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

THE LAST INTERVIEW ^{HOMEWARD BOUND INTERVIEW BY DAVID STREITFELD 2015–2018}

Ursula K. Le Guin lived in exactly the kind of Portland neighborhood you would expect. There were marvelous coffeehouses, a library, the offices of a literary magazine, a self-consciously weird shop called The Peculiarium, a grocery co-op, friendly bars, and affordable restaurants—all the comforts of civilization presented at human scale. Le Guin’s street started at the river, traversed the commercial center, rose sharply past a sign warning NO OUTLET, and crossed a gorge too deep for trolls before arriving at her house. Built in 1899, it felt bigger inside than it looked on the outside. The forest was only steps away, the largest urban wilderness in the country. I would smell the roses, take heed of the hand-printed sign imploring PLEASE DON’T LET THE CAT OUT!!, knock on the lion’s-head door knocker, and be granted admission to the living room. The neat shelves held a complete set of Dickens, her beloved Calvino’s Cosmicomics, an oversize tome titled Beyond Time and Space, and an Ovid with four hundred years of student scribbles. The walls displayed landscapes instead of award citations. The windows showed landscapes too—the Willamette River and then beyond to Mount St. Helens. It was a well-ordered but somewhat austere room, with polished wooden floors, beams of morning light, and no technology beyond the lamps.

Beginning in the summer of 2015, I sat in that room with Le Guin five times. We were planning a sixth meeting when a final illness took her at the beginning of 2018. The format was always the same: we placed ourselves in armchairs, separated by the width of the fireplace. The insults of age meant she could only sit still for an hour, and I tried hard never to exceed that limit. I always brought with me copies of her books, for quoting or reference. The early ones had garish and sometimes beautiful pulp covers. Le Guin chuckled frequently—the world amused her—but did not spare me when she felt I misunderstood something.

Pard, the black-and-white cat whose antics Le Guin chronicled on her blog, would stalk imperiously through. Charles, the writer’s husband of six decades, was always home but never visible. “He’s very shy,” she explained. “He doesn’t like to engage with ‘my people,’ as he calls them. He has his own people.” In the evenings, she and Charles used these chairs to read to each other. Charles would read poetry first (once when I was there it was Theodore Roethke) and then Le Guin would do the prose (Richard Henry Dana’s sea-faring epic Two Years Before the Mast). She would have a glass of mellow Speyside whisky. Charles, who hails from Georgia, would drink bourbon.

Extracts from our conversations appeared in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In advance of publication, she would sometimes revise a quote or expand it. Occasionally she softened a point about someone whom she scorned, like her fellow Library of America honoree, Philip Roth. In what follows, I went back to the original tapes to produce a definite record of our conversation, divided for the sake of clarity into two parts.

DAVID STREITFELD: I was perusing the bookcases here, and I didn’t see any of your books.

URSULA K. LE GUIN: They fill the shelves of two bedrooms upstairs, one copy of each edition. So many different editions. [Laughs] I’ve had two partial bibliographies done of my work, but the last one was years ago. I was required to list the number of titles recently. I was told it was forty-seven. And I said, I’ll bet there’s more than that. I went through the bibliography on my website, which is just the main titles, no chapbooks. There were sixty, more than I realized. I can’t keep up.

STREITFELD: I can’t either. I know your work well but I was reading the other night a piece I hadn’t read before, which I guess was performance art from the early 1990s. It was about being a woman who was really a man—because you were born before men acknowledged there were indeed such things as women. It was also about getting older and, among other things, Ernest Hemingway, he of “the beard and the guns and the wives and the little short sentences.” It is deliciously unhinged:

LE GUIN: [Laughs] I was in a state when I wrote that. My early sixties, I guess. Now I’m even older. Much older. And I still don’t have a gun.

STREITFELD: How does getting old look now?

LE GUIN: It’s not the metaphysical weariness of aging that bothers me. It’s that you get so goddamn physically tired you can’t pull yourself together. If you’ve ever been very ill, it’s like that. You just can’t rise to the occasion. It’s why I don’t do many public appearances anymore. I’m a ham. I love appearing in front of an audience. But I can’t.

STREITFELD: Even as a younger writer, you captured the old. As I rapidly age myself, I keep returning to the story “The Day Before the Revolution.” The heroine, Odo, has trouble moving and has trouble thinking.

LE GUIN: Old age is when you realize you can’t do what you used to do. I know more about being older now and I feel compelled to write about it. Partly because there aren’t very many old people in fiction, and they are just as interesting as younger people. And also, I think a writer who is still writing in her mid-eighties, like José Saramago or me—even if I’m only writing poetry—has a certain duty to report from the front. We are bearing witness to a place most people haven’t been. You’re how old? FIfty-four, fifty-six? Believe me, you haven’t been there. You may think you’re getting old, but you have a ways to go.

STREITFELD: It’s a long slide downhill, it seems like.

LE GUIN: A long way to go doesn’t tell you up or down, does it? It’s just a long way to go. I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I just tell it the way it is. [Laughs] Being an artist takes a certain amount of arrogance.

STREITFELD: With fiction writers, we expect them to go on forever. No one expects a surgeon to be operating on people when he’s ninety-three. But the readers always want more.

LE GUIN: There was considerable amazement that Saramago was still writing in his mid-eighties. I was very impressed, I have to say. He’s an unusual case, a very unusual writer. His last books were stronger than many younger writers’ novels. The Elephant’s Journey was a perfect work of art, and very funny.

STREITFELD: I see nothing in this room that smacks of our high-tech era.

LE GUIN: I have a website. I blog. I get email and send email. But I try and keep my distance. The internet just invites crap from people.

STREITFELD: You are the only writer I know who wrote a book about the street she lives on.

LE GUIN: It’s called Blue Moon Over Thurman Street. It has wonderful photographs by Roger Dorband. The street didn’t change for decades—it started at the docks, in industry, and moved through poverty and then small businesses to the working class and the middle class before petering out in hiking trails. It was a street that encapsulated America, or at least Portland. Thurman Street tied together the river with the hills, where the trees are.

