Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SEE” ^{INTERVIEW BY GEORGE WICKES AND LOUISE WESTLING NORTHWEST REVIEW, VOL. 20, NOS. 2 AND 3 1982}

Raj Lyubov is a typical figure in Ursula Le Guin’s fiction, an anthropologist whose mission is to report on higher intelligence life forms (HILFs) on another planet. In this case, the planet is populated by a peaceful race of furry human beings three feet tall who live in harmony with the lush forest that covers their world. The men from Earth who have come to log the planet are led by a military macho who regards these “creechies” as subhuman and treats them brutally. Le Guin has explained that she wrote The Little Green Men (as she entitled it) in protest against the Vietnam War in which the landscape was defoliated and noncombatants of a different race were callously slaughtered in the name of peace and humanity. Characteristically in this novel she subordinates science fiction to her liberal humanitarianism and her concern for the natural world of which humanity is but a part.

Anthropology came naturally to the daughter of the great Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and his wife Theodora, a writer best known for her biography of Ishi, the last surviving Indian of his tribe. Writing also came easily to Ursula Le Guin, but success did not come until she turned her talents to science fiction and fantasy. Then she published in rapid succession three novels set in the universe she was to explore in later novels, and the first volume in the Earthsea trilogy which introduced still another world, this time an antique world of wizards and dragons and legends. Since 1966 Le Guin has published more than a dozen novels and won some of the most prestigious literary awards. Her most highly acclaimed novels are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

The interview was conducted in the Le Guin family home in Portland, a comfortable old wooden house on the edge of Forest Park. The neighborhood seems an appropriate setting for the author who created the forest world of Athshe. In collecting her stories for publication in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters she discovered “a certain obsession with trees” in her writing and concluded that she is “the most arboreal science fiction writer.” She talks a bit about this dendrophilia in the interview.

GEORGE WICKES: When did you first know that you were going to be a writer?

URSULA K. LE GUIN: I don’t know. I sort of took it as an established fact.

WICKES: From infancy?

LE GUIN: Yes. When I learned how to write, apparently.

WICKES: What do you suppose it is that makes people write fiction?

LE GUIN: They want to tell a story.

WICKES: There’s much more than story in your fiction.

LE GUIN: But I think the basic impulse is probably to tell a story. And why we do that I don’t quite know.

LOUISE WESTLING: Did you write lots of stories as a child?

LE GUIN: Some. I wrote a lot of poetry. They’ve always gone together. But I started writing stories somewhere around eight or nine, I think, when I got an old typewriter. Somehow the typewriter led me to prose—although I don’t compose on the typewriter now.

WESTLING: What kind of books were your favorites in early life?

LE GUIN: I grew up in a professor’s house lined with books. My favorites as a child were certainly fiction or narrative, novels and myths and legends and all that. But I read a lot of popular science, too, as a kid. Altogether, pretty much what I read now.

WICKES: If you were asked to compile a list of the books that have been most important to you, not only as a writer but also in your thinking, what would be the first half dozen?

LE GUIN: I tried to do it, and it goes on and on. It’s insufferably boring, because I’ve read all my life, and I read everything. I’ve been so influenced by so much that as soon as I mention one name I think, “Oh, but I can’t say that without saying that.” I think there are certain obvious big guns, but I really hate to say any one, or six, or twenty. But you could very roughly say that the English novelists of the nineteenth century and the Russian novelists of the twentieth century were formative. That’s where my love and admiration and emulation was when I started. But then I read all that other junk, too. And I did my college work in French and Italian literature. I never much liked the French novelists. I can tell you what I don’t like. I don’t much like “the great tradition,” the James-Conrad thing that I was supposed to like when I was in college. I’ve revolted against that fairly consciously. Flaubert I really consider a very bad model for a fiction writer.

WICKES: Stendahl?

LE GUIN: Stendahl’s a good novelist, but I think the limitations of Stendahl have been rather disastrous. I think you’d do better with Balzac. If you have to imitate a Frenchman.

WESTLING: Proust?

LE GUIN: You can’t imitate Proust. And in modern writing, for instance, Nabokov means nothing to me. I have great trouble reading him. I see a certain lineage there which I just don’t follow, don’t have any sympathy for.

WICKES: How about more philosophical books, like some of the Oriental thinkers, or Thoreau?

