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About Writing
Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind,” writes Ursula Le Guin in her introduction to Dancing at the Edge of the World. But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last nonfiction collection, The Language of the Night. And what a mind — strong, supple, disciplined, playful, ranging over the whole field of its concerns, from modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos, with an eloquence, wit, and precision that makes for exhilarating reading.
320 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1989
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7700 people want to read
About the author
Ursula K. Le Guin
1,043 books30.1k followersUrsula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.
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February 11, 2018
Ursula Le Guin begins this collection by speaking of crones, and then proceeds to show us what the word means, by sharing the wisdom of her then sixty years. The subtitle is exactly right, and she weaves these three categories together beautifully.
Did you know that she could write biting book and movie reviews? That she wrote unique travel pieces that reflect her fascination with discovery? And she shared my love of train travel: “Only unimportant people take trains. People to whom time isn’t money, but life, their life lived and to be lived.”
One of my favorite essays was “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” She muses about how our species might have gone from foraging for food to hunting, for the purpose of telling a more dramatic story. “It’s hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another … No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank … shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.” Then, drawing on ideas from Virginia Woolf and others, she discusses how a carrier bag of some kind was probably the first cultural device, and how a story can be seen as such a carrier bag—something that holds something else.
“We’ve heard it all about the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but what we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story.” She’s making a not-so-subtle comparison here between men’s and women’s stories, and their writing. Then she relates from her own story:
“So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble … full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks. I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?”
I found this collection amazing and inspiring. I couldn’t help but leave it feeling that she would have been such a wonderful person to know—so much fun, so wise—and how grateful I am that we will always have her books. I will be reading this one over many times.
Did you know that she could write biting book and movie reviews? That she wrote unique travel pieces that reflect her fascination with discovery? And she shared my love of train travel: “Only unimportant people take trains. People to whom time isn’t money, but life, their life lived and to be lived.”
One of my favorite essays was “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” She muses about how our species might have gone from foraging for food to hunting, for the purpose of telling a more dramatic story. “It’s hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another … No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank … shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.” Then, drawing on ideas from Virginia Woolf and others, she discusses how a carrier bag of some kind was probably the first cultural device, and how a story can be seen as such a carrier bag—something that holds something else.
“We’ve heard it all about the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but what we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story.” She’s making a not-so-subtle comparison here between men’s and women’s stories, and their writing. Then she relates from her own story:
“So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble … full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks. I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?”
I found this collection amazing and inspiring. I couldn’t help but leave it feeling that she would have been such a wonderful person to know—so much fun, so wise—and how grateful I am that we will always have her books. I will be reading this one over many times.
September 30, 2018
"Ahlak ataerkildir."
Daha da söyleyecek sözüm yok. Kraliçe, tamam artık ondan alacağımı aldım, dediğim her an beni beynimden vurmaya devam ediyor.
Daha da söyleyecek sözüm yok. Kraliçe, tamam artık ondan alacağımı aldım, dediğim her an beni beynimden vurmaya devam ediyor.
December 5, 2014
Responding to my brother’s plea for Goodreads friends who have read Ursula Le Guin, I picked up this collection at the library. Mind-expanding. There’s an essay in here called “The Space Crone” where she offers a brilliant and amusing explanation of why the elderly woman is humanity’s best representative.
The collection is presented chronologically so that I could see some of her ideas developing over the years. In 1983 she gave “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” in which she wrote (said):
"[I]nstead of talking power, what if I talked like a woman right here in public? It won’t sound right. It’s going to sound terrible. What if I said what I hope for you is first, if—only if—you want kids, I hope you have them…I hope you and they have enough to eat, and a place to be warm and clean in, and friends, and work you like doing. Well, is that what you went to college for? Is that all? What about success?"
Three years later she gave another commencement address at Bryn Mawr College which was the most compelling assembly of ideas to me in the whole collection. It has incisive wit (“When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner”) is full of practical wisdom which has–I hope—permanently altered the way I hear what a woman says.
"At home, to women and children talking mother tongue, [men] respond with a grunt and turn on the ball game. They have let themselves be silenced, and dimly they know it, and so resent speakers of the mother tongue; women babble, gabble all the time…Can’t listen to that stuff. Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women and children: not to hear that as valid discourse."
I’m guilty as charged. Guilty of having let myself be silenced in the presence of what she calls the mother tongue, which, in the language of the father tongue, is
"inaccurate, unclear, coarse, limited, trivial, banal…repetitive, the same over and over, like the work called women’s work; earthbound, housebound. It’s vulgar, the vulgar tongue, common, common speech, colloquial, low, ordinary, plebian, like the work ordinary people do, the lives common people live."
Le Guin explains the mother tongue in its own terms when she writes:
"The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting…It is the language spoken by all children and most women, and so I call it the mother tongue, for we learn it from our mothers and speak it to our kids."
I’m guilty of having let my wife go on explaining the ordinariness of the spent day without listening to the words, and certainly without receiving the opportunity to connect she is offering to me. I have not felt the binding power because I’ve only heard the trivial repetitiveness. There’s hope for me. Le Guin declares:
"This is what I don’t want: I don’t want what men have. I’m glad to let them do their work and talk their talk. But I do not want and will not have them saying or thinking or telling us that theirs is the only fit work or speech for human beings. Let them not take our work, or words from us. If they can, if they will, let them work with us and talk with us. We can all talk mother tongue, we can all talk father tongue, and together we can try to hear and speak that language which may be our truest way of being in the world, we who speak for a world that has no other words but ours."
There is so much just in this one speech. Great imagery, like “We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” That image is as good as any to describe my new mental terrain. I opened this book with unapprehended prejudices and biases and she introduced me to them and showed me how to begin unlearning them. “I am trying to unlearn these lessons,” she says herself, “along with other lessons I was taught by my society, particularly lessons concerning the minds, work, works, and being of women. I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers.” She has become that for me.
A more exacting exposure of one of society’s wrong lessons comes in her essay “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” in which she weaves together the lessons from female writers past (those known and those “swept under the rug” of literary history), her mother’s example, and her own personal experience, in order to champion the worth of women writers who are also mothers. It makes a beautiful tapestry, full of the warm texture you might expect from a wonderful mother, who is also an artist.
The collection is presented chronologically so that I could see some of her ideas developing over the years. In 1983 she gave “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” in which she wrote (said):
"[I]nstead of talking power, what if I talked like a woman right here in public? It won’t sound right. It’s going to sound terrible. What if I said what I hope for you is first, if—only if—you want kids, I hope you have them…I hope you and they have enough to eat, and a place to be warm and clean in, and friends, and work you like doing. Well, is that what you went to college for? Is that all? What about success?"
Three years later she gave another commencement address at Bryn Mawr College which was the most compelling assembly of ideas to me in the whole collection. It has incisive wit (“When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner”) is full of practical wisdom which has–I hope—permanently altered the way I hear what a woman says.
"At home, to women and children talking mother tongue, [men] respond with a grunt and turn on the ball game. They have let themselves be silenced, and dimly they know it, and so resent speakers of the mother tongue; women babble, gabble all the time…Can’t listen to that stuff. Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women and children: not to hear that as valid discourse."
I’m guilty as charged. Guilty of having let myself be silenced in the presence of what she calls the mother tongue, which, in the language of the father tongue, is
"inaccurate, unclear, coarse, limited, trivial, banal…repetitive, the same over and over, like the work called women’s work; earthbound, housebound. It’s vulgar, the vulgar tongue, common, common speech, colloquial, low, ordinary, plebian, like the work ordinary people do, the lives common people live."
Le Guin explains the mother tongue in its own terms when she writes:
"The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting…It is the language spoken by all children and most women, and so I call it the mother tongue, for we learn it from our mothers and speak it to our kids."
