Imaginary Worlds - Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin

Episode Date: March 8, 2018

Ursula K. Le Guin was a master storyteller who was best known for her "thought experiments" -- like what if there were a planet in which the inhabitants had no fixed gender? Or what if a man's dreams could alter reality around him? She was also a fearless critic, and a trailblazer. But she wasn't all that comfortable being on camera. That was the first of many challenges facing filmmaker Arwen Curry, who was determined to make a documentary about the author. I talked with Arwen about her film, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, and how her subject became a mentor and a friend. (Correction from Arwen Curry: Ursula Le Guin had 3 brothers not 4, and the film will likely be on TV next Spring rather than the Fall.)Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. So I was about halfway through my Doctor Who miniseries when something very significant happened in the world of science fiction. The great novelist Ursula K. Le Guin passed away. I was thinking about how to address her legacy on my podcast when one of my listeners told me about a documentary that's being made called Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. The director's name is Arwen Curry, and she spent almost 10 years with Ursula Le Guin. And now Arwen is in the final stages of editing the film and putting it together. Now, Arwen's production office is in Berkeley. And since I was recently in the Bay Area, I wanted to stop by and find out more

about the film. And it's funny interviewing someone who does a lot of interviews. She was adjusting her own mic, and she even anticipated the question that I was going to ask to get her sound levels, because it's the question that all public radio reporters ask. What did you have for breakfast? So I guess it would be oatmeal. You know my question, don't you? Done a little bit of radio. Arwen actually grew up in Berkeley, and she says her father was a big influence on her childhood imagination. He was an early player of Dungeons & Dragons,

and he enlisted his kids on adventures that went way beyond the manuals, and his bookshelves were filled with fantasy novels for her to discover, like The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. And that's a book in which the protagonist, his dreams change reality. So he wakes up from one of these powerful dreams, and the whole world has changed, but no one knows it except for him. And I just loved that idea. Now, when Arwen started reading Le Guin's books,

she didn't know that Ursula Le Guin was also raised in Berkeley. But there's something about Ursula Le Guin's voice as a writer and just the way she saw the world that felt very familiar to Arwen. There are things that I have in common with Ursula that have become clear to me over the course of working on the documentary. And that may be what it is in this case is that sort of a, you know, a deeply humane, deeply sane, kind of rational, scientific, but very, you know, very measured and poetic approach that seemed familiar to me, perhaps because my own father

was a scientist. Ursula's father was an anthropologist and mine was a chemist. That kind of conversation about understanding things scientifically, about proving a problem, approaching a problem in a really open-minded and creative way with an eye always toward looking to the truth was something that I was familiar with. But that voice seemed very in tune with the kinds of voices that I had in my own family. The ethnologist was a familiar character to me. The person who goes out into a strange culture deliberately, not to conquer it, but to find out about it. This is actually footage of Ursula Le Guin from the documentary that Arwen's making.

There were a lot of anthropologists around, and I heard some of their stories talking about this. It was, you know, it's a shop talk, and I'm listening in. But that whole idea of being the only one of your kind in a strange world was, you know, familiar to me. You know, for an American kid growing up in the 1930s and 40s, that is a very unusual perspective to have. To know that your way of life is just one way of life. Also, she was not treated differently in any significant way from her four brothers.

was not treated differently in any significant way from her four brothers. She was encouraged to participate in their lively conversations and arguments and to do all the rough and tumble play and to really put herself right in the middle of it. Yeah. I remember I read some interview with her too, where she was saying that people think that she's sort of very, very assertive and suffers no fools and throws her opinions out there. But she's like, this is this for me, there's just starting a conversation is what I had to do with the youngest of all these children just to get myself heard. Exactly. And now that we're talking about it, I can say that this was another real similarity with how I grew up. And something in her voice, which was very familiar to me, was just this kind of embrace of the argument

as a way of communicating a way of getting to the truth and we live in a society that fears that strong opinion being put out there at the dinner table that feels like an argument it feels like conflict and people back away from it and in my family and and I think also in Ursula's family, this lively intellectual discussion was just the way that people spoke. So when did you have the idea to make the documentary about her? At first, let's see, I first began to think about the documentary probably 2003. The idea first came into my head. Initially, I valued her as a kind of feminist godmother. And as a reader, to find that person in fiction was where kind of my heart went. But I didn't know very much about her story. I didn't know how it would be connected to so

many other things that I found fascinating and that I cared deeply about. So the more I began to investigate it, the more it became clear to me that I really did want to get into that story and that it was a video, that it was film. Why did you feel like this is definitely going to be a film? I wanted to share the experience of knowing her and speaking with her in a way that was more direct and immediate and intimate than happens in fiction. Of course, fiction can be incredibly intimate, but it's not quite the same as sharing the room with a living person in the way that I know most people never got a chance to do. So going back to the beginning of the documentary, you had to approach her, of course.

