Ursula K. Le Guin, Editing to the End

Ursula’s final words to me, her final edits on the manuscript of our collected conversations, were in pencil. We had talked in one of these conversations about technology, about how, in her mind, she was unfairly labeled a Luddite.That some of the most perfect tools—a pestle, a kitchen knife—were in fact perfected technologies. I had just received the manuscript from her days before, and the pencil on it reminded me of the aura of in-the-world magic this whole endeavor, bringing a book into the world together, had assumed.

The manuscript had traveled in the world as an object, one carried by foot and passed hand to hand. Our publisher, Tin House, located literally in a house of tin on the corner of a leafy boulevard in Northwest Portland, was just down the hill from Ursula’s home.And by a remarkable twist of fate, as if sharing the same street were not enough, Ursula’s own granddaughter worked as an intern there. It was often her or the book’s editor Tony who would walk up the hill to deliver the pages, or walk up the hill to walk them back down again.

Tony had marveled at how quickly Ursula had proofread the book, spotting typos, agreeing or disagreeing with the copyeditor, returning it in a quick 24-hour turnaround. Now I had the same pages and it was taking me days to do the very same task. Even so, everything about the project, beginning to end, had seemed fated and charmed. We were like hobbits in the shire, blissfully unaware of the ways of the world outside it.That is, until we learned, just four days after the manuscript passed from her hands to mine, that Ursula had died.

If it were possible to be dispassionate about death, and I’m not sure that it is, perhaps it would seem strange to be shocked by the passing of any 88-year-old person, writer or not, living legend or otherwise. The titles of Ursula’s more recent books—Late in the Day, Words Are My Matter, No Time to Spare—certainly acknowledged that any of these books could’ve been her last. And yet when someone is there and suddenly, without warning, there no longer—working, writing, collaborating with you up until their final moments…
And Ursula was not any someone.

In other words, I was stunned, stunned even before learning of Ursula’s passing away. And I spent that week after she died in silence, listening to the words of others, the tributes by Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, and—most movingly—Jo Walton, feeling my silence, my loss of words, as my most honest response to the news of her passing and yet also as a painful addition to an unsustainable year of too much silence.

It was during that quiet week of listening to others, of thinking about Ursula and her legacy, that the mystery of Ursula K. Le Guin deepened for me. Somehow, if I looked at any of the fresh tears in society’s fabric, I saw Ursula modeling a counterpoint. Yes, you could look at her overtly political and public gestures on behalf of writers, everything from her refusal to accept the Nebula Award when Stanislaw Lem had his honorary membership to the Science Fiction Writers of America revoked over Cold War politics, to her blistering National Book Foundation speech gone viral lambasting the corporatization and commodification of books by the likes of Amazon. Or you could look to her canonical novels, some a half-century old now, that even then were including, in matter-of-fact fashion, not only characters but protagonists who were people of color and women, gender fluid and anticapitalist. But it wasn’t these aspects of Ursula, however remarkable and career defining, that I was thinking of at all.
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At the mention of the word hologram many peoples’ first thought is of Princess Leia in Star Wars. Evil is on the march in the galaxy but Leia, the leader of the Rebel Alliance, has in her possession the stolen plans to the Death Star. Prior to her capture she hides them in R2D2 along with a holographic message, a hidden hangman’s hope for the forces of good as the galaxy-wide situation darkens beyond imagination.

I was thinking of holograms as I thought back on my interactions with Ursula, for holographic film has a remarkable quality beyond its ability to recreate a three-dimensional image. No matter how many pieces you cut a holographic film into, you can take any one of them, large or small, shine a laser through it and recreate the whole image. The more I thought about Ursula’s off-the-stage, small and everyday actions, the more I felt this holographic harmony between the part and the whole in Ursula’s life, and the more I wondered if there was more than wonder to be had at beholding this, if somehow it was also a key toward living a politically engaged, creatively vibrant life.

She could have published most if not all of her books at one of the big five publishers in New York. She could’ve economized and maximized her time by only granting interviews to the likes of Terry Gross, Bill Moyers, and Charlie Rose. And yet she continued to choose small presses, and often ones distant from the hierarchy of the publishing powers in NYC, whether an anarchist press from San Francisco or a feminist science fiction press from Seattle. Similarly, she never said no to her hometown community radio, KBOO, a station that is not Portland’s NPR affiliate, but whose mission statement is to give voice to the voiceless, with shows like Rose City Native Radio, Transpositive PDX, and Black Book Talk. By conventional metrics, KBOO is a small station, both in reach and listenership, and yet you wouldn’t get that impression when Ursula speaks of it:

I want to thank KBOO . . . for being for 50 years the strongest consistent voice in Oregon of and for the arts and the freedom and generosity of thought. While America is busy tearing itself apart into factions with rants, lies, and mindless violence, it’s in voices like this that you can hear—if you listen—what may yet hold us together.

Dial it down further, to yet a smaller focus, to the defense of language, words, and meaning on the sentence level, and still the same Ursula reappears. She has written extensively about the craft of writing, about grammar and syntax, and you quickly learned when talking to her about it, that everything from sentence length, to choice of tense or point of view, has a history, and every choice we make, even here, can reinforce a status quo or gesture toward a different future.

There was a magic, a power in these quiet acts, and in her engagement with and attention to the overlooked.It was these gestures of Ursula’s, the quiet and overlooked ones, that didn’t seem like acts of top-down noblesse oblige but rather, as small acts that nevertheless represented the whole of her, even the source of her wholeness. I couldn’t help but believe that this physical, in-the-world harmony that arose as we put this book together, from the way the manuscript was approached as a shared object, to the all-in-the-family feel between everyone involved, that it was Ursula’s quiet choices that had made all of it possible, that had conjured a web of relations, a bioregional ecosystem from which to birth a book.

Perhaps the biggest moment for Luke Skywalker is not that glorious heroic shot that destroyed the Death Star, but his everyday attention to cleaning his little droid, the very cleaning of which led him to discover, as if by chance, the world-saving message from Leia. But I suspect Ursula would want us to dispense of Luke Skywalker, of masculine hero narratives altogether. She’d more likely point to Lao Tzu, who wrote the Tao Te Ching: The Book of the Way and its Power during the Warring States Period, a particularly terrible time in China, and who advocated wu wei, “doing by not-doing” as a response to it.

Of course, Lao Tzu strikes the Western conflict-oriented mind as incredibly passive. “Don’t do something, just sit there.” That’s where he is so tricky and so useful. There are many different ways of just sitting there.

After this week of thinking about Ursula, of thinking about how the scope and speed of Trump’s attacks on the public commons had left me stunned, after this week of “just sitting there” in that silence, I’m convinced more than ever that Ursula’s holographic way of being is its perfect antidote. And maybe the pencil is too, a perfect tool and a perfected technology itself. When Ursula said the following words near the end of her National Book Foundation speech when receiving the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I think of the sharpness of a pencil’s point, and I also think of its eraser. But most of all I think not only whether my own small acts reflect the whole of me, but that these small acts are themselves the whole. And the whole is all that matters.