She loved the world
Ursula K LeGuin's stories of life
Introduction
This piece was sparked when Julia, my friend and fellow unpsychology editor, told me she was embarking on a collaborative conversation project around one of Ursula K LeGuin’s books. This kind of spark happens every so often for me, as LeGuin and her work come back round regularly to catalyse something.
The last time was a year or so ago when I decided to explore The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction after listening to one of the Crafting with Ursula conversations from the excellent Between the Covers podcast.
The time before that, around the start of 2020, I decided to embark on reading all her short stories and novellas over the space of the next year or so. And before that was the day, in early 2018, when I found out she had died, aged 88, leaving one of the greatest legacies of any writer in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Indeed, since I was a young adult (and a teacher and a father), I’ve returned regularly to her work - particularly the Earthsea books (I’ve always has a penchant for YA fantasy!) and her wonderful, uncategorisable book, Always Coming Home, that I find myself re-reading every few years for its every-unfolding luminous mystery, poetry and utopian realism…
She loved the world
So, this cycle of return and response has been there since my early adulthood. This is partly because LeGuin always seemed to be a bit of a prophet to me – albeit a quite ordinary, common-sense one – in that she has seen coming many of the shifts and movements in our global cultures since the 1970s. And also because I just love her writing and the worlds she conjures; the ways she could spill her imagination across the universe, but still stayed grounded, with a weather eye and a quizzical raised eyebrow to the strange culture we live in.
Ordinary? Yes. There was nothing magical about her, though she often wrote about magic, and respected its metaphorical power. She never claimed to be a philosopher or an opinion-former, though she achieved both by default over the decades. She was a hardworking, gifted and grounded writer, a mother and cat lover who, like all the best writers, saw and recorded the human (and non-human) condition with clarity and precision. Her thing was the story. Her thing was the simple telling. Her thing was the way that a story (or a poem) could teach us something important and universal, but that the ‘lesson’ was never to be the explicit aim. Polemic was anathema to her; the world for her was at once a simple, glorious, complex, awful, nuanced place in which story-telling humans miraculously exist to observe it.
It wasn't just humans who told her stories or were the subjects of her tales. There were dragons, of course; different strokes of humans; intelligent non-humans and planetary, plant-based consciousnesses on far distant planets; a whole town that moved from coast to scrubland to mountainside to the annoyance of its inhabitants; coyotes, jackrabbits and chipmunks appearing in mythical stories along with real human children; ants recording their own language in texts, messages and stories carved on acacia seeds. All people to her.
There was something in her rare, often funny but always peculiarly ordinary imagination that let nothing through. No bullshit anyway. She was aware, as she grew, of her own missteps and misgivings. She made mistakes, then acknowledged and rectified them later in her writing. She imagined peoples who were not bound by ‘gender’, and foresaw the kinds of ‘culture war’ nonsense that follows the simplistic binary thinking of prejudice and determinism, that has made the world so dangerous for so many ordinary people who do not wish to be defined and controlled by their culture’s embodied and sexualised fantasies. She saw, and wrote about, the cruelty that can emerge and grow into individual and collective lives, and was always clear about the ability of poetry – of storytelling – to speak truth to power, yes, but more importantly, to speak truth to ourselves.
Above all, she loved the world. She loved people and skies and animals and stories. She loved the stretch of imagination that is found in speculative fiction writing (sci fi, fantasy etc.), and rejected the myth that fiction had to be tethered to some kind of literary realism. She recognised the ways that this narrow view of literature – that saw the ‘men of letters’ as the grown-ups in the room – was excluding for whole swathes of others who wrote and were written about. Women, children, non-humans, people of colour, non-binary and neurodiverse people, working class people, people from the future and many others. However, she didn't ‘include’ these ‘others’ as a gesture, but just wrote the universe as the diverse, weird and frankly queer and wonderful place it is and – beyond the boundaries of what is ‘known’ – how she imagined it might be.
I’ve worked as a psychotherapist and counsellor for much of my adult life, and I’ve also been an activist, teacher, writer and editor. I’d say that no-one has been more influential in forming my practical view of the world than LeGuin. Of all the political theorists, psychological researchers, philosophers and general bigmouths with big ideas; none of them get close to her grasp of the ways in which humans act, behave, fight, motivate, imagine – and become mad, sad or bad.
