On January 22, Ursula K. Le Guin died. Despite the fact that I never met her (though I often wished to), her words and wisdom have left a profound and indelible impact on my life. If Professor Fred Bauer helped teach me how to think critically, then Ursula K Le Guin helped teach me how to live critically, with purpose, passion, and deep attention to the beauties, complexities, and paradoxes of life. One of my previous posts on this blog was directly inspired by her words. I simply wouldn’t be the writer I am today if not for her.
These past few days, I’ve been wrestling with how to honor her, honor how much she meant to me, how much she meant to so many people.
Last year, right around this time, I wrote her a letter. Reading it again, I realize that it still says exactly what I need it to say, right now, as I grieve her passing. I’m grateful I got to send it to her. I share it here to honor her spirit.
Goodbye, Ursula. Your words live on in my heart.
—
Dear Ursula,
The last time I wrote a letter to an author, I was eleven years old. Her name is Susan Cooper, and she wrote the ‘Dark is Rising’ fantasy series. I can’t remember what I said in the letter, but the other day, as I was going through some old boxes, I found her reply. It is a simple brochure, printed on stock white paper and folded into thirds. It has her biography, some notes about her books, and a picture of her smiling on the front. She wrote a brief message of thanks below her photo, and signed her name with a bold, swooping flourish.
I must have read her books a dozen times as an adolescent. Rediscovering this memento brought me back to her world of Arthurian myth and legend, of seaside homes, of witty, precocious British children, of dark forces moving in the shadows, of the power of an ordinary child to remake the world.
Now, almost twenty-five years later, I find myself sitting down for a second time to put pen to page. Much to my surprise, I have found another author (that’s you!) whose words and worlds move me so much, make me feel so at home, that I feel compelled to let you know how grateful I am.
Six years ago, I started working on my first novel. Four years into that (very slow) process, I discovered your writing, and in that discovery I found a model I was trying to emulate without even knowing it. You have become the writer I most aspire to learn from.
Now, I have a strong draft of my first novel. It still needs a lot of work, but it is real in a way I never could have imagined when I started, and I am already well into my second novel. I give you a bow of deep gratitude for inspiring me to believe that it is never too late, that stories are a potent and essential part of being human.
I am actually a little embarrassed to admit that I did not find you until my early thirties. It makes me wonder how my childhood might have been different with your words to help guide and shape me. At the same time, without even realizing it, I had come to assume that I would never again be moved by works of fiction in the same way that I was moved when I was an adolescent. You proved me wrong.
Your stories found a way through all the layers and barriers and assumptions that I have accumulated over the decades. Your truths are so clear, so honest, so alive in the characters you’ve invented, that I have found my own truths in them. It’s as if your characters come to live inside me every time I open one of your books.
I walk with Shevek as he leaves his homeworld of Annares and travels to Urras with the seemingly impossible task of starting a scientific revolution that will change both worlds and open the doors to the whole galaxy.
I stand alongside Rakam as she comes to understand that the road to freedom on Werel does not end simply because she is no longer a slave.
I sit with Alder in Ged’s garden on Gont as he tells Tenar of the voices of the dead who call to him from across the wall in the land of shadows.
One of the aspects I appreciate most about your writing is how you offer so many permutations on human identity. Despite their differences, or, more likely, because of them, all of your characters feel deeply human, deeply alive. We are, all of us, so much more than our gender, our skin color, our membership in a particular caste. But we cannot seem to stop ourselves from seeing these constructed boundaries as the very definitions of who we are, and who we are not. Even after tens of thousands of years, we are still tribal creatures. Our need to belong is so essential to who we are that we lose sight of the fact that the need to belong is common to everyone.
Your leading characters are so provocative and interesting because they do not know where they belong. In their effort to find belonging, they bridge the gaps that so many others dare not cross. They leap across the differences that are, paradoxically, both deeply meaningful and utterly superficial, and find a bond where others only see strangers or enemies.
Someone very close to me was born into a difficult life. Her parents were rarely around, and they divorced when she was young. Throughout all of this, she was often the victim of bullying, and suffered from intense social anxiety. In high school, she spent several months living in an institution on suicide watch.
Finally, this year, at age eighteen, she came to understand something that no one in her life had been fully equipped to help her work through. She discovered her identity as a woman.
You see, she had been born a boy, as defined by the norms of our time, and this transition has changed everything for her. In some ways, it has made her life much harder, because we live in an intensely gendered society. But in so many other ways it has freed her from the constraints that most of us live by. She finally has a sense of her own agency in life, and she is beginning to understand where she belongs.
She is a child of the digital age, with a remarkable eye for visuals. She is a photographer, an animator, and an aspiring video game designer. She does not read much, but she is whip smart and I just sent her a copy of your incredible book, The Left Hand of Darkness. My hope is that she reads it, and finds some solace in the deeper, higher understanding that every aspect of identity is fluid, including gender.
That identity changes with time and context.
That maybe, somewhere, there are other worlds where people like her are no more strange than anyone else.
That maybe, someday, that world could be our world, right here, right now, for real.
Thank you, Ursula. I am eternally grateful to you.
-Andy