LE GUIN: You’ll find him buried around in poems and novels fairly frequently, but I don’t know Thoreau very well. You have to be a New Englander to really read Thoreau. There was stuff around the house, again. My father’s favorite book was a copy of Lao Tzu, and seeing it in his hands a lot, I as a kid got interested. Of course, it’s very accessible to a kid, it’s short, it’s kind of like poetry, it seems rather simple. And so I got into that pretty young, and obviously found something that I wanted, and it got very deep into me. I have fits of delving further into Oriental thought. But I have no head for philosophy.

WESTLING: You’ve said that you now associate some of your ideas with Jung but that you probably came to these yourself first before you ever read Jung.

LE GUIN: My father was a Freudian—he was a lay analyst—so the word Jung was a four-letter word in our household. After the Earthsea trilogy was published, people kept telling me, “Oh, this is wonderful, you’ve used Jung’s shadow.” And I’d say, “It’s not Jung’s shadow, it’s my shadow.” But I realized I had to read him, and then I got fascinated. Then he was extremely helpful to me as a shaman or guide at a rather difficult point in my life. At the moment I wouldn’t want to read Jung; you have to need him, like most psychologists. But it was amazing to me to find how parallel in certain places his imagination and my imagination, or his observation and my imagination, had run.

WESTLING: Well, part of it could be your absorption with mythology, because he came to his thinking by saturating himself in mythology.

LE GUIN: I didn’t have an absorption with mythology, but I had a child’s curiosity, and there were Indian legends all over the place. My father told us stories that he had learned from his informants, and my mother was interested, too. The books I read were mostly children’s editions, but what’s the difference? The stories are there.

WESTLING: Yes, it doesn’t matter, the pattern is what counts.

WICKES: How do your books come to you? Is there a particular process, or is it different every time?

LE GUIN: It varies from book to book. For some of them it’s very neat, and I can describe the process, but then for another one it’s utterly different. Left Hand of Darkness is the nicest one because it came as a vision, a scene of these two people pulling something in a great snowy wilderness. I simply knew that there was a novel in it. As Angus Wilson describes it, his books come that way, with a couple of people in a landscape. But some of them don’t come that easy at all. The Dispossessed came with a perfectly awful short story, one of the worst things I ever wrote. There it was, all about prison camps, everything in it all backwards, a monstrosity of a little story. Then I thought, “You know, it’s really terrible that you could write anything that bad after writing all these years; there’s got to be something in it.” And sure enough, there was, after about two years’ work and reading all these utopists and all the anarchists and thinking a lot. That one took real homework. But sure enough, the idea had been there all along; I just hadn’t understood it. Yes, I worked like all the blazes on that one. And for Left Hand of Darkness I had to plan that world with extreme care, writing its history, roughly, before I could do a good solid novel.

WICKES: It seems to me there’s a good deal of geography in your writing, too.

LE GUIN: I like geography and geology. You may notice the other thing besides trees is rocks.

WICKES: Yes, and landscapes, weathers, climates—you go into these things a great deal.

LE GUIN: It’s one reason I adore Tolkien; he always tells you what the weather is, always. And you know pretty well where north is, and what kind of landscape you’re in and so on. I really enjoy that. That’s why I like Hardy. Again, you always know what the weather is.

WESTLING: You said you liked trees and you liked rocks, and that expresses a dichotomy I’ve felt in your fiction, between lush forest worlds and desolate places where people have to struggle. I wonder whether you are simply a creechie but are restrained by pioneer impulses.

LE GUIN: You know, I’ve had this mad fascination with Antarctica ever since I was sixteen or seventeen and first read [polar explorer Robert Falcon] Scott, and that’s where all that snow and ice comes in. I believe all the sledge trips in Left Hand of Darkness are accurate. That was very important to me; that I didn’t give them too much to pull and make them go too far.

WESTLING: That’s the heart of that book, the most fully realized thing in it.

LE GUIN: Sure, that’s where it started. But that is also my Antarctic dream, my having followed Scott and [Edward] Wilson on those awful trips for years. Every now and then I have another binge, going back to Antarctica. I have a story coming out in the New Yorker about the first women who got to Antarctica. Actually, they got to the Pole first. But they didn’t leave any traces.

WICKES: You mean they got there ahead of everyone else?

LE GUIN: They got there just a little ahead of Amundsen. A small group of South American women. I think I enjoyed writing that story [“Sur”] more than anything in my whole life.