I’m guilty of having let my wife go on explaining the ordinariness of the spent day without listening to the words, and certainly without receiving the opportunity to connect she is offering to me. I have not felt the binding power because I’ve only heard the trivial repetitiveness. There’s hope for me. Le Guin declares:
"This is what I don’t want: I don’t want what men have. I’m glad to let them do their work and talk their talk. But I do not want and will not have them saying or thinking or telling us that theirs is the only fit work or speech for human beings. Let them not take our work, or words from us. If they can, if they will, let them work with us and talk with us. We can all talk mother tongue, we can all talk father tongue, and together we can try to hear and speak that language which may be our truest way of being in the world, we who speak for a world that has no other words but ours."
There is so much just in this one speech. Great imagery, like “We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” That image is as good as any to describe my new mental terrain. I opened this book with unapprehended prejudices and biases and she introduced me to them and showed me how to begin unlearning them. “I am trying to unlearn these lessons,” she says herself, “along with other lessons I was taught by my society, particularly lessons concerning the minds, work, works, and being of women. I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers.” She has become that for me.
A more exacting exposure of one of society’s wrong lessons comes in her essay “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” in which she weaves together the lessons from female writers past (those known and those “swept under the rug” of literary history), her mother’s example, and her own personal experience, in order to champion the worth of women writers who are also mothers. It makes a beautiful tapestry, full of the warm texture you might expect from a wonderful mother, who is also an artist.
December 18, 2018
"Seks büyük bir doğaüstü güçtür, dolayısıyla gelişmemiş toplum yahut zihin bu konuyu büyük bir tabu haline getirir. Daha olgun kültür yahut zihinlerde bu tabu yahut yasalar kişiye büyük bir özgürlük bahşederken başka bir insana bir nesne gibi yaklaşmasına olanak tanımayan içsel bir şeref yasasına dönüşebilir." Sf:34
"Yanlış olan gebelikten nasıl korunacağını bilmemekti. Yanlış olan cehaletimdi. Asıl suç o cehaleti yaşamaktı. Utanıyorum, diye düşünmüş prenses, yobazların beni cahil bırakmasına izin verdiğim, buna razı geldiğim, zayıf ve bencil bir adama aşık olduğum için utanıyorum. Gerçekten utanıyorum. Ama suçlu değilim. Suç nereden çıktı şimdi? Buraya yapmak üzere geldiğim işi yapabilmek için ne yapmam gerekiyorduysa onu yaptım. O işi yapacağım. Bütün mesele bu. Mesele sorumluluk almak." Sf:123
"Başarı bir başkasının başarısızlığıdır. Başarı düşlemeye devam edebileceğimiz Amerikan Rüyasıdır, zira pek çok yerdeki pek çok insan, biz otuz milyon da buna dahil olmak üzere, korkunç bir yoksulluk gerçekliğinin içinde, gözleri tamamen açık, yaşar. Hayır, size başarı dilemiyorum. Başarı hakkında konuşmak bile istemiyorum. Başarısızlıktan söz etmek istiyorum.
İnsan olduğunuz için başarısızlıkla tanışacaksınız elbette. Hayal kırıklığıyla, haksızlıkla, ihanetle ve telafisi mümkün olmayan kayıplarla tanışacaksınız. Güçlü olduğunuzu sandığınız noktalarda aslında zayıf olduğunuzu fark edeceksiniz. Mal mülk, servet sahibi olmak için çalışacak ve sonra asıl onların size sahip olduğunu anlayacaksınız. Kendinizi izbe, karanlık yerlerde bir başınıza, korku içinde bulacaksınız, ki şimdiden öyle olduğunu biliyorum.
Sizin, kız kardeşlerimin ve kızlarımın, erkek kardeşlerimin ve oğullarımın, orada, o karanlık, izbe yerde yaşayabilmenizi, yaşayabilmelerini diliyorum. Hepinizin ussallaştırıcı başarı kültürümüzün yaşama elverişsiz ve yabancı bir alan, bir sürgün yeri olarak addedip yadsıdığı yerde yaşayabilmenizi diliyorum." Sf:178
October 22, 2023
Le Guin’in 1976-1988 yılları arasında yazdığı yazılar ve yaptığı konuşmaların derlemesi. Le Guin kurgularıyla anlaşamıyorum. Çok kez deneyip çeşitli sebeplerle yarım bıraktığım bir yazar. İlginç bir şekilde kurgu dışı yazılarını çok sevdim. Çok üretken bir yazar olduğu için de tıpkı kurguları kadar kurgu dışı da çok fazla kitabı var.
Derlemedeki yazılar bir bütünlük teşkil etmiyor. Feminizm, edebiyat eleştirisi, gezi yazısı hatta mezuniyet konuşması gibi çok farklı alana yayılıyorlar. Uzun zamana yayarak okuduğum için takip etmesi çok zevkli oldu. Le Guin’in içten bir dili var. Bazı yazılarda kendi başına ya da bir yakınının başına geleni anlatmaktan çekinmiyor. Bu şeffaf tutumunu çok sevdim. İnandığı fikirlerin öznesi olmaktan gurur duyduğunu görmekten hoşlandım. Tahmin edileceği gibi bu fikirlerin başında feminizm geliyor. Kadınların okullarda, edebiyatta kısaca hayatta görünür olmasını istiyor bunu da destekliyor. Yazıların tarihini de düşününce kürtaj konusunda konuşması çok önemli. Amerika’da feminist özgürleşmenin yükseldiği yıllarda aynı ölçüde tepki görmelerine karşın Le Guin çekinmeden kürtajını anlatıyor. Bu hakkın arkasında duruyor. Hükmetme ve hükmedilme ihtiyacı duymadan yaşamalarını umduğunu belirtiyor. Muhteşem bir temenni bu.
Gezi yazıları da en az diğerleri kadar ilgi çekiciydi. Gittiği yerlere deneyimini ve edebiyatı götürüyor. Edebiyat yazıları genellikle bilim kurgu eleştirilerini kapsıyor. Doris Lessing kadın olduğu için birçok yazıda yer alıyor. Le Guin’in, Lessing’i eleştirirken adının duyulması için de uğraştığı çok belli. C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Calvino gibi yazarlar hakkında da yazılar var.
Güzel bir derlemeydi. Okumaktan çok zevk aldım. Le Guin’in düşünme biçimini sevdim. Kıvrak da bir üslubu var, okuru denemede bile şaşırtabiliyor. Ben aslından okudum ama İthaki Yayınları yayımlamış. Deneme severlere öneririm.
Derlemedeki yazılar bir bütünlük teşkil etmiyor. Feminizm, edebiyat eleştirisi, gezi yazısı hatta mezuniyet konuşması gibi çok farklı alana yayılıyorlar. Uzun zamana yayarak okuduğum için takip etmesi çok zevkli oldu. Le Guin’in içten bir dili var. Bazı yazılarda kendi başına ya da bir yakınının başına geleni anlatmaktan çekinmiyor. Bu şeffaf tutumunu çok sevdim. İnandığı fikirlerin öznesi olmaktan gurur duyduğunu görmekten hoşlandım. Tahmin edileceği gibi bu fikirlerin başında feminizm geliyor. Kadınların okullarda, edebiyatta kısaca hayatta görünür olmasını istiyor bunu da destekliyor. Yazıların tarihini de düşününce kürtaj konusunda konuşması çok önemli. Amerika’da feminist özgürleşmenin yükseldiği yıllarda aynı ölçüde tepki görmelerine karşın Le Guin çekinmeden kürtajını anlatıyor. Bu hakkın arkasında duruyor. Hükmetme ve hükmedilme ihtiyacı duymadan yaşamalarını umduğunu belirtiyor. Muhteşem bir temenni bu.
Gezi yazıları da en az diğerleri kadar ilgi çekiciydi. Gittiği yerlere deneyimini ve edebiyatı götürüyor. Edebiyat yazıları genellikle bilim kurgu eleştirilerini kapsıyor. Doris Lessing kadın olduğu için birçok yazıda yer alıyor. Le Guin’in, Lessing’i eleştirirken adının duyulması için de uğraştığı çok belli. C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Calvino gibi yazarlar hakkında da yazılar var.
Güzel bir derlemeydi. Okumaktan çok zevk aldım. Le Guin’in düşünme biçimini sevdim. Kıvrak da bir üslubu var, okuru denemede bile şaşırtabiliyor. Ben aslından okudum ama İthaki Yayınları yayımlamış. Deneme severlere öneririm.