STREITFELD: And then, suddenly, everything changed.

LE GUIN: Right after we wrote it in 1993 it was boom! The street went upscale. All the empty lots were filled in. They even changed the street down by the river to make it one-way, cutting off lower Thurman from upper Thurman. It reflected with incredible literalness the way America was no longer one place but two, one for the rich and the other for the poor. It was a split that didn’t seem to bother anyone. That also reflected America.

STREITFELD: When did you first move here?

LE GUIN: In 1959. It’s a mail-order house. Sears Roebuck sent the plans, and the local carpenter built it with local wood. The one next door is this house plus a whole other wing. This neighborhood was originally upper middle class, a development for business owners and such. By the time we got here it was very run down, lower middle class or upper working class. We were young. Charles was an assistant professor. We didn’t have much money and were starting a family. It was a beautiful big house on a hill. We just waltzed in here and said “Oh yeah.” You know what it cost us? $12,500. It’s about a half a million now.

STREITFELD: Thurman Street is filled with places to while away an afternoon or maybe a lifetime. I had an excellent cup of coffee at the Clearing Café.

LE GUIN: I don’t know it. It must be new. The Crackerjacks bar hangs on, the one constant. Charles is from Georgia, so going to a bar is not part of his culture, but we used to go into the Crackerjacks now and then. We don’t drink much beer anymore. I don’t know who goes there. Not the trendy people.

STREITFELD: You’ve received a lot of honors and awards over the years, and the pace has picked up recently, but there’s a sense among your admirers that you still haven’t gotten your due—that your influence and accomplishments are only beginning to be charted.

LE GUIN: I’ve had a big influence, yeah. But I published as a genre writer when genre was not literature. So what can you say? I didn’t play by the literary rules at the time. I wrote what was not literature. I wrote genre. I paid the price. Don DeLillo, who comes off as literary without question, takes the award over me because I published in genre and he didn’t. Also, he’s a man and I’m a woman.

[That happened thirty years earlier, but clearly the wound was still fresh. In 1985 Le Guin published Always Coming Home, a story about people in California’s Napa Valley who, she liked to say, “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.” It was her longest work of fiction and her most unconventional, using stories, original folktales, poetry, a glossary, dramatic works, illustrations, maps and mock histories to depict a society that might be a utopia. The book, released in a box with a cassette tape of music and songs that were an integral part of the story, did not sell well. It was too mainstream for science fiction, too much like science fiction for the mainstream. But it did become one of the three finalists for the National Book Award for fiction. DeLillo went home with the prize for White Noise, a tale of an airborne toxic event that borrowed certain motifs from science fiction. In early 2019, the Library of America plans to publish Always Coming Home as the fourth volume in its authoritative series of Le Guin’s works, a vindication of her original hopes for the tale.]

STREITFELD: You were a pioneer.

LE GUIN: Remember, always: you’re talking to a woman. And for a woman any literary award, honors, notice is an uphill job. And if she insists upon flouting convention and writing sci-fi and fantasy and indescribable stuff, well, you know how it’s going to end up.

STREITFELD: Is the situation any better now?

LE GUIN: I have fits of—well, it isn’t envy, because I don’t want celebrity, not at all. And it isn’t exactly jealousy. But sometimes my nose is out of joint when I see some kind of crappy writer getting all sorts of literary honors and I know I write better than he or she does. But all writers feel that way.

STREITFELD: In my experience, writers always want the opposite of what they have. If you sell ten million copies, you want to win the Nobel Prize. Win the Nobel Prize, and you want to sell ten million copies.

LE GUIN: That’s human nature.

STREITFELD: Still, you have been much honored of late. There is the 2014 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the Library of America is publishing your books.

LE GUIN: I don’t think the honors have been overdone. I think I earned them. They are welcome and useful to me because they shore up my self-esteem, which seems to wobble as you get old. And particularly with the National Book Foundation speech, it was really nice to know that people listened.

STREITFELD: You presented a bleak vision in that speech, but said that artists could help us out of it: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now.” It went viral.

LE GUIN: I certainly didn’t foresee Donald Trump. I was talking about longer-term hard times than that. For thirty years I’ve been saying, we are making the world uninhabitable, for God’s sake. For forty years!

That, as of old, was the writer’s job, maybe his primary job. To show us the futures we didn’t want, and the futures we could have if we wanted. The key line in the speech, for me, was the one about, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.” We can change our lives.

STREITFELD: Did the speech come easily?

LE GUIN: It took months to write. It was implied to me that we should be short and I kept trying to make it shorter. They were trying to speed the ceremony up a bit because writers will just babble on.

STREITFELD: The Library of America is the Valhalla of publishing—your hero Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Henry James. Only a few contemporary writers have been honored while they were still alive—Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow among the novelists, John Ashbery and Bill Merwin among the poets. Oh, and Philip Roth.

LE GUIN: Curious company. [Chuckles]

STREITFELD: I could have guessed you were not a Roth fan.

LE GUIN: I kept trying to read him. I couldn’t. Anyway, I didn’t know when the library contacted me that the number of living writers they had enshrined was that low. What caught my attention was when they republished some Phil Dick, a dozen or so novels spread over three volumes. I thought, “Well, well, well. The old genre walls really are crumbling.” But the distinction between the living and the dead didn’t initially occur to me.

I was a French scholar, or thought I would be. So I knew the French series of classics, the Pléiade. I think of them as sacred. They were the entire canon of the great literature of the French—such beautiful books on that very, very thin India paper with the golden binding.

In this country, sets of an author’s work were not such a big deal. I grew up with a set of Mark Twain in the house. My agent was a little iffy about dealing with the Library of America. “They don’t pay beans.” She was pretty scornful. I said, “Ginger, come on! Class! Kudos!” And she said, “Well, yeah, sure. But all the same, they don’t pay beans.” That’s because most of the people they handle are dead. But I’m not in it for the money. I have to coax Ginger into some of the deals I make. She’s a good agent. Her job is to make money. But I like a well-made book, and the Library of America volumes are well made. And the editing seems to be done with great care, line editing like no one does anymore.

