Welcome to The Burning Hearth and the “Echoes of Le Guin” series Part IV: A Matter of Trust.
I trust those of you following this series have done so because you are enjoying the ongoing conversation between William Alexander, Susan DeFreitas, Kylie Mirmohamadi, Julie Phillips, Isaac Yuen, and Kyle Winkler as they collectively ponder a different question centered around Ursula K. Le Guin in each post. I also trust those of you new to “Echoes of Le Guin” have arrived here with a sense of curiosity regarding the conversation they are engaged in. I can promise Part IV: A Matter of Trust will not disappoint. At the heart of the discussion is the trust integral to the author/reader relationship. A relationship that Le Guin was profoundly aware of, as our my guest authors.
Before launching into their collective discussion, I’m delighted to first share my interview with featured author Kylie Mirmohamadi. I could tell you what a joy it is to read Kylie’s writing (in any form) but luckily, you can discover that for yourself.
Interview with Kylie Mirmohamdi
BH: You are an academic whose focus is Victorian writing. Please, share with us what attracts you to Le Guin.
As you know, Constance, I am a relative newcomer to Le Guin, but as I ponder your question I see that there was a road for me, from the nineteenth-century writers whose reception has been the focus of my scholarly work to Le Guin. Dickens’s vastly-peopled worlds, Austen’s quiet staking of her moral ground, Charlotte Brontë’s defiance of the norms, literary and gender; all these things I find and admire in Le Guin’s fiction and non-fiction. I think of Jane Eyre looking out at the beyond and wanting more, and I find Le Guin there too, looking out at the beyond, wanting more, wanting more for other people, making more. I think of my people, Austen and Woolf, in their rooms, writing, showing that writing is a woman’s thing as much as a man’s, and Le Guin is there now too. The mothers, who we think back through, according to Woolf. These literary mothers give me courage to write truth, and even before that, to think, and feel, it.
It is, I think, Le Guin’s imaginative power that first captured me. I’ve spoken before about how I had a feeling of vertigo when I started reading Earthsea. I felt the power in my body, a swerve. But there was also a feeling of safety in that reading for me, an innate knowledge that even though she was doing something big – very big – she could be trusted with it. This safety, this trust, is a very important thing for me as a reader, and I try to uphold it in my own fiction writing.
Another thing that attracts me to Le Guin is shared affinity (I am reading Brian Dillon’s marvellous book). The way that writers and readers seem to connect through her, and draw from her collectively, how she becomes a touchstone for thinking and talking about language and creativity and the literary life. I have made these connections with you and with David Naimon (whose conversations with Le Guin I have drawn from in my next answer, and whose Crafting with Ursula series on the Between the Covers podcast was a kind of Le Guin gateway drug for me!) My dear friend, the Australian writer Yumna Kassab, and I have a rich ongoing, sustaining, fascinating, nurturing conversation about many things in our lives and work, and Le Guin is one of the pool of writers who we both admire, and we deepen each other’s admiration for and understanding of her in our talk.
Because I sometimes struggle with the fears – great and small – of the writing life, I am drawn to and sustained by Le Guin’s fearlessness. The way she, in all her work, wrote what and how she needed to, according to what the work demanded and no one else.
It is the voice of her authority. Whether she is building worlds and making characters, or writing poems, or talking about these processes in speeches or interviews, or writing essays that traverse vast territory, or being very and sometimes wickedly funny, every word is considered, well-chosen, measured. She takes her writing seriously, in the deepest sense, and so asks – requires – that her readers do as well.
BH: At your website you have a blog post titled “Writing about Writing.” It’s an exhaustive, ever-expanding list of books on writing. It is impressive, and I highly recommend it for readers who are looking for books on craft or collections of essays on writing. Of course, UKLG makes an appearance on your list. What has been your most significant take away from her writings on writing?
This seems a very dangerous question, Constance, which threatens to provoke a book-length response! The volumes of collections of her essays and conversations about writing are some of my most treasured possessions. They contain wisdom and insight that is never exhausted. It is witchy and powerful and profound.
I’m going to cheat and answer it in two parts.