March 22, 2020
I have always felt that Mrs. Le Guin was amazingly intelligent and this collection of essays and speeches demonstrated her brilliance in numerous ways. However, sometimes her academic approach to everything becomes inaccessible and loses the reader. Her feminist essays were wonderful and her commencement speeches uplifting. Unfortunately I found her literary essays daunting and at times disjointed. Overall, this was not an easy read but offered a worthwhile academic journey through Mrs. Le Guin’s life in the 1980s.
July 5, 2022
Dancing at the Edge of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin
This collection of essays by one of the premier writers of the last 70 years is a must read for three reasons. One, Ms. Le Guin provides a window into a time that is quickly receding into the past - a time, which remembered, may forestall impending disaster. That window also enables the reader to see two other things: first, how little things have changed since she wrote these essays and second, how those things that have changed have not changed for the better. Interestingly I recall saying the same thing about the essays of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and Arundathi Roy. Well, Ms. Le Guin’s essays approach societal problems from her own unique perspective and they fall in the category with other interesting and sharp-witted writers.
The second reason is that she provides some specific and interesting insights into the writing process. In her essay “Some Thoughts on Narrative” Ms. Le Guin gives a lot of guidance to aspiring writers. For example, “Narrative is a central function of language. Not in origin, an artifact of culture, an art, but a fundamental operation of the normal mind functioning in society. To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story.” (p. 39) Thus, she encourages writers to find their narrative and to share it. Of course that is only a small sample of the excellent advice offered in this essay.
Furthermore, in her essay, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?,” she discusses two myths about writing and five elements of the story writing process. The two myths about writing, she says are: one, “there is a secret to being a writer” and two, “stories start from an idea.” (p. 192) With regards to these myths she elaborated by saying, “There is just the obstinate, continuous cultivation of a disposition, leading to skill in performance.” (p. 193) Later in that same essay she outlines and details five “principal elements” in the writing process.
The patterns of the language.
The patterns of syntax and grammar.
The patterns of images.
The patterns of the ideas.
The patterns of the feelings. (p. 194)
Of course I am just providing the teaser. If you wish to know more about what she says about each of these elements I definitely recommend this essay.
The other essay where she provides writing insight is specific to issues facing women writers. A daughter of a writer herself, Ms. Le Guin draws upon the experience of her mother, and her own experiences, while also delving into the ideas of other women writers, with special attention to Virginia Woolf. It is in this essay that she reveals society’s biases that have been responsible for suppression of talent of half of the human population. For instance, when discussing whether or not women artists are taken seriously she says, “Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life: but no artist can work well against daily, personal, vengeful resistance. And that’s exactly what many women artists get from the people they love and live with.” A bit later she adds the drive, “To push mothers back into ‘private life,’ a mythological space invented by the patriarchy, on the theory that their acceptance of the ‘role’ of mother invalidates them for public, political, artistic responsibility in to play by Old Nobodaddy’s game, by his rules on his side.” (p. 235). In concluding this essay, she does provide a positive, or at least pragmatic, outcome. “The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That’s enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on the paper. In other words, that she’s free. Not wholly free. Never wholly free. Maybe very partially. Maybe only in this one act, this sitting for a snatched moment being a woman writing, fishing the mind’s lake. But in this, responsible; in this autonomous; in this free.” (p. 237).
The third reason is that Ms. Le Guin provides references and reviews to many books - several of which I placed on my "Want to Read" list on my “goodreads” app. Writers are readers. Perhaps an overgeneralization, but I place a substantial amount of confidence in this assertion. Ms. Le Guin is no exception. Throughout the course of her essays and her book reviews I came across dozens of references to other books and authors that she recommended. This did slow down my reading as I was sent to “goodreads” or other online resources to investigate titles, authors and collections of work. Some of the more interesting references were to works on Native American mythology. While I am skeptical in general about the ability of the colonizer to do justice in relating these myths I am accepting these references because of they come from Ursula Le Guin. I hope to pursue them and open a new realm of learning and interest in doing so.
In closing I want to share what, to me, was one of the most powerful statements of Ms. Le Guin’s work. I found it powerful because I could easily relate to what she was saying. “ Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women, children: not to hear that as valid discourse.” (p. 151) I concur. My agreement is not based on an ideology but on my own experience, objectively viewed in retrospect. This is what I experienced in those schools, college and other institutions. The first author to open my eyes to this was James Baldwin, followed by Audre Lorde and Alice Walker (in her essays). I am glad to have added Ms. Le Guin’s essays to my reading collection and to be able to share her clear statement of this shared sentiment.
Thanks are due to my late mother for having this book in her collection. In its pages, as a bookmark, I found a stub from a boarding pass that must have been hers. I felt her presence as I read.
I strongly recommend this book.
This collection of essays by one of the premier writers of the last 70 years is a must read for three reasons. One, Ms. Le Guin provides a window into a time that is quickly receding into the past - a time, which remembered, may forestall impending disaster. That window also enables the reader to see two other things: first, how little things have changed since she wrote these essays and second, how those things that have changed have not changed for the better. Interestingly I recall saying the same thing about the essays of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and Arundathi Roy. Well, Ms. Le Guin’s essays approach societal problems from her own unique perspective and they fall in the category with other interesting and sharp-witted writers.
The second reason is that she provides some specific and interesting insights into the writing process. In her essay “Some Thoughts on Narrative” Ms. Le Guin gives a lot of guidance to aspiring writers. For example, “Narrative is a central function of language. Not in origin, an artifact of culture, an art, but a fundamental operation of the normal mind functioning in society. To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story.” (p. 39) Thus, she encourages writers to find their narrative and to share it. Of course that is only a small sample of the excellent advice offered in this essay.
Furthermore, in her essay, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?,” she discusses two myths about writing and five elements of the story writing process. The two myths about writing, she says are: one, “there is a secret to being a writer” and two, “stories start from an idea.” (p. 192) With regards to these myths she elaborated by saying, “There is just the obstinate, continuous cultivation of a disposition, leading to skill in performance.” (p. 193) Later in that same essay she outlines and details five “principal elements” in the writing process.
The patterns of the language.
The patterns of syntax and grammar.
The patterns of images.
The patterns of the ideas.
The patterns of the feelings. (p. 194)
Of course I am just providing the teaser. If you wish to know more about what she says about each of these elements I definitely recommend this essay.
The other essay where she provides writing insight is specific to issues facing women writers. A daughter of a writer herself, Ms. Le Guin draws upon the experience of her mother, and her own experiences, while also delving into the ideas of other women writers, with special attention to Virginia Woolf. It is in this essay that she reveals society’s biases that have been responsible for suppression of talent of half of the human population. For instance, when discussing whether or not women artists are taken seriously she says, “Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life: but no artist can work well against daily, personal, vengeful resistance. And that’s exactly what many women artists get from the people they love and live with.” A bit later she adds the drive, “To push mothers back into ‘private life,’ a mythological space invented by the patriarchy, on the theory that their acceptance of the ‘role’ of mother invalidates them for public, political, artistic responsibility in to play by Old Nobodaddy’s game, by his rules on his side.” (p. 235). In concluding this essay, she does provide a positive, or at least pragmatic, outcome. “The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That’s enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on the paper. In other words, that she’s free. Not wholly free. Never wholly free. Maybe very partially. Maybe only in this one act, this sitting for a snatched moment being a woman writing, fishing the mind’s lake. But in this, responsible; in this autonomous; in this free.” (p. 237).
The third reason is that Ms. Le Guin provides references and reviews to many books - several of which I placed on my "Want to Read" list on my “goodreads” app. Writers are readers. Perhaps an overgeneralization, but I place a substantial amount of confidence in this assertion. Ms. Le Guin is no exception. Throughout the course of her essays and her book reviews I came across dozens of references to other books and authors that she recommended. This did slow down my reading as I was sent to “goodreads” or other online resources to investigate titles, authors and collections of work. Some of the more interesting references were to works on Native American mythology. While I am skeptical in general about the ability of the colonizer to do justice in relating these myths I am accepting these references because of they come from Ursula Le Guin. I hope to pursue them and open a new realm of learning and interest in doing so.