WICKES: Now that brings up something else. You have all these journeys in your fiction; people are always traveling around. That’s a great way to see your geography, but it often becomes the plot. We go on a journey, not always an ordeal or quest, but we always go on a journey.

LE GUIN: You’ve just hit a very significant note here. Actually I’m terrible at plotting, so all I do is sort of put people in motion and they go around in a circle and they generally end up about where they started out. That’s a Le Guin plot.

WESTLING: Well, who says you have to go straight ahead and then stop?

LE GUIN: I admire real plotting, the many strands and real suspense. But I seem not able to achieve it.

WESTLING: Have feminists commended you on this fact? They should. That’s supposed to be feminine, just as Eastern culture is supposed to be feminine because it emphasizes the circular.

LE GUIN: But complexity surely is neither masculine nor feminine, and I see the line of my stories being awfully simple. It’s not that I want to write mysteries, I’m talking about something more like what Dickens did, pulling strands together, weaving something—I’m not very good at that. I just plunge ahead. Or I do it by trickery, by zigzagging.

WICKES: How long have you lived in Oregon?

LE GUIN: Since 1959.

WICKES: Do you think Oregon has had an influence on your work?

LE GUIN: Sure. It’s the place I’ve lived longest now.

WICKES: Has it made you a dendrophile, or were you one already?

LE GUIN: I must have been one already, but I didn’t even notice until I was looking over that bunch of short stories I was supposed to write an introduction for and suddenly realized, “My God, this thing’s crawling with trees.” I think living on the edge of a forest has had some influence. And we’ve managed to plant a forest, without really intending to. The kids won’t let us cut anything down: “Oh, what a sweet little seedling!” So now we have a garden towering over us. And every summer when I was growing up in northern California, I lived in a forest, up in the foothills of Napa Valley, and going out in the woods was what I did.

WESTLING: Were you a tomboy?

LE GUIN: I had three older brothers, so I tagged around after them. I wasn’t brave, and I didn’t climb trees—I’ve been terrified of climbing and so on—I was not a tomboy in the sense of being brave and courageous, but my parents made no great distinctions between boys and girls, so I had the freedom of the woods.

WICKES: Would your feelings about nature have something to do with your feelings about what we might loosely call civilization or more exactly call technology? How do you feel about technology—for or against?

LE GUIN: Oh, for. I don’t know, it’s such a large question, every answer turns out sounding like a fortune cookie, but you don’t get civilizations of any kind without technology. If you want a tool to do something with, you’ve got to figure out how to make it and how to make it best. And all that aspect of life I enjoy very much. I am really interested in things and artifacts, doings and makings and objects. So in the very simplest sense I enjoy technology. I love a good tool or a well-made thing.

WICKES: Yes, but there’s a difference between craftsmanship and technology.

LE GUIN: Well, craftsmanship is just good technology. Now if you’re talking about the excesses of the industrial West, then obviously we have taken something too far too hard. But to say that I’m against technology would make me a Luddite, and that I detest and abhor and am afraid of. People who think they can get on without the things that we now know how to do are kidding themselves. I would last five days in the woods without a good deal of technology. And besides, I like houses and cities.

WICKES: Yet it seems to me that your ideal state is the one you describe in City of Illusions, for instance, a comfortable old Maybeck house in the forest, with modern conveniences that nobody has to look after, where life is rather simple.

LE GUIN: No, no, not at all. That’s a total dead end. That’s why he had to get out of that place. It was fun to describe it, to give it the solar cells and stuff so they had this nice, low-level dream technology, but I’m a city person.

WICKES: I’m surprised to hear you say that because I thought the city was a bad place in your fiction. There’s the one in City of Illusions, which is a bad place, or the one on Urras in The Dispossessed, which is beautiful and luxurious but ultimately evil.

LE GUIN: But what about the other city in that book, the one on Annares? It’s a kind of Paul Goodman city.

WESTLING: And yet dangers lurk there, because of the political conniving.

LE GUIN: A city is where all dangers come together for human beings, where everything happens to human beings. I use “city” in a fairly metaphorical sense. A city is where culture comes together and flowers. A pueblo is a city.

WESTLING: The idyllic moments in many of your stories, though, seem to occur outside of cities. It’s the pastoral problem. People need to escape the corruption of urban life and find renewal in an idealized natural setting, but they have to go back.

LE GUIN: Yes, people are always going back and forth. But in my fiction the place they’re going to end up and do their work and live their lives out is the city. As at the end of The Beginning Place, which is, of course, much fresher in my mind than City of Illusions is. If I might say so, City of Illusions is rather a bad book to use for anything; it’s my least favorite and certainly the one with the most just plain stupid mistakes and holes in it.

