Many of you will have heard the news that Ursula Le Guin died on Monday; the news was confirmed by her son, Theo, yesterday. Many of you also know that I studied her work intensively and for a long while; you may not know that I also had something of a personal relationship with her. I wouldn't flatter myself that I was among her friends, but I was among those with whom she enjoyed corresponding. For me, her death is a personal loss, as well as a literary one, and I feel the urge to share with you something about my experience of reading her work and getting to know her as I did. I completely understand if you're not interested; by all means, feel free to delete this email without reading further. If you are interested, if this speaks to you at all, I'm grateful.
When I was about 17, living in Boulder, Colorado, my mother's boyfriend gave me a book, saying, "I think you'll like this." The cover was so god-awful I very nearly didn't read it: schlock image in garish colors of an agonized young man with some sort of monster on his back, shocking red title, author's name almost invisible. Eventually, both so I could report that I had, in fact, read the damned thing and because I was desperate for something to read (having consumed everything else within easy reach), I started. The title: A Wizard of Earthsea. The frontispiece is a poem:
Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky
--The Creation of Ea
The story starts with this (I had to look it up: I know some quotes verbatim but not this one):
"The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards."
It's simple. It's clear. It's visual--but the frontispiece provides the sense that something deeper is going on than just "kiddie lit" about wizards. For me, that was where the wizardry began--Ursula's, as well as the wizardry of Earthsea.
(Some day, I will do a conference presentation, or write a paper, titled, "Real Fantasy versus Fake Fantasy: or Why I Hate Harry Potter." Don't get me started on schools for wizards.)
I immediately set out hunting for anything by this author. It probably speaks to that time (and how it differs from ours) as well as to the fact that I was in Boulder that I found not one but two of her most renowned works--The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia--in the corner drug store, on the paperback rack. I read everything of hers I could get my mitts on (with the exception of her poetry, I confess). I read each work repeatedly--some more than others, but all of them over and over. There are certain weathers, certain moods, in which only a specific book by Le Guin will suit me: one of the two above, or Malafrena, or The Lathe of Heaven, or her essays--or, as was the case in August, everything, in alphabetical order, across the shelf and a half of her writings in my apartment. In the 1980s, living alone in a rooming hotel in Manhattan, I wrote her a fan letter, explaining the mood that went with certain books: going into the dust with Shevek, or onto the ice with Genly and Therem.... To my inexpressible delight, I got a postcard from her in reply. I've kept it, of course. "Keep your gin, boys," she wrote, "I've got Tonia."
Fast forward to the late 1990s, when I was about to finish my graduate course work and had to determine a dissertation topic. Knowing I would be living for some time with whatever material I chose, I thought, "What do I love to read?" The answer was, "Le Guin, and nature writing." So, I found a way to combine them: I placed Le Guin's fiction--primarily her SF or fantasy but including all of it (what there was at that time)--in the tradition of American nature writing. Knowing how she felt about critics talking about her work without ever consulting her, as expressed in her essay, "The Only Good Author," I wrote her a letter--through her agent, as I had the fan letter years before--letting her know I was embarking on the project and that I would be honored by her input. She warned me that she wasn't very good at answering questions about influence but was happy to clarify what she could. As it happened, I didn't contact her often, but when I did, I'd always get a clear, insightful, gracious response. When the dissertation was ready to defend, at her request, I sent her the whole thing. And she read it all, carefully, thoughtfully. She sent me a ten-page letter in response. Most of the response told me more about what she'd been thinking when she wrote X, or Y; once she gave a gentle correction of a truly embarrassing error, when I got the name of the central character in a short story wrong (and her correction included the meaning of the names, the one I'd used in error and the one she'd chosen). She also thanked me for noticing and pointing out something no one else had.
And thus my professional relationship with her began. Whenever I wrote an article about her work for publication, or prepared a conference presentation, I'd send it to her. In the cases when I hadn't done so before submitting or presenting, I always regretted it, as her responses invariably strengthened my thinking, often redirected it. And periodically, she would provide validation that I'd found a nugget that was particularly gratifying to her, or that I'd made something complex more clear (as when I wrote about the strange amalgam that is Always Coming Home). Eventually she began corresponding with me via email (having resisted for some time, saying "This snail needs her shell"). We didn't correspond much unless I was working on something--but when I was, her door, metaphorically speaking, was always open.