STREITFELD: How did your first volume for the Library of America become the 1979 novel Malafrena and other stories from the place you call Orsinia? When most people think of Le Guin, they don’t first think of fiction about an imaginary nineteenth-century country.

LE GUIN: I bullied them into doing Orsinia first. I didn’t realize I was bullying them, but I was. They were very good-natured about it. They were going for the sci-fi, the science fiction, straight off and I kind of felt, okay, the Library of America is a literary series, and I’ve insisted for fifty years that science fiction properly done is literature. But it’s not all I write and I’m tired of having always foregrounded “the sci-fi writer.” No, I’m not a sci-fi writer. I’m a writer. I write novels, short stories, and poems, of various kinds. To just republish the same things that everyone republishes all the time, the old works, that I wrote way way back, does not interest me.

STREITFELD: You bend even the Library of America to your ways.

LE GUIN: What have I got to lose?

STREITFELD: You were this way fifty years ago.

LE GUIN: I really was. There’s some innate arrogance here. I want to do it my way. People are always trying to pigeonhole me and push me off the literary scene, and to hell with it. [Chuckles] I won’t be pushed.

STREITFELD: That even extends to the way you deal with publishers.

LE GUIN: So much writing about being a writer is about how you have to do it their way. I have never—or at least very, very seldom—made any deal for an unwritten work in my whole career. I write it and then sell it. That wasn’t so unusual fifty years ago, but it is now. I don’t promise work. People ask, will you write us a short story? I might, but I’m not signing any contract. No way do I contract for any unwritten work, ever. Way back my agent Virginia Kidd did it to me a couple of times and I gave her hell. I don’t write to order. I write to private order, to internal orders. Most of my fellow authors want a deadline. I ask for deadlines on nonfiction. “When you want this?” But when it comes to the stuff that comes from inside me, the fiction and poetry, I demand an extraordinary and unusual amount of liberty.

STREITFELD: The readers of Malafrena and the Orsinia stories have always struggled to locate them, sometimes literally. Orsinia seems like Hungary, but you once suggested Czechoslovakia. Poland seemed possible too.

LE GUIN: They take place in an imaginary Central European country but within the framework of European history. It’s confusing to people. What do you call the stories? It’s not alternative history because it’s just European history. There is no name for it. I do things like that. Parts of Malafrena go back decades, to the beginning of my career. I sold the first Orsinia story, “An die Musik,” in 1960 to the Western Humanities Review. That same week I sold my first fantasy story, “April in Paris.” I had two horses running. Fantasy paid better.

STREITFELD: There’s a quote I love, from Always Coming Home: “A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just space. It is not information, but relation.” With your books, they looked like one thing in the 1960s and ’70s. They looked like—forgive me—escapist trash, bought off a paperback rack, never reviewed, disposed of after consuming. And now they’ll be in those elegant, austere Library of America editions that are on acid-free paper that will last forever, or thereabouts. And yet they’re the same stories.

LE GUIN: And yet they’re the same stories. That’s what matters to me…

[She leafed through some of the books I had brought along. The 1967 Ace paperback of City of Illusions showed shadowy figures and rocketships, with the cover line: “Was he a human meteor or a time-bomb from the stars?” On Rocannon’s World, half of a 1966 Ace Double, a man holding a torch is riding a winged beast in outer space. The blurb: “Wherever he went, his super-science made him a legendary figure.”]

LE GUIN: Those are actually pretty good covers compared to some I got. There was the awful Wizard of Earthsea paperback from Ace that showed the shadow leaping onto Ged’s shoulders.

My books have risen above their Ace origins, their antecedents. They come from a nice working class family. I’m not remotely ashamed of their origins, but I am not captivated by them either the way some people are. Some people are fascinated by the pulps—there’s something remote and glamorous in the whole idea of a twenty-five-cent book. I am in the middle of re-reading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael is enthralled by the whole comic book thing. That is perfectly understandable and I enjoy his fascination, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I am into content. Presentation? That is just something that has to be there.

STREITFELD: How do you feel about e-books these days? In 2008 you wrote for Harper’s Magazine about the alleged decline of reading. It now seems prophetic about the reliability and durability of physical books: “If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”

LE GUIN: When I started writing about e-books and print books, a lot of people were shouting “The book is dead, the book is dead, it’s all going to be electronic.” I got tired of it. What I was trying to say is that now we have two ways of publishing, and we’re going to use them both. We had one, now we have two. How can that be bad? Creatures live longer if they can do things different ways. I think I’ve been fairly consistent on that. But the tone of my voice might have changed. I was going against a trendy notion. There’s this joke I heard. You know what Gutenberg’s second book was, after the Bible? It was a book about how the book was dead.

Personally, though, I hate to read on a screen. I don’t have an e-reader.

STREITFELD: Speaking of Kindles, you’ve been a vocal critic of Amazon.

LE GUIN: Their wish to control is what scares me. What I want people to worry about is the extent this corporation controls what is published. Amazon sets the norm—if it’s interested, the publisher increases the print run. If it’s not, the print run goes down. Jeff Bezos has got all the guns on his side. I hate to put in war imagery here about everything being a battle, but I don’t know any other way.

STREITFELD: Some writers grumble to me about Amazon, but they’re reluctant to be public about it because they think it will hurt their careers. Others say they do not see an issue here at all.

LE GUIN: Amazon is extremely clever at making people love it, as if it were a nice uncle. I don’t expect to win, but I still need to say what I think. When I am afraid to say what I think is when I will really be defeated. The only way they can defeat me is by silencing me. I might as well go out kicking.

STREITFELD: You and Phil Dick were the two great science fiction writers of the 1960s and ’70s. You grew up a few miles from each other. You both went to Berkeley High. You graduated together, in 1947. You wrote in 1971 one of the best Phil Dick novels that Phil Dick never wrote, The Lathe of Heaven. You called him, in The New Republic, “our homegrown Borges.” He said some complimentary things about you in public and some less than complimentary things in private. You tangled in the pages of fanzines over his depiction of women, and he credited you with his luminous creation of Angel Archer in his last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. She was his most complex female character. I suspect monographs will be written one day about your influence on each other—and yet you never met.