Le Guin’s writing on writing is enormously generous in offering insight into the ‘tin tacks’ of creative work: the small, large, transforming, decisions about story and voice and vocabulary and punctuation and syntax that are all part of the process. One of her most resonant ideas, for me, is the importance of sound, which she wrote about in a number of essays and conversations. The cadence and rhythm, the thrumming, the sound that is before the words. ‘The sound of the language’, she says, ‘is where it all begins. The test of a sentence is, Does it sound right? The basic elements of language are physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms marking their relationships.’
She pays a poet’s attention to rhythm in prose. The rhythms (following Woolf) ‘to which memory and imagination and words all move’. The task of the writer ‘is to go down deep enough to begin to feel that rhythm, to find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.’
She dwells on Woolf’s wave metaphor:
A wave in the mind, she [Woolf] calls it; and says that a sight or an emotion may create it – like a stone dropped into still water, and the circles go out from the center in silence, in perfect rhythm, and the mind follows those circles outward and outward till they turn to words . . . but her image is greater: her wave is a sea wave, traveling smooth and silent a thousand miles across the ocean till it strikes the shore, and crashes, breaks, and flies up in a foam of words. But the wave, the rhythmic impulse, is before words, “has nothing to do with words.” So the writer’s job is to recognize the wave, the silent swell, way out at sea, way out in the ocean of the mind, and follow it to shore, where it can turn or be turned into words, unload its story, throw out its imagery, pour out its secrets. And ebb back into the ocean of story.
Secondly, Le Guin is a mother-writer as well as a writer-mother. And she (unsurprisingly) has so many useful and inspiring things to say about women and writing – how creative work fits into the shape of, and shapes, women’s lives, and about gendered ways of storytelling. There is ‘The Fisherwoman’s Daughter’, and the wonderful ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ which we have discussed in this series, and her poem ‘The Writer On, and At, Her Work’:
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.
And even though it isn’t specifically about writing (though, of course, it can be) I’m very moved by her hope for the graduands at Bryn Mawr:
‘I hope you don’t try to take your strength from men, or from a man. Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot. I hope you’ll take and make your own soul; that you’ll feel your life for yourself pain by pain and joy by joy; that you’ll feed your life, eat, “eat as you go” – you who nourish, be nourished!’
BH: I understand you have a novel coming out in the fall of 2024. Please, share what you can about it.
Thank you so much, Constance. I’m really excited to share this with you and your readers. My novel, Diving, Falling, is coming out with Scribe next year. It’s about families and art and writing and women’s lives. The protagonist is a novelist who is dealing with the death of her prominent artist husband. She’s trying to hold her family and circle of friends together, emotionally, through this period of change, while she also pursues new possibilities for herself. It’s about the decisions that people, and especially mothers, make to keep those around them happy, and to make sure that things run smoothly, and what happens when that focus shifts. All the complications, and joys, and betrayals, and messiness, of lives lived together.
Echoes of Le Guin, Part IV: A Matter of Trust
BH: When I was studying dance in college, I did a lot of work in improvisation. I still remember one of my professor’s teachings.
“Your ability to improv is directly linked to how large your dance vocabulary is. The more you know, the more you have to draw upon when improvising.”
He was referring to everything from knowing the logical movement of arms from one position to the next, the way positive and negative space works together, knowing steps and their terms, what creates harmony and dissonance in movement, and having a strong grasp of the “rules” of movement, allowing me to then knowingly, and intellectually, break them.
He is the same person who, in terms of choreography, taught me the following. (By trick, he means things like performing 10 pirouettes in a row.)
“Tricks are not dancing. Dancing is how you move the dancer from trick to trick. You must trust and believe that it’s the dancing, not the tricks, that holds the audience’s attention. Tricks lose all their impact if you overload your choreography with them.”
It didn’t take me long to understand that the larger my dance vocabulary was the less I would have to rely on tricks to carry my choreography; and thus, I would become deft at leading the audience to and from the trick.
At this same time, I was sitting in workshop with Jane Smiley, who was continually telling me that I was trying to take on too much in my writing. I was overwhelming my reader. She surprised me when she attended the spring dance performance in which I had choreographed 3 pieces. The following Monday in class, she asked me something that changed everything.
“Why don’t you write the way you choreograph?”
Sometimes, when reading contemporary writing, I feel like I’m moving from one action (trick) moment to the next, as if the only way to keep a reader’s attention is to have them perpetually on the edge of their seat. There is no time for slowing down, quieting down, to allow for the story to unfold.
