In tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, who died last week, the Ace Hotel published a brief recent talk with the master of science fiction and fantasy:
You’ve been working and living in Portland since 1958. How have you seen the local literary culture and community change over the years? Do you think the Wordstock Literary Festival has shifted the literary culture here at all, or that it serves the community in some special way?
Hey, I thought you said this interview would be short and simple. The literary history of Portland since 1958 is short and simple? The literary scene here was never simple. Maybe the biggest change in it is that women count for more than they used to. Due partly to a major societal shift, but also, specifically, to people like Judith Barrington and Ruth Gundle and many, many other activists working to get women writers out of the margins and into the middle of the page.
During the first few years after Brian Booth energized us to get Oregon Literary Arts going, the literary community, writers and readers, came together at the Oregon Book Awards for real celebrations. They were great. But it’s hard to keep that much pizzazz going. The current Literary Arts does a terrific job of outreach to all of Oregon.
The old book fair at ArtQuake in the Park Blocks was a hoot. Talk about keeping Portland weird! Wordstock is ever so much more respectable and outward-looking and success-oriented, bringing best selling authors from the East Coast and all. That’s probably a fair reflection of what people want.
Tell me about how your “source” – internal, creative or otherwordly – for writing finds its expression in such varied iterations as children’s books, poetry, essays and stories. Do you work on one project at a time or many at once, and do they feed each other in any way?
I can’t tell you anything much about my internal, creative, or otherworldly sources, or how they work. I just sit around and wait for them to tell me what I’m supposed to be writing next, and then I write it, if I can. Good work if you can get it.
I’m sure you’ve answered more questions about gender and writing than you can stand – but, here’s one more. You have been publishing books for over forty years. Tell me about your experience of gender – personally and professionally, as well as how creating science fiction expresses, changes or anticipates social evolution around gender.
I made out better in some ways than most women writers of my generation, because I wasn’t competing for the big time awards and glittering prizes (still reserved for male writers at a fairly standard rate of from ten to one to four to one.) My work got shunted off into the slums of genre, where I won lots of awards, and made friends, too. The poor are always more generous than the rich.
Now that genre seems to be eating mainstream, and men seem to be less afraid of being eaten by women, things could get even better. If only they can figure out how to make writing e-books pay writers, before stupid Amazon and the stupid pirates destroy the system, and all the writers starve, and THEN what’ll you read? Huh? Aspirin labels?
Imaginative fiction is a great place for people who feel society could use a few changes. Science fiction is particularly good at showing what a different society would actually be like to live in, whether it’s the macho utopias of space opera, or the mean streets of cyberpunk, or the stuff writers like me come up with, like re-inventing gender, or giving Portland a subway out to Reed.
Ursula LeGuin, The Complete Orsinia (2016). Image credit: Library of America.