LE GUIN: He was self-isolated. He went through Berkeley High with no one knowing him. I was shy but my picture was in the yearbook. His was not. He would scare people off. He scared his wives off. He was a loner—very ambitious, very self-destructive.

STREITFELD: He scared you off. He wanted to come visit you at one of his many low points, in the early 1970s. He tried to reassure you that the rumors you had heard weren’t true. “I swear I can conduct a civilized, rational conversation, without breaking anybody’s favorite lamp,” he wrote.

LE GUIN: I was terrified he would just show up. I had young children.

STREITFELD: You wrote about Dick in a 1974 letter to James Tiptree, Jr., “We are both scared to death of each other. Each of us is the other’s Unconscious, I think.” And then you added: “Geniuses do tend to be overwhelming, I guess, don’t they?”

LE GUIN: What some consider a mystical breakthrough late in Phil’s life looks to me more like a breakdown. Still, this was a remarkable mind. But his works don’t wear as well as I hoped and thought they would.

STREITFELD: Oh no!

LE GUIN: I did an introduction to the Folio Society edition of The Man in the High Castle, and re-reading it I was struck by the clunkiness. Others that I liked a lot I now find hard going. I’m afraid to re-read Galactic Pot-Healer, my secret favorite. Clans of the Alphane Moon, which I was crazy about, now seems cruel. The way he handled women was pretty bad.

STREITFELD: There is a utility box on a street next to Berkeley High that devotes one side to you and another to Dick, the school’s two most famous graduates.

LE GUIN: I’ve never heard of that. This is a huge school. They must have famous graduates other than us.

[When I got home, I sent her pictures. The utility box was not well kept up, and there was graffiti on it. On the third side was playwright Thornton Wilder. On the fourth side was a relatively recent graduate named Ariel Schrag, a cartoonist. Le Guin wrote back: “Wow. I gotta monument. It’s hard to tell, but it looks like I gotta mustache, too. Fair enough. I never knew Thornton Wilder went to BHS! I’ve always liked his stuff. Live and learn.”]

STREITFELD: I live near Berkeley, and you seem to haunt the place. Your father was a professor at Cal. A big building on campus is named after him. The family ranch in Napa, which you’ve returned to every year, is not far away. Parnassus Press, the original publisher of A Wizard of Earthsea, was based in Berkeley.

LE GUIN: I grew up on a house on a hill in Berkeley, at 1325 Arch Street. It was then a lower-middle class neighborhood. Now it’s very expensive, near the Gourmet Ghetto and Chez Panisse. I wrote an essay about the house, “Living in a Work of Art,” about how it was designed by Bernard Maybeck in 1907 and was a wonderful if sometimes scary place for a child. The floors creaked long after you walked on them. The house was a complex space, even a moral space, and had an influence on me I can only begin to understand. My family owned it for fifty-four years, until my mother’s death in 1979.

I sort of do and don’t belong in the Bay Area. I grew up there but left at seventeen and never lived there full-time again. I just visited, and stayed there in summers with my family. I had friends and relatives all over the place for a while. But I was never ever part of the California literary scene—the Beats and so on. San Francisco has had quite the glory days but I’ve never felt so unwelcome in any bookstore as City Lights. Oh, they were so snotty.

STREITFELD: They were? They carry more of your books than anyone else in the Bay Area.

LE GUIN: This was twenty years ago, thirty years ago. They were very male-oriented. Come on. I’ve got nothing against City Lights. They’re great and I’m glad they’re there and I’m glad they’re keeping going, but it never was much of a pleasure to go into in the old days. It’s a kind of underground snobbishness. They make you feel like a middle-aged housewife, because they’re so liberated and San Francisco is male. Well, what do you do when you actually are a middle-aged housewife? The Beats weren’t good to women, with their addiction scene.

STREITFELD: I never think of you as contemporary with the Beats, but you were. Jack Kerouac was only seven years older than you, Allen Ginsberg barely three. You had the last laugh on the Beats. You’re still alive.

LE GUIN: Being a housewife and not being an addict prepares you for being eighty in ways that a life of wild living does not. The Beats died young, many of them. The great survivor is Gary Snyder. He was the one who didn’t dope.

STREITFELD: Someone needs to do a monograph on Parnassus Press, publisher of A Wizard of Earthsea and much more. Very little is known about them.

LE GUIN: They were called Parnassus because they started in the late 1950s on a street named Parnassus. It was just Herman Schein and his wife, Ruth Robbins. They published my mother’s book, Ishi: The Last of His Tribe, in 1964. That’s how they found out about me. Herman was cranky, difficult. He asked me if I would write a fantasy for teenagers. I said I could never do that. Then it was, “Oh wow, I got this idea.” Robbins, who did the illustrations, was a darling. She, and Herman, had no difficulty in understanding that the hero Ged is not a white man. Herman died rather young, and Ruth sold the press to Houghton Mifflin. They never got the credit they deserved as a children’s press. They did beautiful books.

STREITFELD: A Wizard of Earthsea seems steeped in the Bay Area—the hills, the rain, the fog, the sense of never being far from the ocean. There’s a line I love in “Living in a Work of Art” about “the extraordinary light of the Bay Area, which combines inland sunshine with sea-reflected radiance.” I always imagine Earthsea to be like that.

LE GUIN: Havnor, the capital of Earthsea, was modeled on San Francisco. I could see it from my bedroom in Berkeley, a long way away. The world was bigger then. This was before the Bay Bridge, before the Golden Gate. To get to San Francisco, you took a ferry. It was an expedition, not a commute.

STREITFELD: You once did a script of Earthsea, with the legendary English director Michael Powell. That was back in the early 1980s, I think.

LE GUIN: That script is kind of a miracle. He got in touch, said he liked the books. We put the first two books—Wizard and The Tombs of Atuan—together. It moves with the stately Powell pace. The story is very old fashioned, an English school story. You could have made a movie out of it then. I don’t think it would work now. It would be childish.