WICKES: Still, quite often you present this antithesis between the modern city and the natural world, and my impression is that your fiction doesn’t show much interest in technology. By technology I mean hardware, gadgetry. This side of science fiction doesn’t seem to interest you very much, and though you’ve got the convenience of space travel which will permit you to visit all these wonderful different worlds, you’re not really interested in how the contraption works.

LE GUIN: Not at all. Because I don’t believe in it. If you ask me, do I believe that we will have space-flight of the speed necessary to get outside the solar system in any foreseeable future, I’d say no. We have nothing leading to such technology. So the whole thing is a metaphor, and you play around with making it look realistic, because that’s part of the fun of a novel. And I put limitations like they couldn’t exceed the speed of light. I like that part of it; I like playing with theory and what science I am able to absorb, which is pretty limited. But the engineering part is where I draw the line. I like my washing machine, and I treat it well, but I don’t really yearn to know what’s inside.

WESTLING: How do you go about mapping out an imaginary world like that of Malafrena?

LE GUIN: You certainly have to have maps. You have to know how far it is from there to there, or you get all mushy in your mind. Don’t all the novelists draw maps? Jane Austen did it, when she needed to, and the Brontës did.

WESTLING: But when Joyce wrote back to Dublin and had people measure the time it would take to walk from one place to another and whether Bloom could jump over the railings, wasn’t he being awfully literal-minded?

LE GUIN: Well, of course. A novelist has to be really, stupidly literal about these things.

WICKES: But that’s very different from inventing a country, as you do in Malafrena.

LE GUIN: Whether it’s real Dublin or invented Dublin, it’s got to be right. Whether it’s really there and other people can walk it, or whether you’re building it for them to walk in the mind, it’s got to be absolutely solid.

WESTLING: When you got ready to write The Lathe of Heaven, did you wander around in downtown Portland to see exactly where the parking structure was in relation to the other places?

LE GUIN: I checked a couple of things, because my memory’s so terrible. There are deliberate red herrings there. For instance, I could show you the house George lives in, but it’s not on the street I say it is, it’s one down. And Dave’s Delicatessen never was on Ankeny Street. When they moved it, I went into an absolute panic. I thought, if they put it on Ankeny, I’m leaving this town.

WICKES: Why did you choose Portland as the setting instead of some imaginary place?

LE GUIN: Oh, that wasn’t an imaginary place type of story. That was about America now. That story came close to home, literally.

WICKES: Is this your vision of what’s going to happen in the next twenty years?

LE GUIN: The book’s a dream, quite a bad one. If I had a vision of what’s going to happen, I’m sure I would be unable to speak of it. And I don’t see why I should. I don’t see what right I have. I’m not a prophet. I do not predict. I certainly hope I’m wrong.

WICKES: Are you more interested in the past or in the future? Your fiction goes both ways.

LE GUIN: It’s all mixed up together for me. You don’t get one without the other. It’s a Gordian knot which I have no wish to cut. It’s obvious there’s going to be no future without the past and no past without the future. I get rather Chinese about the whole thing.

WESTLING: Well, in a way then, real time doesn’t matter because what you’re doing is establishing metaphors within which problems can be explored. Is that right?

LE GUIN: Yes. And I think the way of talking about time that makes the most sense to me and within which I work most happily is to connect what it’s now fashionable to call waking-time and dream-time. There are two aspects of time, and we live waking in one; but Western Civilization has announced that there’s only one real time, and it is that one. This I more or less consciously reject, and I am perpetually attempting by one metaphor and device or another in my books to reestablish the connection between the dream-time and the waking-time, to say that the one depends upon the other absolutely.

WESTLING: Well, then, do you see the writer as a dreamer?

LE GUIN: Any artist goes back and forth between the two times, trying to speak one to the other, as a translator or interpreter.

WICKES: One of the most interesting things that keeps turning up again and again in your fiction is “mindspeech” and telepathy. Do you believe in ESP or anything like that?

LE GUIN: I have to give an agnostic’s answer. I certainly have never experienced it. But it was a very convenient metaphor for what I needed to do in the stories. I am not sure what it’s a metaphor for. I’ve read some critics who have had some ideas about what I was trying to say and have left that to them because I really don’t know what I was babbling about. I just know I needed it in certain stories.

