Welcome to The Burning Hearth! I’m so glad you are here for the final issue of “Echoes of Le Guin.”
As I look back on 2023 and this series, I am overcome with gratitude that William Alexander, Susan DeFreitas, Kylie Mirmohamadi, Julie Phillips, Kyle Winkler, and Isaac Yuen agreed to be a part of this journey with me. That these six talented, bright, funny, and engaging authors took the time and care in answering my questions, so that I could bring a collective discussion of one of my most beloved authors to my readers has been a gift I can never repay. Many, many thanks to them! There is no “Echoes of Le Guin” without them. And many, many thanks to you, my readers, for joining us on this journey.
In “Part VI: What Carries On,” my guest authors conclude their discussion of Le Guin by pondering her legacy. But before beginning the group interview, I am honored and delighted to have Julie Phillips as the featured author for Part VI. She and this question were paired and saved for this last post. After all, who better to lead the discussion of Le Guin’s legacy than her biographer?
Interview with Julie Phillips
Burning Hearth: I thoroughly enjoyed your book Baby on the Fire Escape. I have yet to read your biography titled James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon but it is sitting patiently on my TBR pile. And I am patiently, but with much anticipation, awaiting your forthcoming biography (2026) on Ursula K. Le Guin. How did you come to be her biographer?
Julie: She asked me, is the short answer. In my biography of Tiptree I described Tip’s, and later Alli’s, epistolary friendship with Ursula; I interviewed Ursula then, and I quoted at length from her letters, with her generous permission. (The letter she wrote to Alice Sheldon when she “came out” to her as Tiptree is beautiful—when she read it aloud, years later, at the University of Oregon, she reduced the audience to tears.) She read the book when it was done, said “lucky Alli,” and asked me if I would write about her.
Becoming her biographer was a longer process, as we cautiously learned to talk to each other and I interviewed her over a period of several years. Really, I’m still becoming her biographer, in the sense that I’m still getting to know her through the papers and the record she left.
Burning Hearth: If I’m not mistaken, you spent ten years working on Sheldon’s biography? What is it like to spend so many years focused on another person’s life?
Julie: It’s very human. After all, most people spend a lot of time in close relation to other people, and that includes people they’ve never met in person. I loved being in her company, as it were, and was sorry when the book was over.
I felt in some ways very intimate with Alli, because she was so frank about herself on paper, in her letters and journals. I felt that she was looking for someone to tell her who she was, and at the same time I could see bits of my own life reflected in hers. That’s less true of me and Ursula because she was so original and so brilliant. I see her as sui generis.
In any case, it takes a lot of time to organize my thoughts. But it’s good for biographies to marinate a bit, because you get more insight as you go along. While you’re fixing dinner or talking to a friend you have sudden thoughts like “Oh, that’s what Ursula was doing when she wrote x.” Biography is basically l’esprit de l’escalier in book form.
And everything you read and learn while you’re working on the book adds to the richness of it. One of my favorite compliments I received for the Tiptree book was when someone told me he admired my epigraphs. The Le Guin biography will have epigraphs—and illustrations, and Ursula’s cartoons—but I suspect most of them will end up being by Ursula herself, because she’s so quotable.
Burning Hearth: Personally, I can think of nothing more challenging to write than a biography. You are the person selecting what the reader is going to know about your subject. In this case, Le Guin, is a person fans might feel they already know. How challenging is it to encapsulate such a long, prolific career, and to present Le Guin in a manner that feels fresh and, perhaps, revealing to readers?
Julie: Ha, no pressure here. But is it true that people feel they know Ursula? Even after all our interviews and after having had the good fortune to spend time with her, I saw her as a very private person who didn’t easily reveal herself in conversation. In her writing of course it was different, but even then, she conceals as much as she reveals on the page. I’ve written about her a lot, and I continue to be surprised by her. I notice new things every time I reread her work. I find passages in letters that move me or crack me up.
So, I hope the biography will be as full of surprises as she was, and if not, that at least it will give readers the pleasure of her company on the page.
Of that, I have no doubt. Thank you, so much Julie. And now, we conclude the “Echoes of Le Guin” series with “Part VI: What Carries On.”
PART VI: WHAT CARRIES ON
BH: In Ursula’s book with David Naimon Conversations on Writing, she says of her acceptance speech for her Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2014:
“That was my fifteen minutes, my whole fifteen minutes. That was so amazing when I woke up the next morning.”
As we all know, the words she spoke in those specific fifteen minutes are quite possibly extending into infinity. Ursula currently seems larger than life. It is unfathomable to me that there will be a generation going forward that doesn’t know about her and her work. And yet, she worried about falling into obscurity, in part because she was a female writer.
In Conversations on Writing, she says, regarding Grace Paley and the potential erasure of women writer’s:
“I fear for Grace’s reputation, because it happens so often that a woman writer, very much admired but not best-seller famous, however admired by many critics, just slides out of sight after death…and the place is filled by a man. Well, no man could possibly fill Grace Paley’s place. She wrote extraordinarily for a woman. And that may be part of the problem.”
All of us collected here are in small and large ways, doing what we can to secure Ursula’s place in the future. What do you believe her enduring legacy will be?