STREITFELD: There is a lot of debate about the right age for children to read Wizard.

LE GUIN: The Parnassus first edition had on it “11 up.” They took that off very soon, because it was just about that point that the publishers were inventing the “young adult.” YA became a recognized publishing genre and Herman Schein realized that the way to define this book is YA, not “11 up.” But I kind of like “11 up.” A lot of nine-year-olds read A Wizard of Earthsea. I don’t think I would have understood it at nine but kids are very sophisticated now. Adult relationships are being talked about in the book—that can be really boring to a kid. But I don’t know.

STREITFELD: There’s a new Earthsea omnibus of the first four books that was just published by Puffin in England. It has supplementary material in the back that seems geared to very young readers.

LE GUIN: Young or stupid. I had a discussion about this with my editor at Puffin. She said, “The schools want it.” If that’s true, English schools are not what they used to be. But you can’t argue with an editor that says schools want it. I hate all back matter—“Questions for your book group” and so on. I just won’t look at it.

STREITFELD: The esteemed critic John Clute said every science fiction novel is secretly about the year it is written, and reflects what the writer was thinking and the cultural attitudes of the time.

LE GUIN: Inevitably!

STREITFELD: Would Wizard be fundamentally different if it had been written ten years later?

LE GUIN: Clute was talking about science fiction. This is fantasy. Fantasy draws on a much older, deeper well for its models, inspiration, style, everything. Science fiction is time-bound in a way that fantasy can be but does not need to be. But I can never answer questions like that. Ten years later I was a different person, so of course I would have written a different novel.

STREITFELD: You began by writing firmly within the male power hierarchy. In Wizard, women take a secondary role. There are sayings in Earthsea about “weak as woman’s magic” and “wicked as woman’s magic.” The wizard school on Roke does not admit girls. Wizards are celibate.

LE GUIN: I was comfortably writing within that tradition in the 1960s, and then I was uncomfortable writing within it. Earthsea certainly would have been different if I started it ten years later. I had to turn around in the fourth volume, Tehanu, and untie it, untie the whole Earthsea from the male-centered, happily hierarchical, top-down world of the old fantasies. In coming back to Earthsea after seventeen years, what was interesting and reassuring to me was the realization that it wasn’t any longer going to be about heroes in a happily male-dominated world, with no sex for the wizards. I didn’t want to do that anymore, I couldn’t do it anymore. It wasn’t true anymore. And yet it was still Earthsea. I didn’t have to change anything, I just had to explain it. It was quite an education for me, actually, writing those last few books—the fourth, fifth and sixth. Now it’s done. I could go on and do sequels about other people in Earthsea but no. A story has an arc. You don’t want to go on after the end of King Lear.

STREITFELD: I interviewed you in 1990 when Tehanu came out. You said, “Finally the story is done.”

LE GUIN: I was wrong. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things about Earthsea. But now I believe I’m right.[2]

STREITFELD: You wrote Lavinia after you did the later Earthsea books. It was a novel about a character in the Aeneid, that translates the latter part of the epic, that revisions it, that is an explicit dialogue with its author, Virgil, as well as a tribute to him. As so often with your work, people had a hard time categorizing it.

LE GUIN: Lavinia doesn’t fit, just like Orsinia doesn’t fit. It’s not science fiction, not fantasy, not realism. Why the hell does it have to fit a label? Labels—that’s how you sell. And that’s how you shelve at the library. It can be helpful but it is limiting.

The thing to do is get away from these late-twentieth-century attitudes. What does Borges write? You can only call it Borgesian. Kafka is Kafkaesque. There is no label for what Calvino does. Calvinistic? It’s just what Calvino does. What you really want is to be your own label.

STREITFELD: You recently said you’ve stopped writing fiction.

LE GUIN: I didn’t say I stopped. I said, “The fiction isn’t coming.” It’s never been a matter of “I will write” or “I won’t write.” I’m not getting short stories. I haven’t gotten a story now for quite a while. “Elementals” was in Tin House in 2012, and then they published “The Jar of Water” in 2014 after the New Yorker sat on it forever and then didn’t take it, which was very un-New Yorker–like. That’s probably my last written, last published story.

STREITFELD: Lavinia in 2008 was your last novel.

LE GUIN: There just wasn’t another novel lurking somewhere at the back of my consciousness. It’s a very strange feeling, like having a well and the well goes dry. It’s a disappointment and a letdown, it’s work I loved doing. I know I can do it, so there’s a feeling of waste. I have my profession, my art. I’m good at it. It’s a pity I can’t use it on what I love to use it on most, which is fiction. But I’ve got to have a story that picks me up and carries me. If it ain’t there it ain’t there. What is the use sitting around and whining about writer’s block? It’s not writer’s block. I’m just written out. I’m glad I still can write poetry. I started with that and can continue with it now. That is both a lifelong need and a solace. If that gives out, I will be frustrated.

STREITFELD: You once clarified your political stance by saying, “I am not a progressive. I think the idea of progress an invidious and generally harmful mistake. I am interested in change, which is an entirely different matter.” Why is the idea of progress harmful? Surely in the great sweep of time, there has been progress on social issues because people have an idea or even an ideal of it.

LE GUIN: I didn’t say progress was harmful, I said the idea of progress was generally harmful. I was thinking more as a Darwinist than in terms of social issues. I was thinking about the idea of evolution as an ascending staircase with amoebas at the bottom and Man at the top or near the top, maybe with some angels above him. And I was thinking of the idea of history as ascending infallibly to the better—which, it seems to me, is how the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to use the word “progress.” We leave behind us the Dark Ages of ignorance, the primitive ages without steam engines, without airplanes/nuclear power/computers/whatever is next. Progress discards the old, leads ever to the new, the better, the faster, the bigger, etc. You see my problem with it? It just isn’t true.

STREITFELD: How does evolution fit in?