In contrast, I immediately think of Ged in The Wizard of Earthsea and his endless days on the water. Or Hugh in The Beginning Place and the many paths he walked and retraced. It was the interiority of the characters that carried these scenes, not ongoing action or conflict; and because of that, these characters, along with the sea and the paths, were deeply embedded in my mind.
Is it possible that we have dulled our collective senses to the point that we no longer have the patience to allow a quieter narrative to expand and unfold? Has the story that takes place between the action, become too much to ask of writers to write and readers to read? Must we always be dazzled?
I remember my early days of reading William Faulkner and coming to understand my relationship to him needed to be centered in trust. I had to trust that what wasn’t making sense to me 20 pages in, would by the end of the book. Is it possible to ask this trust of a modern reader, particularly a young reader whose communication has been pared down to that of a text? Idk. Wdyt?
Kylie Winkler
Kyle Winkler: Well, this is a huge question. But yes, many of us have dulled senses in relation to a quieter narrative, and perhaps some of us are more addicted to the firing of those dopamine receptors in a faster, more immediate medium. But look, back in the 19th century, Herman Melville founded his writing career on writing novels about sea adventure. Like, the first two books, Typee and Omoo, were pretty much in that genre. He sold well. Then he wanted to expand his artistic horizon and publish Mardi–a book that proleptically shows us what Moby-Dick will be like. People trashed it. The book gives way from a sea adventure to something more philosophically meandering and people in 1849 couldn’t put up with it. What I’m saying is that there is always a need in readers to have the urgency first. I will repeat what I tell my college students–reading, like deep and sustained reading, in most instances, has to be modeled for you. Whether by a parent, a teacher, a mentor, or a friend. Or hell, just watching a film where a character is reading. But the point is that when you teach a young person to enjoy the pleasures of books and to find the various textures inside, then you’ve given them the equipment to continue. And yes, I think it is still possible to ask this trust of a modern reader. I think we overestimate to some extent the infatuation that younger generations have with technology and “pared down speech.” That said, I teach plenty of students who “hate writing because it takes too long.” But that’s mostly because no one has taught them how to arrange their thoughts and then choose which ones to write down.
Isaac Yuen
Issac Yuen: I’m going to defer to Ursula again, this time through the opening section of Changing Planes:
“The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.”
I think there’s always going to be a larger, more mainstream demand for stories that thrill and titillate. They have been around since the beginning, operate on a time-tested formula, and to be honest, require some skill to pull off. (There is an art to crafting a good piece of pulp that shouldn’t be underestimated). I think the quieter, perhaps more resonant and enduring narratives you speak of generally come from a different creative space, with a different intention, and are there for readers who may have grown wise to the facades and want to see more behind the curtain. I feel there’s space for all sorts of stories, even the ones we might deem as junk food, because sometimes being sick of junk is what draws one to try something new and maybe more nourishing. There’s a passage I can’t find right now in Ursula’s essay collection, The Language of the Night, that speaks to this, of how it is good for children in particular to ingest bad books. The key, of course, is in the cultivation of a curious palette and exercising moderation in all things, which hopefully leads to a broad and varied literary diet.
Julie Phillips
Julie Phillips: Le Guin would say that rhythm matters in writing. She used Tolkien as an example: after a harrowing scene he often leads his characters, and the reader, into a restorative place. Le Guin too gave her characters time to reflect, often in domestic spaces (though surprisingly little eating goes on in Le Guin novels; have you ever noticed that? Apparently food wasn’t on her mind when she was writing). Those are the moments that readers remember, I think, the scenes where the meaning happens.
She would also say that a great writer has to teach their audience how to read them.
Susan DeFreitas
Susan DeFreitas: I understand what you’re saying, and the danger conveyed by that focus on external fireworks in fiction, on the “tricks” of trouble and action and monsters and mind-blowing plot twists and such.
But personally, I’m not convinced we’re in any real danger of losing quieter narratives.
Again, I go back to base principles in storytelling, and I think one of the true base principles is this: the meaning we take from what’s happening in the story is the meaning the protagonist takes from it. You can make walking back over the same path many times compelling to a reader, the way Le Guin does in THE BEGINNING PLACE, if doing so really means something to the character, in a way the reader can connect with.
I think arousing curiosity also gives you a whole lot of margin as a storyteller, to do really whatever you’d like.