In closing I want to share what, to me, was one of the most powerful statements of Ms. Le Guin’s work. I found it powerful because I could easily relate to what she was saying. “ Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women, children: not to hear that as valid discourse.” (p. 151) I concur. My agreement is not based on an ideology but on my own experience, objectively viewed in retrospect. This is what I experienced in those schools, college and other institutions. The first author to open my eyes to this was James Baldwin, followed by Audre Lorde and Alice Walker (in her essays). I am glad to have added Ms. Le Guin’s essays to my reading collection and to be able to share her clear statement of this shared sentiment.
Thanks are due to my late mother for having this book in her collection. In its pages, as a bookmark, I found a stub from a boarding pass that must have been hers. I felt her presence as I read.
I strongly recommend this book.
September 22, 2022
Che voglia di scrivere e leggere tutto il reale e l'irreale che c'è nel mondo.
April 13, 2019
Ursula hanımın şu ana kadar okuduğum en teorik kitabıydı. teknik olduğu için okurken zorlandım fakat güzel kafa açtı. kitabın son bölümündeki kitap eleştirilerini kitapları okumadığım için okuyamadım. kitapları okursam eleştirilere de bakacağım.
April 26, 2022
DNF @ ~20% ish
I love Earthsea, but I'm not the biggest fan of LeGuin's writing outside of that. These essays came across as very dated to me- reeking of second wave feminism and being kind of clunky when discussing issues of gender/pronouns etc. I know she was probably very woke for her time, but the times have changed and this text is not as relevant as I'd hoped it would be.
I'm also not familiar enough with her other works (nor do I have enough interest in them) to listen to a 20 minute essay about a TV adaptation I haven't seen of a book I haven't read. Alas.
I got this one for free on Audible, and I will say that the narrator did a fantastic job. So, if you are:
a) a big fan of second wave feminism
b) a big fan of Ursula K. LeGuin's writing; and
c) very familiar with her body of works, then this may very well be the book for you!
I love Earthsea, but I'm not the biggest fan of LeGuin's writing outside of that. These essays came across as very dated to me- reeking of second wave feminism and being kind of clunky when discussing issues of gender/pronouns etc. I know she was probably very woke for her time, but the times have changed and this text is not as relevant as I'd hoped it would be.
I'm also not familiar enough with her other works (nor do I have enough interest in them) to listen to a 20 minute essay about a TV adaptation I haven't seen of a book I haven't read. Alas.
I got this one for free on Audible, and I will say that the narrator did a fantastic job. So, if you are:
a) a big fan of second wave feminism
b) a big fan of Ursula K. LeGuin's writing; and
c) very familiar with her body of works, then this may very well be the book for you!
Read
December 18, 2023"Konuşmalar ve Makaleler" ile "Kitap Eleştirileri" başlıklı iki ana bölümden oluşuyor kitap. İlk bölümdeki birkaç yazıyı okudum. Yazar eserlerine atıf yapmış hatta bazı kitaplarını analiz edip eleştirmiş. Ursula K. Le Guin'in okumadığım kitapları hakkında bu kadar ayrıntılı yazılmış denemelerini okumak istemiyorum. Kitap eleştirileri kısmını bitirip kütüphaneye geri götüreceğim. Yazarın külliyatında belli başlı eserleri okuduktan sonra dönmek istiyorum bu denemelere. Seda Ersavcı'dan bekleneceği üzere çeviri başarılı. Özellikle yazarın hayranları için okunası bir kitap.
April 21, 2023
When it comes to opinions about writing, and women, and books in general, we can argue about do we agree with other peoples subjectivity, or not. When it comes to Le Guin, all I can say is this:
“Dear Ursula, please come back.” <3
“Dear Ursula, please come back.” <3
Read
September 4, 2015This is the passage I hit that sent my reading of this book screeching to a halt:
In this book of essays, Le Guin has gone back and added her commentary to a previous essay, "Is Gender Necessary? Redux", to mark the parts where she no longer agreed with her past self. No annotations in this essay, though, so I guess she still believed, at the time of publication, that it is natural and right and obvious that all disabled fetuses should be aborted, and that it is blindingly obvious that it's morally wrong to birth a child with a disability.
Right then.
"You see, she [Irene Claremont de Castillejo] is trying to show how a woman's desire to have children, and to love and care for them, can be twisted all out of shape by ethical coercion, until it becomes a bondage , a hideous sentimental trap. Here she offers an example of natural, unperverted feminine morality:
I have been struck with the spontaneous reaction of many women and girls to the thalidomide tragedies. So often they exclaim with absolute conviction, "Of course they should be aborted! It is criminal to make a woman carry a deformed child." [And pressed further, they say,] "It is monstrous that men should decide whether a woman should or should not have her own baby."
If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival. "
In this book of essays, Le Guin has gone back and added her commentary to a previous essay, "Is Gender Necessary? Redux", to mark the parts where she no longer agreed with her past self. No annotations in this essay, though, so I guess she still believed, at the time of publication, that it is natural and right and obvious that all disabled fetuses should be aborted, and that it is blindingly obvious that it's morally wrong to birth a child with a disability.
Right then.
October 7, 2018
Serendipitously reading this after Native Tongue was especially enriching. Startling to read the earlier essays and find myself completely disagreeing with Le Guin. Relieved to find more common ground in the more recent essays. Thrilled to have more reading to do, thanks to Le Guin’s recommendations.
October 25, 2022
Yet another entry in the list of “this book changed my life.” Every book does, to be sure; if only cumulatively. But Ursula Le Guin, once again, changes it in a big way.
July 1, 2023
(3.75) i’ll start off with really my only negative—i wish this were only thoughts on words and women rather than thoughts on words, women, places. the writing on travel seemed to me like it wasn’t really meant to be read by an audience? if it was, it felt at points like science fiction filled to the brim with proper nouns and concepts you’re unfamiliar with, as though it expects too much knowledge from the reader. a few of the essays in here were jargony in a similar way.
now that my only negative is out of the way: what a phenomenal collection of essays. le guin’s ideas are so deeply contemporary for having been written in the 70s and 80s, such incredible thoughts on feminism and gender as a whole (i truly recommend everyone reads at least The Fisherwoman’s Daughter, such a beautifully written essay on women in “literature”). i thought the commencement addresses were especially captivating, likely because they’re meant to be accessibly written and captivating. but her theoretical writing is so compelling as well. what an incredibly interesting author, such a fun and personal style of prose. i’d really recommend to anyone looking for a collection of essays or more le guin to read—i can’t wait to read her fictional works! such an interesting, intelligent, kind-hearted person.
now that my only negative is out of the way: what a phenomenal collection of essays. le guin’s ideas are so deeply contemporary for having been written in the 70s and 80s, such incredible thoughts on feminism and gender as a whole (i truly recommend everyone reads at least The Fisherwoman’s Daughter, such a beautifully written essay on women in “literature”). i thought the commencement addresses were especially captivating, likely because they’re meant to be accessibly written and captivating. but her theoretical writing is so compelling as well. what an incredibly interesting author, such a fun and personal style of prose. i’d really recommend to anyone looking for a collection of essays or more le guin to read—i can’t wait to read her fictional works! such an interesting, intelligent, kind-hearted person.
December 30, 2023
I really enjoyed this book of essays by Ursula Le Guin. She is such a great writer, and I especially appreciated that she responded to some of her comments in an earlier speech or essay and corrected them with her updated understanding - I thought this was a great example of how someone's thoughts on issues can change over time, and it was very humble of her to admit her earlier arrogance and come back to her earlier words. I think she was responding to her own protestations that "the Left Hand of Darkness" was not a feminist work, and also correcting some things she said that were more gender-binary so that they were more gender-inclusive.
She writes a lot about women writers and how for a long time it was seen as a detriment for women writers to have families, because it was thought that they wouldn't be able to get much done with them, but actually for a lot of women writers, having a family added to their work, and while it may have made it more difficult to find time to work, it also made their time to themselves more precious and more wisely used.