LE GUIN: Evolution is a wonderful process of change—of differentiation and diversification and complication, endless and splendid; but I can’t say that any of its products is “better than” or “superior to” any other in general terms. Only in specific ways. Rats are more intelligent and more adaptable than koala bears, and those two superiorities will keep rats going while the koalas die out. On the other hand, if there were nothing around to eat but eucalyptus, the rats would be gone in no time and the koalas would thrive. Humans can do all kinds of stuff bacteria can’t do, but if I had to bet on really long-term global survival, my money would go to the bacteria.

STREITFELD: In the Library of America’s edition of Orsinia, you quote from a 1975 journal when you were finishing up the novel that you began in the 1950s, Malafrena. You realized that in many ways it was spiritually and thematically similar to the novel you had just finished, The Dispossessed. You wrote, “not only the person and the situation are similar but the words:—True pilgrimage consists in coming home—True journey is return—and so on. I have not a few ideas: I have ONE idea.”

LE GUIN: [Laughs] People will take it literally, and they will quote it as the gospel truth, but what the hell—you just can’t write for stupid people. I beat up myself considerably about putting that section of a private diary in print. I’ve never done anything really like that before. I just kind of thought, “Oh, what the hell.” I wrote it and reading it decades later said, “Yeah, okay, there’s some truth in that, and what have I to risk?”

STREITFELD: The idea turns up everywhere in your work. You wrote a poem called “GPS” which ends:

LE GUIN: Another major version of that idea is Always Coming Home. It’s even in the title. That’s one of my most neglected and most central books. You want to understand how my mind works, go there. In the novel within the book, Stone Telling starts in the valley, goes to a different valley and comes back. There’s this whole difference between the circle and the spiral. We say the Earth has a circular orbit around the Sun, but of course it doesn’t. The sun moves too. You never come back to the same place, you just come back to the same point on the spiral. That image is very deep in my thinking. You can’t come home again and you can never step in the same river again. I quote that over and over again.

STREITFELD: Is this the central fantasy notion? It’s certainly in many fairy tales and ghost stories. I’m not sure how many of your peers are preoccupied by it.

LE GUIN: I recognize it in Borges. We’re very different writers, but he uses that notion too. Saramago—and Borges too, for that matter—is fascinated by the idea of doubles. I don’t go there.

Is going home a central fantasy notion? I think that would be a very interesting question to explore. Certainly it’s a central idea of The Lord of the Rings. But of fantasy? It may be a central idea, one of them. The first great fantasy is The Odyssey. And what does Odysseus do? He comes home. Homecoming may not be such an easy visit, after all. The world is changing. It is a spiral. That is kind of the point.

STREITFELD: The idea has less appeal in science fiction. The central SF idea, as molded in the 1940s, is, “We’re going to Mars, to another galaxy. We’re out of here and we ain’t coming back.”

LE GUIN: Outer space was an extension of the frontier—“We’re going to California in 1849. We’re gone.” I just discovered, though, that some people went back and forth, including my own family. My great grandfather, James Johnston, was a ’49er. He went out on the immigrant trail the first year of the Gold Rush, spent quite a while in California, ranched a while in Steens Mountain in Oregon—why, I can’t imagine—and then went back on the immigrant trail to Missouri. He ended up in Wyoming. There were a lot of people who did something like that. You always hear about the westward movement. You don’t hear about the backwash. Once you get to the frontier and there is no more frontier, what do you do? Well, you find a new frontier. That was talked about a lot in the 1940s, the 1950s. What is the new frontier? It’s the moon, outer space. We must have a new frontier, we must go forward! It fits in with capitalism, after all.

STREITFELD: In 1974, you published an essay, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” You wrote, “I think a great many American men have been taught to repress their imaginations, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful.” Fantasy was kept in the nursery or with the outcasts.

LE GUIN: Americans are no longer afraid of dragons, I think it’s fair to say. [Laughs] What’s that old saying, Be careful of what you wish for? The panic is dying. We’re going back to the mixture as it was before in earlier generations, when realism and fantasy mixed in all sorts of different ways.

STREITFELD: We’re inundated with fantasy now.

LE GUIN: But much of it is derivative; you can mash a lot of orcs and unicorns and intergalactic wars together without actually imagining anything. One of the troubles with our culture is we do not respect and train the imagination. It needs exercise. It needs practice. You can’t tell a story unless you’ve listened to a lot of stories and then learned how to do it.

STREITFELD: When the new Ghostbusters movie came out, and it had an all-female cast, the culture trembled. There were riots in the street, almost. Is fantasy now infantilizing us?

LE GUIN: I was talking about the genrification of fantasy literature. When you get into the whole pop-culture side of things, I don’t know what goes on there. The retreat into childishness is not a special characteristic of fantasy, but it can be a characteristic of almost anything.

STREITFELD: I stand corrected.

LE GUIN: To genrify is necessary. There are different genres. What is wrong is to rank them as higher or lower, to make a hierarchy based only on genre, not the quality of the writing. That is my whole argument and it goes no further. So don’t try to extend it into this world.

STREITFELD: You noted the tendency in American culture to leave the unbridled imagination to kids, who will grow out of it to become good businessmen or good politicians. Has that changed?

LE GUIN: Maybe it’s changed some.

STREITFELD: The battle has been won?

LE GUIN: Can we get away from the battle metaphor, and from winning and losing? Things have changed and maybe they’ve changed in that perspective, and in a good direction. You talk about winning and losing. I see it as, you make a gain here and then discover you lost something there.

STREITFELD: Okay.

LE GUIN: The place where the unbridled—not a word I’d use—imagination worries me is when it becomes part of nonfiction. You’re allowed to lie in a memoir now. In fact, sometimes you’re encouraged. I’m not a curmudgeon, I’m just a scientist’s daughter. I really like facts. I have a huge respect for them. The indifference toward factuality that is encouraged in a lot of nonfiction—it worries me when people put living people into a novel. Even when you put in rather recently dead people, it always seems you’re taking a terrific risk. There’s a kind of insolence about it, a kind of colonization of that person by you, the author. Is that right, is that fair? And then we get these biographers where they are sort of making it up as they go along. I don’t want to read that. I always think, what is it, a novel, a biography, what is it?