In Susanna Clarke’s PIRANESI, for example, the protagonist spends the vast majority of the book just walking around these rather weird, repetitious marble halls and thinking about things, speculating about them—and it’s riveting. In part because Clarke is so skillful at raising questions about what’s actually going on here, what kind of world we’re in—but also because the titular character has so much love for these spaces. They’re tremendously meaningful to him.
And even in a book like WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, the protagonist spends a whole lot of time just living in the marsh, just looking at birds and drawing them. Here too, the questions carry the reader through all that—questions about the murder mystery unfolding in the present, which the story of the past will provide clues to—but what carries all that “quiet stuff” is what the marsh means to the protagonist, how much meaning she finds in it, and the way she becomes one with its rhythms and seasons and creatures, to the point of actually fearing human contact.
William Alexander
William Alexander: There’s so much to love in this essay of a question! Let’s unpack tricks and trust a bit further. The trick is not the dance, and narrative moments of action are another kind of trick—impressive, but meaningless without context. (Dazzling swordplay isn’t very exciting if we don’t have enough narrative context to care about the outcome.) Your professor said to trust the dance, and you learned to trust Faulkner while he slowly and deliberately established the foundations of a novel. There’s another relationship here that also needs our trust:
“You must trust and believe that it’s the dancing, not the tricks, that holds the audience’s attention.”
The dancer needs to trust and believe in the audience as well as the dance that holds their attention. The writer needs to trust and believe in the reader as well as the story.
I wouldn’t worry about the attention span of younger readers. Kidlit used to have strict page-count limits, because conventional wisdom insisted that no eleven-year-old would stick with any book longer than 200 pages. If you glance at a bookshelf full of paperback box-sets of classic fantasy novels for children—The Chronicles of Prydain, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark is Rising, The Pit Dragon trilogy, and the first Earthsea trilogy—then you might notice that those slender spines are approximately the same size. Contemporary middle-grade novels are allowed to be massive in comparison. Ursula’s Annals of the Western Shore, a more recent YA fantasy trilogy, takes up more space on the bookshelf.
It’s also true that she accomplished more in A Wizard of Earthsea’s 200 pages than most of us could manage in thousands. Quantity doesn’t mean quality! In The Sentence Louise Erdrich praised those “short, perfect novels” that “knock you sideways in about 200 pages. Between the covers there exists a complete world.” Earthsea is one of those worlds. Brevity is powerful, but I still think it’s worth noting that middle-grade readers also like big books. They already have the skills to meander through narrative territory that isn’t dominated by unrelenting action or bound to misapprehensions about fickle attention spans. The question isn’t whether or not contemporary readers are capable of trusting a book (or its author), but whether or not we have earned that trust.
Kylie Mirmohamadi
Kylie Mirmohamadi: The trust relationship between reader and writer is so special, so vital. It is especially important (as you say) when a narrative doesn’t give everything away in the first instance, when a reader hears a skilful writer whispering ‘trust me, trust me’, and somehow knows that they can. I think, I hope, that young readers can and do still enter into this contract, and have an instinctive awareness of its rewards.
I was recently at a literary event, where The Melbourne Prize for Literature (the richest literary prize in Australia) was awarded to Jessica’s Au’s Cold Enough for Snow. This richly-rewarding book is in many ways slow and quiet (I use these words in an admiring, complimentary way). There is room in it, it makes room, for multiple readings, hauntings even, and the ‘action’ is internal, contemplative, relational, even as its descriptions of place dazzle (I steal your word, Constance, to use it in a different way, more like the glint of light on snow). It is a great example of what you are pointing to here: that when we slow the pace, of reading and of writing, interpretations, responses, readings, can open up. Possibilities reside in the interstices; that is where the dancing happens.
I love how your comments on dance and choreography enrich the contemplation of how movement occurs, in a sentence, on a page, in a story, and it seems to me that your broader question – like dancing – is to do with how time is experienced and space is occupied. How narratives both create and inhabit their own chronology. How time passes and Time Passes, as To the Lighthouse makes explicit. These are all questions that intrigue me, and make me see how, in my own writing, time passing is both a narrative vehicle and a thematic preoccupation.
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. Visit in October when William Alexander will be the featured author.
Be sure to stop by in September for my second rotation of “Circling Saturn with David Naimon”
Until then, safe and happy days to you all!
Constance
Constance Malloy 