In all, an excellent collection of essays, and although it came out decades ago, it's still very timely for the most part.
She writes a lot about women writers and how for a long time it was seen as a detriment for women writers to have families, because it was thought that they wouldn't be able to get much done with them, but actually for a lot of women writers, having a family added to their work, and while it may have made it more difficult to find time to work, it also made their time to themselves more precious and more wisely used.
In all, an excellent collection of essays, and although it came out decades ago, it's still very timely for the most part.
July 26, 2022
A wide-ranging collection of essays, speeches, and articles written by a visionary and brilliant author. I took pages and pages of notes while I was making my way through this book, which I made a point of savouring over an extended period of time. Some of the quotes that I gleaned from the book stood out for me because they were laugh-out-loud funny ("Everyone looks somewhat as if they had voted for Margaret Thatcher and were pleased at the result"); others because they were just plain beautiful ("We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.")
This is as much a book about ideas as it is a celebration of language: a demonstration of what words can do in the hands of an incredibly talented writer.
One final comment: I love the fact that Le Guin takes the opportunity to reflect on some of her earlier work and to talk about what she might have handled differently, if she had been writing that same piece at a later date. It's powerful to watch her reflect on her own learning and growth as a person and as a writer. So don't skip over any of the footnotes. That's where a lot of the magic happens!
This is as much a book about ideas as it is a celebration of language: a demonstration of what words can do in the hands of an incredibly talented writer.
One final comment: I love the fact that Le Guin takes the opportunity to reflect on some of her earlier work and to talk about what she might have handled differently, if she had been writing that same piece at a later date. It's powerful to watch her reflect on her own learning and growth as a person and as a writer. So don't skip over any of the footnotes. That's where a lot of the magic happens!
September 23, 2019
Le Guin is a very intelligent, open-minded woman with worthwhile things to say about science fiction and its place in reality, abortion / pro-choice, women and gender, narrative and writing and fiction and poetry!, and politics. Occasionally she oversteps her bounds and uses examples that aren't credited or explained in ways that makes her use of them okay (some odd stuff with Coyote in particular); and often, her conclusions from texts and her general arguments don't follow a logic that shares much similarity with my own, meaning I gained nothing from certain paragraphs or pieces, until she'd loop back to something that I felt did add up. Despite this, I enjoyed reading quite a few of the works contained in the book (I didn't, and don't intend to, read through the review section), and found a lot of knowledge in it that expands on ideas of my own and those from other sources. Le Guin's novels follow an essay-like structure in some portion, and turning to her non-fiction work helped somewhat to see her meanings in a concise form of her own witty, weird, kind voice, not filtered through narrative and character.
Want to read
May 25, 2018putting this on my list after seeing this line:
attributed to Ursula K. Le Guin on my twitter feed. went to look for the source, and found this. oh, I miss her dearly.
'"No house worth living in has for its cornerstone the hunger of those who built it.'
attributed to Ursula K. Le Guin on my twitter feed. went to look for the source, and found this. oh, I miss her dearly.
August 26, 2018
Today seems to be the day I talk about books I've read more than once (yes, I'm procrastinating; I should be copy-editing a book I will soon be publishing), and Dancing at the Edge of the World is no exception.
Spoiler alert: This collection of informal essays is fantastic. The late Ursula K. Le Guin, science fiction Grandmaster, noted fantasist and, yes, essayist, is a writer who's quiet, sardonic and yet passionate pieces give the lie to the idea that feminists have no sense of humour. If you have in your circle someone still labouring under that delusion, give him (or even, possibly, her) a copy of this book.
Dancing at the Edge of the World written between 1976 and 1988 and (with the exception of the book reviews) are arranged chronically, providing, as the author puts it in her introduction, "a sort of mental biography, a record of responses to ethical and political climates, of the transforming effect of certain literary ideas, and of the changes of a mind."
Le Guin had a remarkably broad range of interests and passions, and wrote eloquently, incisively, and wisely upon them. (She also had very correct opinions about the worth of J.R.R. Tolkien.)
She is a writer whose fiction I respect and have enjoyed; but it is as an essayist that I adore her.
Spoiler alert: This collection of informal essays is fantastic. The late Ursula K. Le Guin, science fiction Grandmaster, noted fantasist and, yes, essayist, is a writer who's quiet, sardonic and yet passionate pieces give the lie to the idea that feminists have no sense of humour. If you have in your circle someone still labouring under that delusion, give him (or even, possibly, her) a copy of this book.
Dancing at the Edge of the World written between 1976 and 1988 and (with the exception of the book reviews) are arranged chronically, providing, as the author puts it in her introduction, "a sort of mental biography, a record of responses to ethical and political climates, of the transforming effect of certain literary ideas, and of the changes of a mind."
Le Guin had a remarkably broad range of interests and passions, and wrote eloquently, incisively, and wisely upon them. (She also had very correct opinions about the worth of J.R.R. Tolkien.)
She is a writer whose fiction I respect and have enjoyed; but it is as an essayist that I adore her.
May 15, 2020
To read Dancing at the Edge of the World is to enter the sweeping, vast thoughts in the mind of author Ursula Le Guin. She leads her reader from menopause to giving birth and reveals her own experience with abortion. She bemoans the fate of women caught in a male dominated world and explores the difficulties of women who write. Le Guin wraps the book in thoughts about poetry, prose and narration. She shares thoughts about her own science fiction characters and her experiences as a writer in that genre as it evolved around her. She touches on the lives of many writers including a comparison of Jo March in "Little Women" to the true story of the author Louisa Mae Alcott. There are several tales about her travels cross country and one about a West Coast adventure on Amtrak. The book is filled with inspirational morsels.
Read
October 28, 2025"the children of the revolution are always ungrateful"
"To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost."
Rating Ursula K Le Guin's speeches and essays feels wrong, that's like rating someone's honest thoughts.
Le Guin is a genius, she drops the most profound thoughts casually, often while talking about something else.
She also can be profoundly, heartbreakingly wrong. (I am referring to the speeches she gave at PP symposiums)
You know the cliché about meeting your heroes. (She has very strong opinions on heroes too, but that is beside the point.)
"To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost."
Rating Ursula K Le Guin's speeches and essays feels wrong, that's like rating someone's honest thoughts.
Le Guin is a genius, she drops the most profound thoughts casually, often while talking about something else.
She also can be profoundly, heartbreakingly wrong. (I am referring to the speeches she gave at PP symposiums)
You know the cliché about meeting your heroes. (She has very strong opinions on heroes too, but that is beside the point.)
August 15, 2025
“ Where man-made ethics differ most radically from female morality, from what women think and feel to be right and wrong, is precisely in this area where we need a new morality: the area in which men and women differ: the area of sexuality, of conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and the responsibility for children. I must admit that to me personally most of the rules men have made on these matters seem, if not simply irrelevant, disastrous. And yet we are still pretending that it's a "man's world," still letting that myth run us. And it's going to run us right into the ground.
I suppose a morality that arises from and includes the feminine will have to be invented as we go along. Rigidity and codification are exactly what we want to get away from, after all. But here—for it's so easy to talk about things like "a new morality" and so hard to show what one means—here, perhaps, is a suggestion of the kind of thing I and many, many others are groping towards. In her book Knowing Woman, Irene Claremont de Castillejo writes:
‘Woman, who is so intimately and profoundly concerned with life, takes death in her stride. For her, to rid herself of an unwanted foetus is as much in accord with nature as for a cat to refuse milk to a weakling kitten. It is man who has evolved principles about the sacredness of life ... and women have passionately adopted them as their own. But principles are abstract.... Woman's basic instinct is not concerned with the idea of life, but with the fact of life. The ruthlessness of nature which discards unwanted life is deeply ingrained in her.’
You see, she is trying to show how a woman's desire to have children, and to love and care for them, can be twisted all out of shape by ethical coercion, until it becomes a bondage, a hideous sentimental trap.
..,
That is not ethics. But it is morality.
