everyone who writes for children, and everyone searching for narrative paths through the damaged landscape of the Anthropocene.

I also recommend Catwings for all of the truths about the nature of cats that Ursula reveals by giving them wings, and Voices—the second book in The Annals of the Western Shore—for its revolutionary love of libraries.

Kylie Mirmohamadi

Kylie: My first choice is the short story, ‘Sur’. In the essay ‘Heroes’, Ursula says that writing this story was ‘one of the pleasantest experiences of my life’, and it is this joy that draws me to it. Its joyfulness, and playfulness, and seriousness, and for what it has to say about heroism, about story, about gender, and women’s lives. It recounts a successful (I question this word, this value, this aspiration, as I type; something that I believe this story asks its reader to do) expedition to the South Pole, made by a group of Latin American women the year before Amundsen and Scott’s ‘first’ arrival there. The women keep their achievement (again, the question) quiet, confining all accounts of it to the attics in their houses; family stories, for grandchildren, ‘But they must not let Mr Amundsen know! He would be terribly embarrassed and disappointed. There is no need for him or anyone else outside the family to know. We left no footprints, even.’

Yes, that is a (joyful) rendering of the Hero as someone who needs guarding from the truth, possessing a child’s fragile ego, but Le Guin leaves us with a deeply serious note at the end of this story, and a summing up of it. We left no footprints, even. No footprints, but, like something imprinted in the snow, that elegant sentence, the last word falling, dropping, unevenly.

For leaving no mark is the women’s way in ‘Sur’. Not even at the Pole, where they left no sign, glad in this act of erasure (not erasure, non-inscription) ‘for some man longing to be the first might come some day, and find it, and know then what a fool he had been, and break his heart.’

The men’s expeditionary movements are all about marking. They leave behind (the official) maps, and names, and published accounts.

And abandoned structures. When the women visit the Scott camp, they find the area around it ‘disgusting’ with animal skins and bone litter and rubbish, and the hut not much better: an open tea tin, empty meat tins, discarded biscuits, dog shit. ‘No doubt,’ our narrator tells us, ‘the last occupants had had to leave in a hurry, perhaps even in a blizzard. All the same, they could have closed the tea tin. But housekeeping, the art of the infinite, is no game for amateurs.’

It’s perhaps not heroic to bother to put the lid on the tea-tin, to pick up the biscuits, to clean and clear only to clean and clear again. But the women practice all kinds of anti-Heroic behaviour in this story. They don’t subdue or struggle against the landscape; they work with it, live with it, literally live in, under the ice. They practice home-making as well as house-keeping there, and Teresa gives birth in that icy womb, in an act of surrender, generating, creating rather than conquering. They refuse hierarchy among themselves, the fetishization of leadership, the system of marks and signs and monuments. Indeed, the ice figures that Berta lovingly and skillfully sculpts on the Barrier, which she could not take north with her, are anti-monuments, for they cannot be mounted, transported, celebrated: ‘That is the penalty for carving in water.’

In ‘“Carving in Water”: Journey/Journals and the Images of Women’s Writings in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Sur”’ (LIT 7, 1996, 51-62) Anne K. Kaler argues persuasively that in ‘Sur’ Le Guin ‘provide(s) a cleverly-coded map for women writers striving toward the “tin-mines” of professional writing’. I see the same cartographic, nurturing, guiding, impulse in my next choice –  ‘The Writer On, And At, Her Work’. (I will try to resist the urge to quote this beautiful, generous poem too extensively – it can be found, among other places, in the collection The Wave in the Mind).

Ursula shows us the woman working, writing, being. She suggests that this figure – the working, writing, plurality of woman – brings words and worlds into being, brings herself into being too: ‘Words are my way of being/ human, woman, me.’ And those upside-down values again. She works against the idea of the warrior hero (‘Seems to me she has better things/ to do than be a hero’), and the Goddess, the ‘Archetype/ at the typewriter.’ This luminous, moving passage:

Her work, I really think her work

isn’t fighting, isn’t winning,

isn’t being the Earth, isn’t being the Moon.

Her work, I really think her work

is finding what her real work is

and doing it,

her work, her own work,

her being human,

her being in the world.

If she does play god (for ‘making things/ is a kind of godly business’), let it be ‘Aphrodite the Maker, without whom/ “nothing is born into the shining/ borders of light, nor is anything lovely or lovable made,”’; let it be ‘Spider Grandmother, spinning,/ Thought Woman, making it all up,/ Coyote Woman, playing’.

