Ursula K. Le Guin — A Giant!

In 2013 (was it that long ago already?) Lisa Twining Taylor and I drove to the Puyallup Library to spend a delicious 90 minutes or so with Ursula K. Le Guin and a roomful of her admirers.

 

To say it was a total love fest is not an exaggeration.

 

She spoke, read some of her poems and shorter pieces, and answered questions.

 

It was one of the few times in my life that I was speechless and in awe of another human being.

 

She talked some about her parents writing about Ishi, the last of his tribe, when asked about him. Here’s the gist of what she said (I found this online):

 

Concerning Ishi:

People often ask me about Ishi. I know no more about him than anyone else who read my mother’s book (Theodora Kroeber: Ishi In Two Worlds,University of California Press). The only useful thing I can tell people is about his name. Since his people didn’t tell other people their name and there was no one to do it for him, he and my father Alfred Kroeber and the other people working with him agreed to use a word which they understood to mean, in Ishi’s language, simply “Man.” I don’t know where allegations that Kroeber “invented” the name come from. But I do know that Kroeber (presumably imitating the man he learned the word from) pronounced it Ishi, rhyming with fishy — not Eee-Shee, which I keep hearing lately.

Ishi died thirteen years before I was born, so I have no nice anecdotes about knowing him when I was a child. I’m sorry.

But anyone interested in Ishi can find a lovely story written by a man who as a little boy who really did “play Indians” with Ishi in a San Francisco park. And you can find a great deal of updated information, passionate argument, and thoughtful ethical discussion, by Indians, anthropologists, and others. It’s all in a new book edited by my brothers Karl and Clifton Kroeber: Ishi in Three Centuries, University of Nebraska, 2003. — UKL

 

At the end of the night, she sat in the hallway area and signed books for what seemed to be an endless throng– essentially everybody in attendance. (How often do you get a chance to rub shoulders with one of the greats?)

 

Lisa and I thought about joining the throng and waiting to exchange a few personal words with her, but the line was so long that we figured she’d be wiped out (she was 83 at the time) by the time our turns came around, so instead we loitered nearby within ten feet of where she was seated and watched for a while, basking in her presence as she interacted with her other fans, then reluctantly turned away and drove home.

 

Ursula K. Le Guin passed away on Monday.  People are writing about her today in words passionate, profound and fawning. She simply awed them as a writer and as a human being. The greats are extolling her to Andromeda and back. As well they should.

 

I only wish she were still here to read them. I can only hope that enough of these folks let her know while she was alive what she meant to them. They probably did. (Writers are like that–yeah, we are! We know what a thrill it is to hear that readers love our books, articles, blogs, interviews, etc.!)

 

It is almost as rare as hens’ teeth that American women authors are listed in the pantheon of great American literature. I think 17 (by my count) women make the top 100 “greatest American writers” list. And many of them became famous after they died (and after the big wigs caught on and belatedly published them).

 

Some of the folks on the list wrote only one or two books. Le Guin, like Isaac Asimov, wrote scores of them.

 

And how many exemplary women writers can be readily found on the tips of American readers’ tongues? Too darned few!

 

Le Guin wrote about this herself, saying that only mainstream, earthbound, male-written and male-oriented fiction and nonfiction appeared “worthy” of mass media companies’ adulation and attention (the corporate folks who decide which books you should read–ahem, the ones they publish!) despite the  hundreds of writers who are drop-dead fabulous and worth every dime you pay to engage with their minds.

 

Lots of white men made the 100 greatest American writers list.

 

Fewer than ten people of color did. (Six, to be pathetically exact.)

 

It’s been a privileged white men’s world for too long. 

 

There are voices out there that need to be heard. It’s time for readers to seek them out. You’ll be richer for your quest, I promise!

 

Ursula K. LeGuin was a pioneer, a feminist, a force and a reckoning, all wrapped up in one irreplaceable package.  I am so glad we will always have her words and her worlds to remember her by.