If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust in ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong—not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck—if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
Note (1988): Castillejo's statements still seem as strong as any I have read on this subject, but they do, in equating woman-mother with cat-mother, run the risk of implying that women are "natural," that their morality is "natural" or "instinctive" (and hence "lower" than that of "civilization," i.e., male-dominated society). I have found Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) one of the most useful guides into the difficult area of the cultural determination and enforcement of differences between male and female moral perception.
***
We must all expect a few rude words from time to time; if we are either authors or critics, more than a few.
***
The view, where I sit writing this, is of frozen Klamath Lake, a sweep of bluish white, and the dawn-bright mountains above it—a picture postcard of Oregon winter. Ten minutes from now my view will be of fences zigzagging past farms among the snowy hills, a whole new postcard. And soon after that it will be great, solemn, snow-hung firs and the peaks and chasms of the Cascades. Because I'm sitting in Room 9, Car 1430, of the Coast Starlight, coming north to Portland. And the whole trip is beautiful.
President Reagan has decided he can do without Amtrak and has left it out of his budget. I suppose the last time Mr. Reagan rode a train was before I was born, and by now he probably doesn't know anybody who ever travels by train. He only knows Important Peo-ple, people whose time is money. Only unimportant people take trains. People to whom time isn't money, but life, their life lived and to be lived.
***
Because you are human beings, you are going to meet failure.
You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself—as I know you already have—in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place.
***
Without it, all I can do is blunder on through the minefield. At once I step straight onto Gertrude Stein, and leap into the air.
‘Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not.
And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and deter-minately and vigorously not based on the noun.
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns....
So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.’
That is a charming hand grenade, but the pin's missing, I think.
•••
Pursuing the Snark of definition through the fog, one comes upon a statement by Huntington Brown that is far more cautious, specious, and dangerous than Gertrude Stein's.
‘If it be asked wherein a poet's attitude toward his matter differs from that of a prose writer, my answer would be that in prose the characteristic assumption of both writer and reader is that the subject has an identity and an interest apart from the words, whereas in poetry it is assumed that word and idea are inseparable.’
This one ticks.
As a distinction of fantasy from realistic fiction, it would be of considerable interest, but as a distinction of poetry from prose it is very odd. I do not think Mr. Brown meant to imply that the subject or matter of poetry is unidentifiable and of no inherent interest, though he comes very near saying so; but there is in his definition an implication that cannot be avoided and should be made clear: It is the language that counts in poetry and the ideas that count in prose.
Corollary: Poetry is untouchable, but prose may be freely para-phrased.
This is indeed a very common assumption, shared by readers and writers alike: Mr. Brown is absolutely correct in that. But I question the assumption, which he does not.
***
Copernicus told us that the earth was not the center. Darwin told us that man is not the center. If we listened to the anthropologists we might hear them telling us, with appropriate indirectness, that the White West is not the center. The center of the world is a bluff on the Klamath River, a rock in Mecca, a hole in the ground in Greece, nowhere, its circumference everywhere.
***
With such fragments I might have shored my ruin, but I didn't know how. Only knowing that we must have a past to make a future with, I took what I could from the European-based culture of my own forefathers and mothers. I learned, like most of us, to use whatever I could, to filch an idea from China and steal a god from India, and so patch together a world as best I could. But still there is a mystery. This place where I was born and grew up and love beyond all other, my world, my California, still needs to be made. To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.
***
Narrative is a stratagem of mortality. It is a means, a way of living.
It does not seek immortality; it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time (as lyric poetry does). It asserts, affirms, participates in directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful. If the human mind had a temporal spectrum, the nirvana of the physicist or the mystic would be way over in the ultraviolet, and at the opposite end, in the infrared, would be Wuthering Heights.
***
Anyone who knows J. T. Fraser's work, such as his book Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge, and that of George Steiner, will have perceived my debt to them in trying to think about the uses of narra-tive. I am not always able to follow Mr. Steiner; but when he discusses the importance of the future tense, suggesting that statements about what does not exist and may never exist are central to the use of language, I follow him cheering and waving pompoms.
When he makes his well-known statement "Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is," I continue to follow, though with lowered pompoms. The proposition as stated worries me. Man's refusal to accept the world as it is? Do women also refuse? What about science, which tries so hard to see the world as it is? What about art, which not only accepts the dreadful world as it is but praises it for being so? "Isn't life a terrible thing, thank God!"says the lady with the backyard full of washing and babies in Under Milk Wood, and the sweet song says, "Nobody knows the trouble I seen, Glory, Hallelujah!" I agree with them. All grand refusals, especially when made by Man, are deeply suspect.
So, caviling all the way, I follow Mr. Steiner. If the use of language were to describe accurately what exists, what, in fact, would we want it for?
***
We cannot ask reason to take us across the gulfs of the absurd. Only the imagination can get us out of the bind of the eternal present, inventing or hypothesizing or pretending or discovering a way that reason can then follow into the infinity of options, a clue through the labyrinths of choice, a golden string, the story, leading us to the freedom that is properly human, the freedom open to those whose minds can accept unreality.
***
I was told as a child, and like to believe, that California was named "The Golden State" not just for the stuff Sutter found but for the wild poppies on its hills and the wild oats of summer. To the Spanish and Mexicans I gather it was the boondocks; but to the Anglos it has been a true utopia: the Golden Age made accessible by willpower, the wild paradise to be tamed by reason; the place where you go free of the old bonds and cramps, leaving behind your farm and your galoshes, casting aside your rheumatism and your inhibitions, taking up a new "life style" in a not-here-not-now where everybody gets rich quick in the movies or finds the meaning of life or anyhow gets a good tan hang-gliding. And the wild oats and the poppies still come up pure gold in cracks in the cement that we have poured over utopia.
***
Now, that's how animals talk! Ramsay Wood seems to lack faith in his material, to believe that it needs "brightening up" or "interpreting for the modern reader," as they say. It doesn't. It's good, strong stuff. It tastes a lot better without 7-Up.
***
Is Gender Necessary?" first appeared in Aurora, that splendid first anthology of science fiction written by women, edited by Susan Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre. It was later included in The Language of the Night. Even then I was getting uncomfortable with some of the statements I made in it, and the discomfort soon became plain disagree-ment. But those were just the bits that people kept quoting with cries of joy.
It doesn't seem right or wise to revise an old text severely, as if trying to obliterate it, hiding the evidence that one had to go there to get here. It is rather in the feminist mode to let one's changes of mind, and the processes of change, stand as evidence— and perhaps to remind people that minds that don't change are like clams that don't open. So I here reprint the original essay entire, with a running commentary in bracketed italics. I request and entreat anyone who wishes to quote from this piece henceforth to use or at least include these reconsiderations. And I do very much hope that I don't have to print re-reconsiderations in 1997, since I'm a bit tired of chastising myself.”
I suppose a morality that arises from and includes the feminine will have to be invented as we go along. Rigidity and codification are exactly what we want to get away from, after all. But here—for it's so easy to talk about things like "a new morality" and so hard to show what one means—here, perhaps, is a suggestion of the kind of thing I and many, many others are groping towards. In her book Knowing Woman, Irene Claremont de Castillejo writes:
‘Woman, who is so intimately and profoundly concerned with life, takes death in her stride. For her, to rid herself of an unwanted foetus is as much in accord with nature as for a cat to refuse milk to a weakling kitten. It is man who has evolved principles about the sacredness of life ... and women have passionately adopted them as their own. But principles are abstract.... Woman's basic instinct is not concerned with the idea of life, but with the fact of life. The ruthlessness of nature which discards unwanted life is deeply ingrained in her.’
You see, she is trying to show how a woman's desire to have children, and to love and care for them, can be twisted all out of shape by ethical coercion, until it becomes a bondage, a hideous sentimental trap.
..,
That is not ethics. But it is morality.
If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust in ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong—not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck—if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
Note (1988): Castillejo's statements still seem as strong as any I have read on this subject, but they do, in equating woman-mother with cat-mother, run the risk of implying that women are "natural," that their morality is "natural" or "instinctive" (and hence "lower" than that of "civilization," i.e., male-dominated society). I have found Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) one of the most useful guides into the difficult area of the cultural determination and enforcement of differences between male and female moral perception.