WICKES: I think it works very well.

LE GUIN: It certainly is another way of talking about double vision. There is more than one way to see, more than one way to speak, more than one aspect to reality.

WESTLING: It’s also a way to indicate the closeness of the two travelers across the ice.

LE GUIN: Sure, it’s a lovely emotional metaphor. You can play with it endlessly. That’s what’s so neat about science fiction. It gives you the opportunity to say, “All right, there is such a thing as telepathy, and you can learn it as a technique.” Then you play with it novelistically. That’s why I’ve enjoyed writing science fiction.

WESTLING: Have you ever lived in a desolate place like Anarres?

LE GUIN: No, I never really lived in a desert, although I’d been across it in a train, until we went to [the eastern Oregon town of] Frenchglen years ago, just overnight. A whole book, The Tombs of Atuan, came out of that one trip into the Oregon desert. And I’m absolutely addicted to the desert now. Both of my parents liked the high desert country; they liked the Southwest and went there when they could.

WESTLING: Your new story in the New Yorker makes me think of another question, which I’m sure you’ve been asked ad nauseum, but I’ll just ask it one more time. Why is it that most of your protagonists are male?

LE GUIN: I don’t know. Yes, I’ve certainly been asked it, and I’ve tried and tried to answer it, and I’ve given up trying to answer it. In the crudest sense it’s that all protagonists doing the kinds of things that I had mine doing were male, and it took an effort of the imagination which I wasn’t capable of making until very recently to change that. This is going to look rather odd in print, but it really doesn’t matter to me very much what sex people are, and this is my main problem as a feminist. Every now and then I forget to be upset.

WESTLING: Well, Flannery O’Connor said that she always knew there were two sexes, but she guessed that she behaved as if there were only one.

LE GUIN: Yes, I’m afraid this happens to a lot more of us than has either been fashionable or even right to admit, but I think now we can admit it. I think the Movement has gone far enough, given us strength enough that we can say it. Sometimes it just doesn’t bloody matter.

WESTLING: I used to be quite disturbed when I thought of myself in front of a classroom. For years I saw a man in a tweed coat with a pipe. And that bothered me. I’ve been working on it for ten years, and I’m still not able to see me up there yet, but it’s not the man in the tweed coat anymore. I wonder whether you’ve had to make that kind of conscious effort.

LE GUIN: Oh, yes. And I am so grateful to the whole women’s movement for giving me the intellectual tools to make the effort with. Sometimes it’s almost gimmicks—making yourself change the sex of a pronoun to see what happens, for example.

WESTLING: So sex does matter, ultimately, doesn’t it?

LE GUIN: Of course it does. But it doesn’t always matter in everything.

WESTLING: Well, if one grows up with adventure stories, they’re always about boys, and one’s imagination gets formed by that.

LE GUIN: That’s it. But you see, I happily identified totally with the hero—if it was Jane Eyre, I identified with her; if it was a hero in Zane Grey, I identified with him—and I never thought a thing about it. And so I didn’t think anything about it as a writer. My conscience had to be raised a lot before I saw that. As of about the early seventies, it does matter. Now I can’t do this innocently anymore, that innocence is gone. So now it matters a lot what one’s protagonist is. I would defend my earlier books, because then it didn’t matter. But now it does.

WESTLING: So you wouldn’t agree with Virginia Woolf that there is such a thing as a woman’s prose style.

LE GUIN: I don’t know. I am not going to disagree with Virginia Woolf about anything. I see her style, which is wonderful. Now there’s the kind of complexity that I envy with my whole heart, that kind of weaving. But is there anybody besides Virginia Woolf who can do that particular sort of thing? You see, that way of thinking slides so easily into a sort of sexism that it worries me a bit.

WESTLING: But many of your stories are about hero adventures in the vein of the old military epics with hardly any participation by women.

LE GUIN: Are they? Well, particularly the earlier ones. There’s nothing like a good vicarious adventure.

WICKES: Speaking of one of the later ones, when did you write Malafrena? At the time it was published [in 1979], or was this a book you’d written earlier?

LE GUIN: No, it wasn’t a book I’d written earlier, but parts of it are very old. The idea and some bits of it go back to the mid-fifties or late fifties. And it shows in the way it’s put together; it creaks a little. It’s a very old-fashioned novel. It’s a nineteenth-century novel.

WICKES: We would have guessed that it was your apprentice work.