It’s funny. As a novelist, my requirements for a nonfiction book are different than for many nonfiction writers. The difference between fiction and nonfiction to me is pretty absolute. Either you’re making it up or trying to figure out what happened and say it as well as you can. Your own biases will get in the way and nobody can be perfectly factual, but you try. The main thing is trying. It seems to me a lot of people have given up trying, and the reviewers give them their blessing. But we have to be factual. Ask any scientist.

STREITFELD: Reality is so murky…

LE GUIN: Of course. So don’t make it murkier.

STREITFELD: History used to be about white men.

LE GUIN: That wasn’t wrong for previous generations. It is for this society. Times change.

I can’t make moral judgments about what was wrong and right a hundred or two hundred years ago. I don’t live in that world. We have so much trouble reading history without colonizing it, without asking how could you possibly be in favor of slavery or whatever. As if they had the ideas in their head to think the way we do. It’s so unfair.

There’s a sort of absolutism today. You do one bad thing and you’re a bad person. That’s just childish. There’s a lot of childishness around.

STREITFELD: The culture is getting more intolerant?

LE GUIN: There’s a tendency that way.

STREITFELD: But in some ways, there’s greater acceptance too. We’ve talked about how your work has made the transition from sci-fi to lit.

LE GUIN: I existed as an Ace double, half of a back-to-back paperback. We got somewhere. But then you look around and find out it really is the same place after all. Remember the spiral? That’s how I see it. It’s the same. America’s still America. [Laughs]

People are seeing the stories differently, with different eyes. That’s good, I’m happy. I’m delighted. It never was a battle to me exactly, and winning and losing are not the terms I would choose to talk in. It was a change I wanted to see happen, and in its own way and its own time it has happened and is happening.

STREITFELD: I’m reading your mother’s book about your father, Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration. He died in 1960. Around the time the book was published, in 1970, your mother remarried, to a much younger man.

LE GUIN: John Quinn. I had it in my head that he was thirty and she was seventy-two but I’m not good with figures. He was a lot younger. Her ten years with him, up to the last year, which was illness and other trouble, she had a terrific time. He just spoiled her rotten. He did it with a certain class. She had a good time.

STREITFELD: Have you ever been tempted to write more about your parents?

LE GUIN: Oh my Lord, it’s impossible. They’re just beyond me. She was… oh man. She was such a kind sweet mother. Men just ate out of her hand. Whatever “it” is she had “it.” “It” with a capital “I.”

STREITFELD: Since you’ve from time to time given me child-raising advice, I want you to know I took Lily, my eight-year-old, to see a production of Snow White. After it was over, all the kids lined up to have their picture taken with Snow White. Lily was the only one who wanted her picture taken with the Evil Queen.

LE GUIN: My eldest daughter took up the cello at age eight, and went on to become a cellist. Years later I said, “Elizabeth, how did you know to pick the cello?” And she said, “Oh it’s just that everyone else was doing the violin.”

Raising daughters is very interesting. My first daughter has always been just a good kid. My second daughter—oh my God. [Laughs] Is Lily a good reader?

STREITFELD: Yes. She takes books to the bookstore. If she can’t find anything there, she’ll have something to read on the way home. But she’s at an age where things in books really scare her.

LE GUIN: She may not get over that. I never did. I’ll stop reading because either I’m existentially terrified or it’s just too scary.

STREITFELD: Maybe you’re lucky you can still respond so intensely.

LE GUIN: I get sent a lot of books to blurb. I look at them. And so many have a lot of high tension, a lot of suspense. I’ll get really scared, and then it will turn out to be the first book of a series. To hell with it. I don’t respond well to suspense. I hate it. I’ll look at the end of the story when I’m still at the beginning.

STREITFELD: Speaking of children, between 1966 and 1974, you raised three children and wrote a series of masterpieces. Much of the work in your second and third Library of America volumes was done in a short span of time—a few years during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Did you feel at the time your brain was on fire?

LE GUIN: I worked just as hard before that and just as hard after. Why those years? That’s not all my significant work. There’s pretty good stuff after.

STREITFELD: But later your children were older. You had more time to write.

LE GUIN: I had a child under five at home for how many years? Probably seven or eight. No. 3 came along slightly unexpectedly, about the time No. 2 was beginning to go off to kindergarten. So all of a sudden I had a baby again, which was unexpected but profitable. I could not possibly have done it if Charles had not been a full-time parent. Over and over I’ve said it—two people can do three jobs but one person cannot do two. Well, sometimes they do, but it’s a killer.

STREITFELD: How did you manage?

LE GUIN: I don’t want to be Pollyannish but the fact is both jobs were very rewarding. They were immediately rewarding. I enjoy writing and I enjoyed the kids.

STREITFELD: You once said that having kids doesn’t make the writing easier but it makes it better.

LE GUIN: When I discovered I was pregnant the third time I went through a bad patch. I thought, “We didn’t really mean to do this thing. How are we going to do it all over again?” Pregnancy can be pretty devouring. But it was an easy pregnancy, a great baby, and we were really really glad we did.

STREITFELD: The kids sometimes inspired stories. Caroline, age three, came to you with a small wooden box and asked you to guess what was inside. As I recall, you guessed caterpillars and elephants, but she opened the box a tiny bit, allowing you to peek inside, and said: “Darkness.” That resulted in the story “Darkness Box.”

LE GUIN: That was a direct influence, which is kind of rare. Usually it was more general. There was all this vitality in the house. I was lucky because I was healthy and the kids were healthy. That makes such a difference. But it didn’t seem remarkable. I was of a generation when women were expected to—did expect to—have kids.

STREITFELD: Tillie Olsen, the author of Tell Me a Riddle, said that the need to earn money to support her family destroyed her as an artist. She’s remembered for that assertion now as much as she is for her stories.

LE GUIN: Tillie was the generation before mine. She was also a much more fierce kind of feminist than I was. She made me rather uncomfortable. But the real difference between us was that Tillie didn’t have any money. She had nine-to-five jobs or whatever she could get. That is a huge difference. I had friends in that position. It was particularly hard if the marriage was broken up. If they didn’t have a husband pulling in some income, they tried very hard to keep doing their art, but they had to earn money. And so they had to make a choice I never really had to make.