***
We must all expect a few rude words from time to time; if we are either authors or critics, more than a few.
***
The view, where I sit writing this, is of frozen Klamath Lake, a sweep of bluish white, and the dawn-bright mountains above it—a picture postcard of Oregon winter. Ten minutes from now my view will be of fences zigzagging past farms among the snowy hills, a whole new postcard. And soon after that it will be great, solemn, snow-hung firs and the peaks and chasms of the Cascades. Because I'm sitting in Room 9, Car 1430, of the Coast Starlight, coming north to Portland. And the whole trip is beautiful.
President Reagan has decided he can do without Amtrak and has left it out of his budget. I suppose the last time Mr. Reagan rode a train was before I was born, and by now he probably doesn't know anybody who ever travels by train. He only knows Important Peo-ple, people whose time is money. Only unimportant people take trains. People to whom time isn't money, but life, their life lived and to be lived.
***
Because you are human beings, you are going to meet failure.
You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself—as I know you already have—in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place.
***
Without it, all I can do is blunder on through the minefield. At once I step straight onto Gertrude Stein, and leap into the air.
‘Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not.
And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and deter-minately and vigorously not based on the noun.
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns....
So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.’
That is a charming hand grenade, but the pin's missing, I think.
•••
Pursuing the Snark of definition through the fog, one comes upon a statement by Huntington Brown that is far more cautious, specious, and dangerous than Gertrude Stein's.
‘If it be asked wherein a poet's attitude toward his matter differs from that of a prose writer, my answer would be that in prose the characteristic assumption of both writer and reader is that the subject has an identity and an interest apart from the words, whereas in poetry it is assumed that word and idea are inseparable.’
This one ticks.
As a distinction of fantasy from realistic fiction, it would be of considerable interest, but as a distinction of poetry from prose it is very odd. I do not think Mr. Brown meant to imply that the subject or matter of poetry is unidentifiable and of no inherent interest, though he comes very near saying so; but there is in his definition an implication that cannot be avoided and should be made clear: It is the language that counts in poetry and the ideas that count in prose.
Corollary: Poetry is untouchable, but prose may be freely para-phrased.
This is indeed a very common assumption, shared by readers and writers alike: Mr. Brown is absolutely correct in that. But I question the assumption, which he does not.
***
Copernicus told us that the earth was not the center. Darwin told us that man is not the center. If we listened to the anthropologists we might hear them telling us, with appropriate indirectness, that the White West is not the center. The center of the world is a bluff on the Klamath River, a rock in Mecca, a hole in the ground in Greece, nowhere, its circumference everywhere.
***
With such fragments I might have shored my ruin, but I didn't know how. Only knowing that we must have a past to make a future with, I took what I could from the European-based culture of my own forefathers and mothers. I learned, like most of us, to use whatever I could, to filch an idea from China and steal a god from India, and so patch together a world as best I could. But still there is a mystery. This place where I was born and grew up and love beyond all other, my world, my California, still needs to be made. To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.
***
Narrative is a stratagem of mortality. It is a means, a way of living.
It does not seek immortality; it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time (as lyric poetry does). It asserts, affirms, participates in directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful. If the human mind had a temporal spectrum, the nirvana of the physicist or the mystic would be way over in the ultraviolet, and at the opposite end, in the infrared, would be Wuthering Heights.
***
Anyone who knows J. T. Fraser's work, such as his book Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge, and that of George Steiner, will have perceived my debt to them in trying to think about the uses of narra-tive. I am not always able to follow Mr. Steiner; but when he discusses the importance of the future tense, suggesting that statements about what does not exist and may never exist are central to the use of language, I follow him cheering and waving pompoms.
When he makes his well-known statement "Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is," I continue to follow, though with lowered pompoms. The proposition as stated worries me. Man's refusal to accept the world as it is? Do women also refuse? What about science, which tries so hard to see the world as it is? What about art, which not only accepts the dreadful world as it is but praises it for being so? "Isn't life a terrible thing, thank God!"says the lady with the backyard full of washing and babies in Under Milk Wood, and the sweet song says, "Nobody knows the trouble I seen, Glory, Hallelujah!" I agree with them. All grand refusals, especially when made by Man, are deeply suspect.
So, caviling all the way, I follow Mr. Steiner. If the use of language were to describe accurately what exists, what, in fact, would we want it for?
***
We cannot ask reason to take us across the gulfs of the absurd. Only the imagination can get us out of the bind of the eternal present, inventing or hypothesizing or pretending or discovering a way that reason can then follow into the infinity of options, a clue through the labyrinths of choice, a golden string, the story, leading us to the freedom that is properly human, the freedom open to those whose minds can accept unreality.
***
I was told as a child, and like to believe, that California was named "The Golden State" not just for the stuff Sutter found but for the wild poppies on its hills and the wild oats of summer. To the Spanish and Mexicans I gather it was the boondocks; but to the Anglos it has been a true utopia: the Golden Age made accessible by willpower, the wild paradise to be tamed by reason; the place where you go free of the old bonds and cramps, leaving behind your farm and your galoshes, casting aside your rheumatism and your inhibitions, taking up a new "life style" in a not-here-not-now where everybody gets rich quick in the movies or finds the meaning of life or anyhow gets a good tan hang-gliding. And the wild oats and the poppies still come up pure gold in cracks in the cement that we have poured over utopia.
***
Now, that's how animals talk! Ramsay Wood seems to lack faith in his material, to believe that it needs "brightening up" or "interpreting for the modern reader," as they say. It doesn't. It's good, strong stuff. It tastes a lot better without 7-Up.
***
Is Gender Necessary?" first appeared in Aurora, that splendid first anthology of science fiction written by women, edited by Susan Anderson and Vonda N. McIntyre. It was later included in The Language of the Night. Even then I was getting uncomfortable with some of the statements I made in it, and the discomfort soon became plain disagree-ment. But those were just the bits that people kept quoting with cries of joy.
It doesn't seem right or wise to revise an old text severely, as if trying to obliterate it, hiding the evidence that one had to go there to get here. It is rather in the feminist mode to let one's changes of mind, and the processes of change, stand as evidence— and perhaps to remind people that minds that don't change are like clams that don't open. So I here reprint the original essay entire, with a running commentary in bracketed italics. I request and entreat anyone who wishes to quote from this piece henceforth to use or at least include these reconsiderations. And I do very much hope that I don't have to print re-reconsiderations in 1997, since I'm a bit tired of chastising myself.”
April 7, 2024
Wanted to read nonfiction and a book store owner recommended I read what my favorite fiction authors write/read. Le Guin is a renowned sci fi author and reading her compilation of essays/speeches/other musings was really interesting and stretched my brain in some really good ways. The subjects span literature, feminism, travel, and social responsibility and each chapter is identified by which subjects it broaches which allows for easily skipping through to topics of interest. I found the social responsibility and feminism most intriguing, especially given these were all written in the 80s, while the travel and literature pieces were a bit sophisticated for my new to non-fiction and out of practice with philosophy brain but I highlighted the sections I particularly liked and see myself coming back to this book frequently.
Overall non-fiction v fiction takeaways: slower to read, requires a different type of brain power, improved by having someone to discuss with (more so than fiction is)
Overall non-fiction v fiction takeaways: slower to read, requires a different type of brain power, improved by having someone to discuss with (more so than fiction is)
October 12, 2012
I think Ursula Le Guin's collections of essays were the first non-fictional works that I really learned to appreciate. I was very much not a non-fiction person at the time, but Le Guin's writing is always so full of clarity, so well considered, that it draws me in when it's non-fiction as surely as when it's prose.