How did that go at first? First, I had to go get the training. Then I got the training. Oh, the training? Really? Yeah. I thought you had made some, didn't you? No. Well, when I first had the idea, I was working in print. Then I decided to work on this, and it was part of the reason that I went to get my master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley Journalism School. Wow. So with in mind the idea that you would eventually make this film. Oh, wow. So it in fact kind of drove the direction of my storytelling and my

career. Right. So step one, go to film school. Step two, establish yourself as a filmmaker. Step three, many years later, contact Ursula Le Guin. Well, I had a little bit of help. We had a mutual friend who was a member of a collective of house cleaners who up until the end, and I think still, cleans Ursula's house and kind of helps take care of things there. And I knew this mutual friend, Moe Boestern, who basically put in a good word for me. So I sent Ursula my only film, which was a short documentary about compulsive hoarding, and sent it to her and said, this is my work. This is some of the writing that I've done. Basically, this is who I am in the most simple terms that

I can express it. And this is what I'd like to do. And then this mutual friend, Mo, put in a good word for me, which I think also swayed Ursula to kind of entertain the idea. And then at a certain point early on, before we had met, she sort of backtracked a little bit and was looking like she was maybe having second thoughts. And that's when we met. I said, basically, let me come over and talk to you. Well, what was that conversation like? And also, were you intimidated to finally meet her?

I was a little intimidated to meet her, but I was more driven to convince her to let me do this. And so that was primarily the energy that I was bringing there. I wanted to really share with her why I thought it was important and see if I could get her to see that. And what she had to overcome on her end is really significant, is just her natural kind of shyness and discomfort with being in front of the camera. And she's interviewed extensively on radio and print, but not on the camera. So we kind of had to cross that bridge. And that was just the beginning of their journey. The rest is after the break. Rest is after the break. So Arwen Curry spent about 10 years filming Ursula Le Guin.

In the meantime, she worked on other documentaries and continued building her career. So she had the sort of experience of meeting up with Le Guin, then they go back to their lives, and they meet up again. And then Arwen realized something. As I continued working with her through the years, I also realized that there was something basic about sort of how to live your life with integrity and grace and kind of how to make the most of what you're given.

That's interesting because she's not, she seems to be someone who had a pretty, you know, blessed with a lot of great, you know, great family and all that and not any huge tragedies. I don't think that she had to work through. So I'm curious what it was that you were thinking in that regard. Well, precisely. She's a person who was very gifted in many ways. She was gifted with, first of all, her own innate gifts, her own incredible talent, and her work ethic, her stamina. She was gifted with her family that she grew up in,

which provided not only incredibly interesting ideas, but also a framework that was supportive of her own writing and her way of working through them. She was gifted, of course, in the way that many of us are, by being in this country at this time, by coming from a well-to-do academic family. So anyway, she had a lot of privilege and gifts in her life. And she could have squandered it.

As many of us do, she could have spent her time wondering how she could make the most of her life while sort of frittering it away, doing other things, you know. And we all try our best and try our hardest. But she's an example of one of the people who has made, you know, almost the most of what she could have done. She's a kind of a guide for how to live. And by live, I mean, she's a guide for how to give back, how to use what you have to make the world a better place in a real way. It took a long time for Ursula Le Guin to become the famous author Ursula Le Guin. In the 1950s, she started out writing more realistic novels, but they weren't catching on. And when she finally decided that her talents would be best used in science fiction or fantasy,

I mean, you gotta remember, sci-fi was not cool back then. It had no respect from the critics. It was not taught at all. Literature people knew nothing about it unless they found it for themselves. Again, here's Ursula Le Guin from the upcoming documentary. I kind of waded into the middle of that, and I knew that my work was not second rate. I knew that what I was writing was of literary value. But it's sort of hard to be standing there saying, I know better than all of you do for a long time.