LE GUIN: Well, there’s apprentice work in it.

WICKES: Of course it’s entirely appropriate that it should be a nineteenth-century novel; it’s right in the tradition of Stendhal.

LE GUIN: If you’re going to write about the revolution of 1830, you might as well do so in a style appropriate to the subject.

WICKES: You majored in Romance languages in college. What other languages do you know at least something of? The reason I ask is that you have these names that seem to be part Germanic, part Slavic, part Scandinavian.

LE GUIN: Well, I’ve got a little linguistic facility which I haven’t done much with. I’m trying to teach myself Spanish now, but that’s no great trouble for someone with French and Italian. I didn’t learn any other languages. But my father was an ethnologist. There were books about language around, and he talked with informants in the languages he knew, like Yurok. The house was always full of people with funny accents. I’m comfortable with foreign languages, and I enjoy them, so it’s a lot of fun making them up. Word-making is one of the roots of fantasy. It reaches its peak in Tolkien, who said he wrote The Lord of the Rings so that they could say “Good morning” in Elvish.

WICKES: How do you choose your names? It seems to me you have a hodgepodge, or is that deliberate?

LE GUIN: I don’t think you’ll find too much hodgepodge in the phonemes of any language that is implied by the names in a certain island or a certain country in my books. I tried to have fairly clear in mind what pool of sounds they used because it bothers me very much in other people’s fantasies when they have a hodgepodge of sounds that don’t go together. One name obviously resembles German and the next something totally different, like Chinese, and then you get an “X,” which you don’t know how to pronounce. I tried for a certain coherence in implied language, and also for something that looks pronounceable to the reader so that he doesn’t have to stop every time he comes to it.

WICKES: In Earthsea you’ve got quite a variety in the names.

LE GUIN: Well, there are four languages going in Earthsea. There’s Kargad; there’s Hardic, the main one; there’s the Old Language, and then there’s the language they speak up in Osskil.

WICKES: Then in Malafrena you have characters with names taken from several different languages. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where Orsinia was, and whether you agree or not, I know it’s Hungary.

LE GUIN: Well, it isn’t Hungary, but it must be pretty near Hungary. I’ll tell you something funny. I’ve been told quite authoritatively by several people what it is and where it is, and nobody has ever mentioned Czechoslovakia, which is incredible to me because it seems fairly obvious that there’s a lot of resemblance. Could I throw Romania at you? That’s the language.

WICKES: Well, I figured it should be Romania, but it doesn’t fit. For me the real clincher is that when Luisa goes to Vienna she stays in the Hotel König von Ungarn.

LE GUIN: You know why? Because I stayed in the König von Ungarn. It was right behind the [cathedral]. It’s closed now, but it was a real hotel that Mozart and Beethoven stayed in, so I could use it with total assurance. I knew it was there in the 1820s and 1830s.

WICKES: Do you attach any particular significance to the names in Malafrena? For instance, Valtorskar and Paludeskar seem to be landscape names. Is there a significance to those landscapes? Is Luisa a swamp?

LE GUIN: There’s a touch of swampiness in the Paludeskar family. I like Luisa, though. Now that was one of the parts of the book that was old. Luisa was an incredible villainess as I first thought about her, the femme fatale, when I was trying to write that book way back when.

WICKES: One final question. What are you writing now?

LE GUIN: I have just been working on a television screenplay of one of my short stories for PBS. This is a new venture for me, screenwriting. Last year I was working on a screenplay for Earthsea with Michael Powell. He’s an old British director—have you seen The Red Shoes?—and he was determined to make Earthsea into a movie.

WESTLING: And what’s its fate?

LE GUIN: Its fate is Hollywood. We wrote a perfectly beautiful screenplay that would make a beautiful, serious fantasy, finally, in the movies. But then Hollywood said, “Oh, yes, this is wonderful, yes, we want to do this, but actually what we need now is a movie about immortality.” And so Michael and I said, “Well, yes, but you see, what we have is not a movie about immortality. We have a movie about this here wizard, and this young lady.” We did the whole thing backwards. You never start with a script. What we should have done is gone down to Hollywood together, Michael and me, and said, “Here we are, you’re going to buy us, for $200,000, and two years from now we will give you the script that you always wanted.” What idiots, we arrived with a script! And so now they want to rewrite it. And it’s going to be our movie or no movie. So it will probably be no movie. But we are both rather obstinate people, and we believe in our screenplay; so who knows?