Even other writers whose trade is imagination understand this. No-one gets close to imagining what she does…
And while she was not usually writing directly about politics, or psychology, or science, or ethics, she was always writing about all of these. I think this is because she was not prepared to separate the world into compartments, disciplines and silos. She was not prepared to accept the hierarchies that our cultures all too often impose upon us – whether these be modern, post-modern or indigenous.
She tells us, playfully, but with more than a hint of subversion, that “it doesn’t have to be the way it is”… 1
Jealous of a man
There is a man in America I am jealous of. His name is David Naimon. He runs a book podcast called Between the Covers, and he was a friend of Ursula LeGuin in the later stages of her life, and had the kinds of conversations with her I would love to have had. In 2022, he devoted a year of monthly podcast episodes to the theme of Crafting with Ursula, talking with twelve writers – all people who knew and had worked with her in some capacity - about her life, writing and influence.
(For that gift, I am prepared to forgive him his fortune and privilege!)
As most people know, Ursula K LeGuin died in early 2018. Three days after she died, I published a piece about her.2 I wrote in particular about the influence on me of her strange and beautiful masterpiece, Always Coming Home, a book that has been with me as a touchstone since I first picked up my treasured copy in the late 80s. I wrote:
‘It begins wonderfully: “The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California”. Time-twisting from the start, Le Guin plays with the idea of then (before) and now and then (to come), and tells us something marvellous about this game of life: “What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now”.
This sensibility has become central to my life and work, as I evolved from naive, troubled activist and doting young dad, to a (hopefully) more mature therapist, writer and doting grandpa. I have changed, as we all do, but Le Guin’s book has stayed with me; and I read it every few years with new insights emerging each time.’
Her death touched me deeply, and I wished then, as I had wished before, that I could have met and talked with this wise, brilliant and inspirational woman.
David Naimon had the privilege of talking with her a number of times. In an article he wrote soon after she died, he reproduced one of these interviews taken from the book he wrote with her entitled Conversations on Writing, and reflected further on his collaborations with her in another piece Ursula K. Le Guin, Editing to the End (both of them are up on lithub.com). They are great reads and Naimon brings out Ursula’s character beautifully in the second, his heartfelt tribute piece.3
However, I love the interview most, as her voice is in it, and I can imagine her saying the things she says, in the ways she says them. There are few people in the world I have that feeling about. It’s a strange relational mystery – that I should feel so close to a person who I have never met, who I only know through her words. I don’t feel that with other writers I admire; they stay at a writerly ‘distance’ – psychologically ‘appropriate’ perhaps – but not Ursula LeGuin. I became a bit of a LeGuin completist (I’m not there yet!) not just because I wanted to read more of her stories and essays, but because I felt that the ‘clear, clean lines’ she wrote held something of her and, in turn, held something important I wanted to listen to and understand.
It’s not a culty thing, I hasten to add, and not (much of ) an obsession either. It’s more of a practice – in the meditative sense of the word. Something involving contemplation, with a rhythm and a flow that, when I’m reading her, carries me along like a current; sometimes gently, sometimes in a rush. It’s an image she used in one of her short stories, Unlocking the Air,4 when a group of student revolutionaries are arguing about direction and choice. One says: “When the dam breaks? You have to shoot the rapids! All at once”. It’s a line I love and have written about; her work is scattered with these amazing sentences and paragraphs, full of wisdom, yet totally and necessarily in the context of the story they need to be part of.
Things to be imagined and reimagined
What we learn from Ursula K LeGuin is that things can be imagined and reimagined. That souls can be made and remade. That there are empires in time and space and we don’t have to get the physics right in order to reach them. That imagination and fundamentalism are in conflict, and that fantasy, therefore, is an act of freedom – and poetry too, as LeGuin puts it so eloquently in her interview with David Naimon.
They are talking about an literary prize event at which, as Naimon puts it, she “gave both a beautiful and blistering speech about the commodification of art versus the practice of art.” He goes on: “In it you say that resistance and change often begin in art, and that most often it is in the art of words that you see the beginnings of resistance and change.”
And LeGuin replies: “After all, dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom poets are not political beings, but it doesn’t seem a bit weird in South America or in any dictatorship, really.”
Politically and psychologically, Ursula LeGuin understood that writing – and other forms of imaginative work – can be a subversive act. However, we do not do the job of creation - writing - in order to be disruptive. We do it in order to tell the stories and write the poems that show us how the world is – how WE are. This, in itself, can be as subversive as it gets..
I’ve learned this the hard way, of course! Like many others, I’ve written fiction that ‘tells’ not ‘shows’. I have written poetry that is polemical and obvious. I have written non-fiction that uses rhetorical imperatives: “we must!'…”, “we should all…!”, “let us…!”.