Writers, all writers, can find consolation here, for those times when they follow themselves, write what they want, and find themselves in darkness. The sympathy of shared experience; the hope, too, that after all the searching, they will find – hidden and concealed and elusive though it has been – ‘a map/ of the forest/ that you drew yourself/ before you ever went there.’

My third choice is Lavinia, which was one of my few exposures to Le Guin’s work before David Naimon’s podcast series ‘Crafting with Ursula’ catapulted me into her universe. Perhaps this book’s time has come (again), in the surge of interest in re-telling mythology from different viewpoints, and in narratives of women’s power; the witchy, symbolic, earthly sources of it. I have always been fascinated by narratives that spring explicitly from other narratives, generating stories that are also about Story. In this portrait, prised from between the lines of The Aeneid, Lavinia, daughter of the King of Latium, encounters the future Virgil, the ailing, dying Poet, and the voice which will speak her into existence. There is so much to admire in this book – its world-making, its exquisite but never encumbering detail of daily ancient life, its unflinching appraisal of the decisions we all make and don’t make, the enigmatic ending – but it is these meetings between the young girl and her poet in the sacred woods of Albunea that shine for me. They are tender and profound; ripe with ideas about time, and story, and fate, and regret, and art, and mortality. The poignancy of the poet, with ‘his kindness, his searching kindness, sensitive to every suffering’, reflecting on his work, reckoning with time and death.

The poet, sad and desperate and weary, addresses Lavinia, saying that he saw Aeneas, but not her, not until it was too late: ‘You’re almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido’s. But it’s there, that life ungiven, there, in you.’

Like the classical mythology that it echoes, gives new voice to, re-births, I am grateful for Lavinia because it allows (urges, compels) me to reflect on what it is to be human, and on the nature of story-telling.

Julie Phillips

One thing you might want to know about Ursula is that she never made lists of favorites. Also, her own work speaks to different people in different ways, so both of your questions are ones whose answer depends on the person asking. I don’t know which of her books will take the top of your head off and rearrange your particular mind.

Home was a charged idea for her, one I don’t fully understand. Here are three quotes about home, which are signposts on my own journey to figuring out what she meant.

“If you have really had a home, been a homebody, maybe it’s easier to reconstitute one, wherever you are … You sort of have the home knack. I never lived anywhere I really felt not at home (except Moscow, Idaho, and even it had redeeming features).”

“A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.”

“Home…is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are….They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home.”

Isaac Yuen

Isaac: In no particular order and beyond what we have already mentioned:

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, 1975: The short story collection contains a lovely mix of her original science fiction and fantasy, along with prequels to her more famous works. Highlights for me include “The Word of Unbinding” (connected to The Farthest Shore), “The Day Before the Revolution” (connected to The Dispossessed), “The Stars Below”, and “The Direction of the Road”. Of course, the collection also includes “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas”, arguably her most famous and most taught short story.

Changing Planes, 2003: A speculative travelogue made up of vignettes and ethnographic profiles of alien cultures. Perhaps Ursula at her most satirical, but there’s also a reflective, mournful edge to many of these tales. Highlights for me include “Feeling at Home with the Hennebet”, “The Building”, and “The Nna Mmoy Language”. I like those stories because they are all a little bit inexplicable and leave me somewhat unsettled, which is a great place to be as a reader.

Lavinia, 2008: Ursula’s final novel. I would argue it’s both her most beautifully written work and her most overlooked. It’s a masterclass of breathing life into a character that has been denied a voice. I’ve written about it in the past and I can’t recommend it enough for anyone interested in delving into Le Guin: The end is sometimes a good place to begin.

Cheek by Jowl, 2009: An essay collection exploring the importance of fantasy, animal stories, and children literature. As someone writing at the intersection between the human and the more-than-human world, I appreciated Ursula’s take on this particular subject matter, delivered with her trademark wit.

As always, I’m so grateful to these six authors for taking the time to answer my questions and to share their thoughts and words with all of you here at The Burning Hearth. For full author bios please visit “Echoes of Le Guin” Part I.

Thank you, readers, for taking the time to stop by and read “Echoes of Le Guin.” I can’t believe we are already halfway through this series.

Upcoming events at The Burning Hearth:

In July, I interview Myna Chang about her speculative fiction group Electric Sheep and her book The Potential of Radio and Rain.

In August, Part IV of “Echoes of Le Guin” posts with featured author Kylie Mirmohamadi.

In September, Rotation #2 of “Circling Saturn with David Naimon” posts. I’m very curious to see if I can elicit another “ew, Constance,” from him. If you haven’t already read Rotation #1, click here to find out what made him respond this way.

Happy Summer Reading,

Constance