But my readers knew better, too. She also wanted to write under her own name as a woman, which can still be challenging today. I mean, a lot of women will choose to initialize their first name and their middle name. And actually early in her career, Ursula Le Guin was encouraged to publish a story under the name UK Le Guin.

She did it once and vowed to never do it again. But she kept at it, and her big breakout came in 1968 with the novel A Wizard of Earthsea. The story was about a boy wizard who goes through a rigorous training at a hidden magic school where he can learn to master a complicated magic system. And yes, a lot of people have wondered if J.K. Rowling was influenced by Ursula Le Guin.

In fact, Ursula Le Guin herself has speculated about that a few times. And back in the 1960s, as the feminist movement was gaining ground, the fact that Ursula Le Guin was a woman writing fantasy novels under her own name began to work in her favor. I mean, like many famous people, she also happened to be in the right place at the right time. And as she says in the film, it was a very interesting moment for science fiction because science fiction was starting to kind of open its arms to other ideas beyond the technological, beyond the gadgetry and spaceships and, you know, ray guns and silly things like that.

And ideas about culture, ideas about identity, ideas about relationships were becoming more interesting to the readers and writers of science fiction. And also there were more voices. There were more women. There were more writers of color. There were different people kind of stepping into the fray and beginning to assert a place for themselves. And this is kind of the community that she stepped into.

the community that she stepped into. And she took that opening and really made the most of it by exploring very deeply these anthropological ideas in her work and asking people to really question some of the assumptions which they held closest, like the idea of a binary gender, for example. Arwen is referring to one of Le Guin's most famous novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, from 1969, which takes place on a planet where the inhabitants don't have a fixed gender. And that really blew people's minds, to be asked to think about these people who were neither men nor women. And even though she was criticized for making them too male, basically,

many of the readers were just blown away by that exercise that they were asked to do. You know, I think it was a really powerful work that was ahead of its time, and it opened up. It got people talking. And that really became the signature of her writing, the, quote, thought experiment. A number of writers bring up this idea of the thought experiment. And to some degree, that's what science fiction does most of the time, because it takes us someplace else and asks us to be there. Maybe that's what fiction does in a more general sense. But she really took this to this wonderful level with her ecumen system. You know, She invented this universe of worlds that are connected by the ecumen,

which is this consortium of loosely organized planets that all are connected with each other. But each of these planets has people on them, but each one of them, in each planet, there are different circumstances and different factors and elements which shape those people to being one way or another. And it asks us to explore why we are the way we are and how we could be different. But society was changing fast. And by the mid-1970s, this liberal, groundbreaking author from Berkeley, California, found herself in a strange position as representing the old guard, the old way of doing things. She didn't initially think of herself as a feminist. And she has said,

and she says in our film, that she began writing from the point of view of a man, or point of view of a woman pretending to think like a man, I think is what she says. When Ursula began reading books as a child and when she began writing and publishing, the default voice, the default protagonist was a male. And the voice was from the point of view of a male hero. And she wrote that way. She accepted that default as most women writers did. And her early works are written from the point of view of these intrepid male heroes. And it wasn't until circumstances both internal and external caused her to think more deeply about her own perspective as a woman that her work began to change. But change isn't easy. The women's movement was happening. And initially, it was hard for her

to be a part of it. She was a mother. She was a housewife when she began writing. She was deeply dedicated to her marriage. And those things did not seem to be compatible with the role of a feminist as she first saw it. But when she did begin to read women's writings and to listen to what they were saying, she realized that she was going to have to change her own perspective in order to actually speak from who she truly was. So there was a process of becoming. And because she is a writer, she was a writer through and through, it happened in her work. It was expressed through the things she was publishing. And so we can actually see that evolution taking place as we read her work and follow it in her fiction.

And there's something that's very unusual about that to basically say, okay, I was wrong about this. This isn't the only kind of hero we can have. this isn't the only kind of hero we can have. Women's magic is not necessarily just weak and wicked, as it's described in the first Earthsea books. It's also powerful. It's also misunderstood.