Fast forward again, to my sabbatical in spring of 2015. Drawing on my years of teaching The Left Hand of Darkness, I wrote extensive apparatus for the book--and while I was in that process, Ursula and I corresponded regularly, several times a week, sometimes several times a day. I would take breaks from my work to read her blog, which covered everything from politics to books to writing to speaking to, yes, cats. In the wake of that correspondence, that summer, I asked if she would be willing to receive a visitor (actually two, as my boyfriend, Ed, would accompany me). I'd met her twice before--once at a book reading in Manhattan, once when she was a keynote speaker at a conference in Oregon--but, she admitted, she wouldn't remember me from those events, as, to her, I would have been part of that blur called "audience." She was delighted at the prospect of a personal visit--though, having lived enough of her life as a public person, she also was careful to set clear parameters (morning, please, and no more than two hours). Carrying flowers, I appeared, with Ed, on the doorstep of her beautiful bungalow in Portland, Oregon, and we sat in her living room, drinking tea and talking. I've said that it was a bit like being asked to tea with the goddess of wisdom--but what struck me most was how easy it was, how comfortable I felt--not at all awestruck or shy. She took me into the kitchen to talk with her about how I take my tea (yes, with milk, please--which she had to pour into a little silver pitcher before I could pour it into my tea--no straight out of the carton nonsense), and she and Ed sat opposite each other on either side of the hearth, Ed in Charles's chair, while I sat on the sofa, completing the conversational triangle. We talked about the novel, and about my project, but we also talked about ... well, I don't even know now. General, intelligent, warm conversation--and laughter. The next summer, Ed and I visited again--in the afternoon, this time, and bearing a bottle of a Speyside single malt, which we sampled together. And again, we just talked.
Little things I remember. Her habit of ruffling her sleek, grey hair when she was working out a thought. That she lifted her shoulders when she giggled--and she did giggle: a charmingly youthful laughter. That she spoke in complete sentences--with very little hesitation or backtracking, but also with no pretension or sense of effort. Her completely unmushy love of her children (describing the specific folk music her daughter Elisabeth was getting excited about as "shouting"), her curiosity, her home filled with books and no clutter. Like her mind.
In fall of 2016, she disappeared off the blog radar for a while; when she came back, she said she was aware that her silence may have alarmed many, as, given her age, we might have thought she had died. She hadn't, obviously, but a congenital heart problem had gotten worse, and she'd been in the hospital for some time. She let her followers know that her energy was henceforth a rare commodity, and that she wouldn't be able to expend as much in correspondence, or in writing anything of length--but she didn't go silent. She posted little bits of humor, added to the Annals of Pard (her record of her cat's life), occasionally provided a brief but brilliant response to current politics, or shared with us the process of working with the illustrator of a forthcoming edition of The Other Wind, the final novel in what ended up being a quintet of Earthsea books. Knowing her energy was at a premium, I generally refrained from contact--but I did reach out to her a few months ago, asking whether I could post a PDF of her novella Paradises Lost for my online Nature in Lit. She referred me to her newest agent--and her agent gently told me that the idea made Ursula uncomfortable; apparently, Ursula hadn't wanted to tell me "no." So I wrote to Ursula, thanking her for putting me in touch with the agent and letting her know I wouldn't bother her further on that score but that I missed having a good excuse to be in regular contact. She told me then that it was "always a pleasure" to hear from me.
And that was the last contact we had. Now she's gone. For a long while, knowing I'm terrible about following the news, friends and family have sent me articles, interviews, notices about Le Guin and her work--and it's been gratifying to see that her work is finally getting some of the wider notice it richly deserves: medals, awards, and not one but two Library of America collections. There is a forthcoming biographical documentary (I contributed to the Kickstarter campaign for it; in testimony to the depths of Le Guin's fan base, the filmmaker exceeded her goal almost immediately), and there is a forthcoming literary biography. There is, today, an outpouring of remembrance, recognition, sadness, and gratitude. I join in all of that, but I feel the loss of not just a brilliant writer and thinker but of a human being whose presence mattered to me. She is part of my psyche: I think how I think, write how I write, in no small measure because of my involvement with her words and work over all these years. A great light has gone out of our world; I feel a void out there on that coast, a significant absence: that dynamic, sharply faceted, focused brilliance is no longer at work, and it will be missed. I am more grateful than I can express to know her work as intimately as I do--and to still have some new pieces to read, in her latest collection of essays, No Time to Spare--and to have had the chances to get to know her, even if only slightly. But I will miss her, the person, just ... Ursula.
We don't need gin!
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