Ursula wrote passionately about the things she believed in, but these most often were in the form of inquiries and deep questions. Her most well-known story of ethics, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, is gently written, yet searingly brutal. It invites the reader to consider, “what would you do?”, and asks again those nagging question she kept asking: “Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?”.
These are questions that politicians, psychologists and others should always be asking, but somehow usually forget to. Perhaps one of the reasons this project is called ‘unpsychology’, is so we can at least remind ourselves to keep asking them!
Why are things as they are?
Must they be as they are?
What might they be like if they were otherwise?
In the current political climate, we live in a world in which there are many people – fundamentalists, dictators, populists and others – who do not want things to be ‘otherwise’. Or rather, the otherwise they imagine is the myth of something that they half remember from before – a story, “that not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful”.
The Hero (the male hero, of course) becomes the carrier of the story; the noisy, talkative, hero storyteller with his long-form podcasts and sensational theories about Man the Hunter, the carnivore, the virile, God-fearing, patriotic male-of-the-species who has been emasculated by… well everyone else who is not male or virile enough, I suppose.
In truth, and as Ursula LeGuin told us with more of her clear, clean lines, the human story was never really about a Hero who hunted and fought. It was about the ordinary people – maybe woman and children, maybe the outsiders and queer folk – who wandered around gathering stuff to put in their containers – their carrier bags, as LeGuin puts it. These are not Action stories, granted, but they are real tales about the ways in which most of us live our lives, when we are allowed to, and are left alone by Heroes. For we know how disaster strikes when the Heroes get involved. And they are, I think, gathering again to do their Heroic, Authoritarian, Carnivorous, God-fearing thing, and so these times are once again perilous for us all…
Yet, dictators hate poets, so here’s a lovely poetic piece of story, from Ursula LeGuin, to finish this chapter, from her small essay, The Carrier Bag History of Fiction.5 It isn’t a Hero story – and Ursula, by the way, isn’t a hero either for doing the things that she and other humans need to do to get on and live and imagine and reimagine our lives. We at unpsychology will have more to say about this in the future; other episodes to imagine and write along the way. In the meantime, Ursula wrote this:
“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again – if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”
Notes
Her final book was an anthology of short essays and blogposts entitled No Time to Spare. It’s lovely and its strength is its simplicity. One of my favourite pieces is a short essay from June 2011, entitled, It Doesn’t Have to Be the Way It Is… There is more wisdom in these five short pages than in some books a hundred times as long… Just saying…
My post about Ursula LeGuin and the influence of Always Coming Home on me can be found at: https://medium.com/unpsychologymag/always-coming-home-f70ca2aed0e9. I’ve also used lines and ideas of hers in short posts in my Medium publications at https://medium.com/21stcenturysoul/hope-is-drawn-in-lines-571e0b9e18c7 and https://medium.com/covid-poetics/10-a-lovely-day-in-the-valley-39f13631ae5e
The two lithub.com pieces written by David Naimon can be found at https://lithub.com/ursula-k-le-guin-dictators-are-always-afraid-of-poets/ and https://lithub.com/ursula-k-le-guin-editing-to-the-end/
Unlocking the Air, a short story by Ursula K LeGuin, in The Unreal and the Real: Selected Short Stories, which also includes the story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and many, many more.
Another of LeGuin’s short but brilliant pieces of nonfiction, The Carrier Page Theory of Fiction, shatters the myth that stories have to have Action and Heroes. it’s full of beautiful lines: “I would go as far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
'What we learn from Ursula K Le Guin is that things can be imagined and reimagined. That souls can be made and remade' - yes. This conviction lies at the very heart of my practice as a psychotherapist. Thanks for this passionate reflection Steve, it's got me dipping back into my collection of Le Guin and finding new volumes too (like her beautiful collection of poems 'Late in the Day'). Food for the soul.
A wonderful reflection Steve - she is my favourite writer too, and for many of the same reasons you share. Like you, she is the one writer with whom I feel an almost visceral closeness. The wisdom scattered liberally through her works is a constant source of inspiration - for example, the wonderful short passage near the start of the first book of Earthsea, where Ogion asks Ged to reflect on what 'naming' a being actually means. This finds a glorious echo in her later short story "She Unnames them". And she is very tough-minded yet warm-hearted about the possibility of humans living in community - see for example The Dispossessed, and as you rightly celebrate, Always Coming Home. Bravo!