And that's what she comes again later to explore in the later Earthsea books. So she doesn't put down anything she did before, but she looks at it from a different perspective. Which is funny because so often that's what she was so best known for with her thought experiments and her anthropological take, to have so many people from the outside saying, you know, actually, if you look at your own work, you also, you know, that must have been a slight humbling lesson for her. I think it was. And I'm sure that you've, you know, talked to many creative people and they don't often take criticism that well.

It usually tends to trigger defensiveness. And sometimes they come back with the same thing they just did and sort of hit the point home harder. This is my stand. And instead of doing that, she was very, I think she took it all in. She felt all the defensiveness. And then she put it in what she called her compost, her creative compost. And what came out of it was this other voice that was her real mature self as a writer, her real mature presence that comes out in her later work and gives her

such depth and integrity throughout her career. She wasn't just the bright spark who was able to write these exciting novels as a young woman. She was also a true master. A few years ago, Ursula Gwynn announced that she would no longer be writing fiction. She didn't have the drive or the energy anymore. But she was still actively engaged with her fans, and she gave some fiery talks on the shortcomings of the publishing industry. Arwen had expected Ursula Le Guin to be there when the documentary was finished. It was more like she entered into another phase of her old age, where she had less mobility, she got tired more frequently, she had less stamina. I had adjusted personally to just that new pace in speaking with her and was in denial

that it would have, you know, that she was close to passing away. So I was not thinking of her as somebody who was going to die at any minute, not at all. Arwen went into this project because she believed very strongly in the intimacy of film as a medium to get to know people. But since Ursula Gwynn has died, it's become kind of difficult to work with that footage, to edit it day in and day out. Yeah, it's very difficult to look at her face and listen to her voice um there there's a period i don't know if this is something that fades over time but right now that the sort of shape of her absence is very large and very tactile to me. Like I can see the shape of her not being here

and it's this huge hole. I think that it's going to go on for a long time while people, it absorbs the magnitude of the loss to kind of the world of ideas, to the literary world, science fiction world, feminist thinkers. And just on a personal level, having spent, you know, I've done a lot of evolution of my own while working on this project.

And she has been a touchstone of kind of wisdom and common sense and integrity and, you know, creative ingenuity throughout the process. And so there's always that impulse with it when a powerful person leaves of wanting to check in with them about any number of things and them not being there. And even about the loss itself, you know, where if it were someone else who had passed away that I cared about, I would be asking her, you know, I would be looking to her for wisdom about how I should proceed in the project and in my life. And of course, she's not here. I mean, given that I know that you're the filmmaker and she's documentary subject, but do you feel like she became a friend or mentor? I mean, how would you describe your

relationship as it evolved? Both of those things, certainly. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I did have an intimate friendship with her, you know, and almost like we're family in some way, which is not to say that we're family in the way that her real family is. But yeah, no, the loss is personal as well. Now, even if there aren't any more Ursula Le Guin novels to come out, her influence is everywhere. I feel it every time I read a new author delving into speculative fiction with her own thought experiments. Ursula Le Guin's legacy is easiest to see in how she left fiction behind her.

When she came into it, science fiction and fantasy was something marginal, something silly, something trivialized. It maintained that status as being kind of laughable, kind of not really where real art happens for a long time. And it was partly because of her real insistence on being a real artist in that medium, in that genre, that that genre is no longer considered off limits for serious artists. So artists like Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell and Zadie Smith, and I could go on and on, can take fantastic elements, science fictional elements, and weave them into their work and just be novelists

who have just as much chance of writing a great novel that ends up on the New York Times bestseller list as anybody else. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. And special thanks to Arwen Curry for providing me with clips

from her upcoming documentary, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. The documentary will premiere at film festivals this summer, and it will be on public television in the U.S. in the fall. It also features interviews with Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and many others.

Oh, and I learned one more interesting tidbit. I mentioned to Arwen how strange it was that there'd been hardly any good TV or movie adaptations of Ursula Le Guin's work. Well? I think it's coming. Yeah? Yeah.

And I can't speak about any of the details, but I think it's on the way. In fact, just a couple days after we talked, I read that Ursula Gwynn's novel The Telling is going to be adapted to a movie by the producers of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek Discovery. So hopefully there's more to come. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. And for a long time, I've been saying I'm a one man band. That is no longer true my assistant producer is Stephanie

Billman you can like the show on Facebook I tweet at Eve Malinsky and my website is imaginary world's podcast dot org