STREITFELD: When did you write?

LE GUIN: After the kids were put to bed, or left in their room with a book. My kids went to bed much earlier than most kids do now. I was appalled to learn my grandchildren were staying up to 11:00 p.m. That would have driven me up the wall. We got them down by old-fashioned hours—8:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m. I would go up to the attic, and have nine to midnight. If I was tired it was a little tough. But I was kind of gung ho to do it. I like to write. It’s exciting.

STREITFELD: Writing came easily to you.

LE GUIN: Yes, I had ideas.

STREITFELD: You didn’t try before bedtime?

LE GUIN: So long as I was in charge of the kids, that was that. It was full time. Sometimes Charles would be in charge, or they’d be out at music lessons. But I’m not very good at seizing broken bits.

STREITFELD: And when you started, you worked efficiently?

LE GUIN: Depends on the book. Sometimes I just sat there for two hours.

STREITFELD: You put in a plug for Elizabeth Gaskell recently.

LE GUIN: North and South is outstanding. Mary Barton makes me cry every damn time.

Speaking of writers, you know who floats my literary agency? Ayn Rand. I couldn’t read Hermann Hesse. He was boring but not as boring as Ayn Rand. I read The Fountainhead when I was twenty. About as loathsome a book as I’ve ever read.

STREITFELD: You have remained on good terms with Harlan Ellison.

LE GUIN: He was kind of adorable. Okay, not in a physical sense. But you would forgive the bastard anything. I’ve forgiven him a dozen times. Things I would not forgive anybody else. Because what the hell. It’s just Harlan. He was so funny. And so much… I need Jewish words here.

STREITFELD: I have a lot of complex feelings about Harlan. All the bragging, the aggression, the time wasted in feuds…

LE GUIN: I never met a man who didn’t have complex feelings about him. And most women too. I have complicated feelings too. He’s a bastard. He did stupid dirty things to me. But they didn’t amount to anything. [Laughs] Dastardly plots that didn’t work out. Besides, he was a lot of fun to be with.

STREITFELD: Neil Gaiman is in some ways the star fantasy writer of the era.

LE GUIN: His fans are devoted. He works in many fields. All my contact with him has been good. He’s truly generous. He’s been very generous to me. [Laughs] I just wish I liked his writing more.

STREITFELD: You’re now a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

LE GUIN: I almost wasn’t. It’s so embarrassing. Either the letter got lost in the mail or I tossed it thinking it was junk, I don’t know which, but in either case I never got the invitation. They waited and waited and waited and finally got in touch with my agent, who immediately got in touch with me. I wrote to them and said, “I wasn’t pulling a Dylan.” But they must have wondered.

STREITFELD: It’s another honor, a significant one.

LE GUIN: To paraphrase Mary Wollstonecraft’s line about the vindication of the rights of women, it’s a vindication of the rights of science fiction. It makes it a lot harder for the diehards and holdouts to say, “Genre isn’t literature.”

STREITFELD: Do they still say that?

LE GUIN: You’d be surprised. In academe, there are still diehards. Once a critic takes a position, he never changes it.

STREITFELD: For all my devotion to your work, the vast academic literature about it always seemed tough sledding.

LE GUIN: Well, they’re academics. There was one book that really took me by surprise and gave me great pleasure. It was called The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed.” It came out in 2005 and practically everything in it was readable. That’s very rare.

STREITFELD: Right after Trump’s election, you came up with a new model of resistance that elevates not the warrior but water: “The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going—carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant by choice and uses force only when compelled.”

LE GUIN: It’s rooted firmly in Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching. He goes very deep in me, back to my teenage years. I’ve found him a helpful thinker. I did my own translation a few years back.

STREITFELD: There are traces of Lao Tzu in Tehanu, but it’s not explicit.

LE GUIN: Most of my real work was fictional, where you don’t express things like that directly. You build it in. Like in The Lathe of Heaven. George, the hero, is kind of watery. He goes with the flow, as they used to say. I was dubious about publishing that piece about water as a blog entry. It was so direct, and sounded like I was trying to be some sort of guru.

STREITFELD: You are direct.

LE GUIN: I like to hide it in fiction.

STREITFELD: For a year or two, you thought you would never write fiction again.

LE GUIN: But then I suddenly went and wrote a little story called “Calx” for Catamaran, and then a long story called “Pity and Shame.” I should have remembered what all good SF writers know: prediction is not our game.

STREITFELD: Are you following the Me Too movement, as women assert themselves on social media after years of harassment?

LE GUIN: I don’t follow things on social media, and I don’t have very much faith in their endurance. Everybody explodes, get it out of their systems, and then they let it drop again.

STREITFELD: Maybe, although careers are definitely being affected here. Can we ever watch House of Cards, with its disgraced star, Kevin Spacey, again?

LE GUIN: If you start saying that about actors, you can’t go to the theater.

STREITFELD: A couple of producers announced they were going to do a show, an alternate history of the Confederacy where the South won. There was an outpouring of rage against it. The very idea was offensive.

LE GUIN: That’s political correctness gone mad, to ban a show that hasn’t even been made. This is why I never write contemporary fiction. I would get raked over the coals by every politically correct anti-racist. I was able to populate Earthsea with brown and black people fifty years ago but it was fantasy and so no one took it seriously. That is why they could keep publishing science fiction in the Soviet Union that was critical of the regime. It’s exactly the same thing. I would never get away with that today.

STREITFELD: I don’t see the books you and Charles were reading last night. Usually they’re on the tables here.

LE GUIN: He’s now reading the Oxford Book of English Verse to me. I’m reading Brontë’s Shirley to him. It’s a good book, much better than I realized. I wasn’t feeling so hot, so we had the reading upstairs, with a little whiskey. I’m still recovering from my birthday. It was very nice. It kind of went on for a week. My daughter came up from Los Angeles, and I got to see her. It’s a serious age, eighty-eight. If you turn the numbers on their side, it’s two infinities on top of each other.