Susan DeFreitas
Susan DeFreitas: I think she’ll continue to have an outsized influence on storytelling, as we seek to tell new stories in new ways, in the interests of reshaping our thinking about what’s important, what stories are worth telling, and by extension our culture. Those of us who teach and mentor other writers can help to secure her legacy by returning to her creative work as examples of those sorts of stories, and to her essays for inspiration on how to do that kind of work—and for open-ended inspiration in carrying on that good work, across the generations.
I also believe that she will continue to have an enduring impact on activists and progressive movements, in the ways that her works model strategies like nonviolence activism and consensus decision making.
Kylie Mirmohamadi
Kylie Mirmohamadi: Recently, I texted a friend about Ursula, saying that she left us with so much. And yet it is still an incalculable loss. Perhaps this is compounded by being a latecomer to her, but I desperately want it to be possible (if not ever likely, for me) to still communicate with her, to hear her speak new thoughts, to read what she had to say about more and more and more. Yet, what a mighty legacy. I want to say that it will be most enduring (surely, it will all be enduring) in her essays, her recorded addresses, her transcribed words, where she spoke so beautifully and deeply to women, to writers, to readers, because these are the things with which I am most familiar, these were my threshold. But I think it will be in her worlds, the places and people of her fiction. And in the way these worlds are discovered and encountered and treasured by readers. I imagine them. The lonely children sitting on the floor in school libraries; young people stumbling across something magical for them, hidden for them, in a curriculum; adults, standing in awe of her output, her range; older people, old women, embracing her courage, her wisdom, owning proud, powerful ways of being a crone. That is a legacy!
Julie Phillips
Julie Phillips: That’s hard to answer, because I don’t know what future readers will need, and because a “shape-shifting” writer, as Kelly Link recently called her, will keep changing her form to fill the mind of her reader. Le Guin said her job was opening doors and windows for other minds. She brought her imagination to bear on questions of ecology, gender fluidity, and social justice, so I suspect at least part of her legacy will lie in her invitation to others to do the same.
William Alexander
William Alexander: Nnedi Okorafor offered this tribute after Ursula died: “I will not say Rest In Peace, I will say Forever Read.” Her words are a well that will never run dry.
I also find it thrilling to think about the intangible qualities of her legacy. She gave us new ways to demythologize and remythologize ourselves. So many stories will be able to trace their ancestry directly back to her. That influence may become invisible in the same way that the foundations of houses are hidden from view, but those foundations will still be there.
Isaac Yuen
Isaac Yuen: It’s hard to assess legacy, especially as you mentioned, since so many deserving woman authors go unrecognized or are actively diminished for their life’s work. Who decides is always an issue. Some, of course, rise above despite it all; I read somewhere that George Orwell famously dismissed Virginia Woolf’s relevance going forward, and we can all see how that turned out.
I feel like I hear Ursula’s name and work mentioned more and more since her passing, almost always in glowing and revelatory terms. I think people have been sleeping on her for a long time, partly due to the stigma around genre fiction and her passionate defense of it (unlike some other authors who write genre fiction but deny it), but also partly due to how she chose to wield her influence. She liked operating out of the limelight—not in a shy way, but intentionally walking off to seek smaller lights. Maybe that’s again the Taoist propensity, to lead without leading, following her own way while lifting up others. I had one piece of correspondence with her in her later years, and that was through a small blog that she started to provide craft advice to fellow writers. I feel like she operated almost as a mycelial network (I might have picked this up from somewhere but no longer know where, sorry!), cultivating connections with grassroots organizations, local media, independent presses, many of which are out of the public eye. I feel these smaller, more obscure linkages she established in life are now bearing fruit in unexpected ways. And so her legacy may come to be, sprouting up across disparate fields and disciplines and minds, acts that reach even beyond the “little black marks on wood pulp”—as she put it. Perhaps beyond the stories she told, the life she led and the causes she championed will come to cement her legacy as somewhat of a timeless one, rippling outwards for years and decades to come.
Kyle Winkler
Kyle Winkler: I’ll keep this brief. She’ll continue to sit amongst the top writers of science fiction and fantasy for a long, long time. I don’t see her legacy crumbling or being forgotten. Not for a long, long time. What she accomplished is too honest and stylistically enduring to fade away any time soon.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for stopping by The Burning Hearth and for reading this series. I do so hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed creating it. If you have enjoyed it, please comment, post (especially, now that I feel all my post fall into a void on X), and share it on your social media sites. I thank you in advance.
In just a few days, a second “Voices of the Winter Solstice” will post featuring stories centered on the theme The Ending Place. I thought that a good theme to follow up this series; especially, since one of my favorite Le Guin books is The Beginning Place.
My contributors are friends from Electric Sheep and include Myna Chang, Tara Campbell, Lisa Short, Teresa Berkowski, Jennifer Worrell, Janna Miller, and myself. I’m hoping to post on the solstice, but if not, it will be before the 24th.
January is a double hitter. I will post an interview with the lovely Diane Gotleib, as well as the penultimate issue of “Circling Saturn with David Naimon” with guest interviewer Anthony Garret.
Until you visit again, stay well, stay safe, and smile!
Constance
Constance Malloy 