Obviously some of these essays are somewhat dated now, written and edited in the 70s and 80s, but there's still a lot of interest there. Le Guin's thoughts on the gender issues in The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, years after it was published, years after she originally wrote about it, for example. Or her reflections on her mother's life, or on Jo March as one of the few female writers in fiction to be a writer and have a family at the same time... A personal gem for me was coming across, in the section containing book reviews, a review of C.S. Lewis that almost inevitably also reflected on J.R.R. Tolkien:
I'm not sure I agree with all of that -- the Southrons are most definitely Othered, and I'm not sure they're meant to be universal symbols of the hateful. Or rather, if they are, and perhaps they are, we need to examine why Tolkien made that decision. But I do think that this is an informative way of looking at the two authors, which reflects a lot on Le Guin herself as well.
Obviously some of these essays are somewhat dated now, written and edited in the 70s and 80s, but there's still a lot of interest there. Le Guin's thoughts on the gender issues in The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, years after it was published, years after she originally wrote about it, for example. Or her reflections on her mother's life, or on Jo March as one of the few female writers in fiction to be a writer and have a family at the same time... A personal gem for me was coming across, in the section containing book reviews, a review of C.S. Lewis that almost inevitably also reflected on J.R.R. Tolkien:
J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis's close friend and colleague, certainly shared many of Lewis's views and was also a devout Christian. But it all comes out very differently in his fiction. Take his handling of evil: his villains are orcs and Black Riders (goblins and zombies: mythic figures) and Sauron, the Dark Lord, who is never seen and has no suggestion of humanity about him. These are not evil men but embodiments of the evil in men, universal symbols of the hateful. The men who do wrong are not complete figures but complements: Saruman is Gandalf's dark-self, Boromir Aragorn's; Wormtongue is, almost literally, the weakness of King Theoden. There remains the wonderfully repulsive and degraded Gollum. But nobody who reads the trilogy hates, or is asked to hate, Gollum. Gollum is Frodo's shadow; and it is the shadow, not the hero, who achieves the quest. Though Tolkien seems to project evil into "the others", they are not truly others but ourselves; he is utterly clear about this. His ethic, like that of dream, is compensatory. The final "answer" remains unknown. But because responsibility has been accepted, charity survives. And with it, triumphantly, the Golden Rule. The fact is, if you like the book, you love Gollum.
In Lewis, responsibility appears only in the form of the Christian hero fighting and defeating the enemy: a triumph, not of love, but of hatred. The enemy is not oneself but the Wholly Other, demoniac.
I'm not sure I agree with all of that -- the Southrons are most definitely Othered, and I'm not sure they're meant to be universal symbols of the hateful. Or rather, if they are, and perhaps they are, we need to examine why Tolkien made that decision. But I do think that this is an informative way of looking at the two authors, which reflects a lot on Le Guin herself as well.
September 19, 2019
No tengo palabras para la grandeza de la mamá Úrsula.
Cada que alguien dice que los autores de décadas pasadas, cuyas obras no han madurado bien a las ideas modernas, tienen tantas ideas cuestionables porque son "producto de su tiempo" siempre recuerdo a grandes mentes como la de Úrsula Le Guin, que no tuvo reparos en romper el canon de la fantasía y ciencia ficción y armar lo que se le antojó con los restos.
Leer sus ensayos y otras piezas de no-ficción permite asomarse a su forma de pensar en toda clase de temas. Siento que nunca terminaré de aprender para estar a la altura, pero creo también que gustaba sembrar ideas y que la reflexión y discusión de ideas le daba tanta satisfacción como compartir su maravillosa ficción.
Estos textos son como estar en compañía de una mente aguda, con sentido del humor y que no teme cuestionar cosas aparentemente "dadas" cuando es necesario. Amo especialmente su relación con las palabras, pues conocía y entendía su belleza y su poder.
Cada que alguien dice que los autores de décadas pasadas, cuyas obras no han madurado bien a las ideas modernas, tienen tantas ideas cuestionables porque son "producto de su tiempo" siempre recuerdo a grandes mentes como la de Úrsula Le Guin, que no tuvo reparos en romper el canon de la fantasía y ciencia ficción y armar lo que se le antojó con los restos.
Leer sus ensayos y otras piezas de no-ficción permite asomarse a su forma de pensar en toda clase de temas. Siento que nunca terminaré de aprender para estar a la altura, pero creo también que gustaba sembrar ideas y que la reflexión y discusión de ideas le daba tanta satisfacción como compartir su maravillosa ficción.
Estos textos son como estar en compañía de una mente aguda, con sentido del humor y que no teme cuestionar cosas aparentemente "dadas" cuando es necesario. Amo especialmente su relación con las palabras, pues conocía y entendía su belleza y su poder.
December 22, 2011
I’ve actually recommended this book many times to people of all reading backgrounds. If you’re a woman, especially with any kind of feminist bent, you should read this book. If you’re a writer, you should read this book. If you’re both, what the hell are you waiting for? Le Guin is a must, especially for those of us struggling to define ourselves in male-dominated genres. And as mentioned behind the cut, Le Guin is passionate about diversity, so if you’re a writer who’s passionate about that, don’t discount her simply because she’s a white female. Le Guin has been noted to be one of the first writers to appeal to readers of all colors. Thank her anthropologist parents for that.[return][return]But I don’t want to limit my recommendation to just writers. Nor do I want to limit my recommendation to only readers of the science fiction/fantasy genres. Le Guin is well-educated, and it shows. She talks Woolf; she talks Stein. Her observations of the world around her will make any one paying any attention sit up and take notice. Le Guin writes with a gentle cadence and humor, and her sarcasm is as subtle as it is sharp. It takes a moment for it to sink in, and it makes you go back and think. [return][return]I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it over and over again: Le Guin makes you think. Even if you don’t agree with her, she’ll make you think.[return][return]For a full review, please click here: http://calico-reaction.livejournal.co...
November 1, 2011
I always find it more difficult to review anthologies and books I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, Dancing at the Edge of the World falls into both categories, making it nearly impossible for me to sum up. I greatly enjoyed reading the majority of this anthology and seeing how LeGuin's views changed over the decade plus time-span covered in Dancing at the Edge of the World. Some of her speeches were clunky in written form and her travelogues would probably have been more enjoyable if I had ever visited the places she wrote about, but her incisive essays on women, writing, and the creative process in general were delightful and thought-provoking. Even when I disagreed with her views (as in "Is Gender Necessary? Redux"), she explained her point of view fairly and in good faith, which makes for compelling reading.
The essays I enjoyed the most were "The Space Crone," "A Left-Handed Commencement Address" (which I liked enough to photocopy), "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (a fantastic way to look at storytelling), and "The Fisherwoman's Daughter" (which inspired me in my literary ambitions). The book reviews at the end were intriguing, although most of them were most interesting as time capsules, since I had never heard of the majority of the books LeGuin reviewed.
The essays I enjoyed the most were "The Space Crone," "A Left-Handed Commencement Address" (which I liked enough to photocopy), "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (a fantastic way to look at storytelling), and "The Fisherwoman's Daughter" (which inspired me in my literary ambitions). The book reviews at the end were intriguing, although most of them were most interesting as time capsules, since I had never heard of the majority of the books LeGuin reviewed.
May 10, 2007
In her collection of essays, speeches, reviews, and journal entries, Le Guin presents a chronicle guide to her reflections of writing and literature, her own work, women's issues, and travel. Most of these works were written in the 80s, but they don't lose their relavance 20 years later. Although she is both an eloquent writer and speaker, all these topics together can feel very random when strung together. The works will appeal mostly to fans of Le Guin, fans of fantasy, writers, or those interested in travel. Outside of these arenas, they probably aren't relatable.
One thing I admired about a couple of her essays is the way she was able to honestly rethink them years later. It's such an accurate reflection of the way we pour out our opinions, put them out there for the public, and then totally disagree with ourselves and feel the need to modify. As a writer, my favorite piece was her essay on the complexity of where a writer’s ideas come from-- a combination of places which she categorizes and explains.
One thing I admired about a couple of her essays is the way she was able to honestly rethink them years later. It's such an accurate reflection of the way we pour out our opinions, put them out there for the public, and then totally disagree with ourselves and feel the need to modify. As a writer, my favorite piece was her essay on the complexity of where a writer’s ideas come from-- a combination of places which she categorizes and explains.
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