Writing About the Author and/or the Work
Before attempting to write about an author like Ursula K. Le Guin—one who brings together readers from different genres into a space beyond genre itself—it feels necessary to begin by speaking about clichés of writing and authorship. I do this first and foremost to put myself at ease. I am an academic, but not from the field of literature. My connection to literature comes through fiction writing, and when I write about literature, I prefer to follow the sentiments inside me rather than rely primarily on references. Therefore, the texts you will encounter in the following pages are not academic in tone; rather, they are essays that circle around Le Guin’s worlds—sometimes drifting beyond their own boundaries into realms of experience, imagination, and dream.
Instead of following a chronological path, these essays are arranged through concepts related to writing itself. They are unafraid to collide with one another. While I have tried not to ignore well-known and significant points, I also allow marginal sentences and overlooked details to wander through the lines.
I have no claim to saying anything that has never been said about Le Guin’s work, nor do I intend to compile what has already been written about her. My aim is instead to reflect on her life and on her particular way of seeing life. Another purpose is to consider her revisiting her own works at different times—how the timelessness of her fictions reappears when she later interprets them—and, finally, to explore what she wrote, why she wrote, and above all, how she wrote and spoke, by bringing together quotations from her fiction with those from her interviews and essays.
While listing what is yet to be written and what has already been said, I realise that I have already begun to speak of clichés. Like the stream of consciousness that Le Guin admired in Virginia Woolf, I write without overanalysing, progressing toward a destination I know I will reach only in retrospect—one that I have in fact designed analytically. Because that is precisely what I wish to explain: where Le Guin drew her inspiration from, how far that inspiration extends, and what it means to speak and debate about her literature today. Is the writer’s personality, lifestyle, and body of work truly interwoven? If we refrain from reading those we politically disagree, do we deprive ourselves of literary pleasure? Or, if even the world’s most magnificent work were produced by a malevolent spirit, would it lose all meaning for us? These are the kinds of questions that shape themselves as I move from analytic reasoning to the margins of consciousness. Without crossing the boundary, I continue to wander within the space the text permits.
When you begin to write, those around you often feel the need to pass judgment on writing itself—either expressing admiration or, at best, bringing up their own experiences as writers. Meanwhile, an internal cliché begins to awaken within you: the dreadful question of what all this writing is for and whom it might concern besides yourself. That question has no definitive answer. Or rather, it has an ambiguous one—both all and none, everyone and no one. Hence, it exists and does not exist; it is and is not.
When considering who might care about what has been written, you inevitably confront the sources of your inspiration. If you have not read and absorbed enough, or if you are unaware that a far better version of what you have written was expressed decades ago, it is clear that you must dedicate more time to reading. Yet, if despite all the admiration you feel for what you’ve read, the contradiction “all great works have already been written—what else could I possibly say?” coexists with the conviction “I must tell this story,” then you might as well proceed until the moment when what is original in you begins to emerge. Life, after all, endlessly resembles the past—with its banality that there is “nothing new under the sun”—and yet, it continues every day in utterly new and unpredictable ways. Thus, I believe there can never be a shortage of words to say, worlds to create, stories to tell, or characters to invent.
Despite the countless studies written on Le Guin’s work, this is my excuse for attempting to write about it myself. What makes my approach distinct—if it can be called so—is that I will not analyse the texts primarily within their historical or generic contexts, but rather interpret the ideas, concepts, and possibilities behind them through Le Guin’s own lens, relating them to her lived practice. Whether this offers a genuinely new perspective, I cannot say; for I am not pursuing an academic study that examines every text written about Le Guin. Nevertheless, regarding the question of how much of an author’s private life ought to be shared, I see myself as an avid reader of biography, yet believe that what is created holds more value than what is lived, and that fiction is often stranger than truth. At this point, I trust our modern capacity to satisfy curiosity through technology. To put it another way, it would be unfitting to commemorate a science fiction master—one who declared herself a lover of artefacts—by neglecting technology.
My emphasis on science fiction is deliberate. First, in Turkey and across the world, intellectual readers often dismiss the genre entirely, adopting a condescending stance toward it. That these same readers emphasise Le Guin’s “otherness” when it comes to her, I find especially meaningful. Indeed, she herself remarked that those who claim as a matter of principle not to read science fiction are “either ignorant or snobbish.” Moreover, in a 2017 letter to the editor of The Oregonian, written just a year before her death, she underscored that fiction writers—whether realistic or not—always invent, imagine, and fabricate realities that do not exist. This alone demonstrates that she never truly separated science fiction from literature itself. According to her, writers do not create “alternative histories” or “alternative universes,” but rather “alternative facts.” In many of her interviews, she even implies—much like William S. Burroughs—that storytelling is a form of deception. But unlike Burroughs, who developed his cut-up technique to avoid lying, she chooses instead to own her lies.
When we consider a writer’s immersion in her own fictions, another name from another geography comes to mind: Nikos Kazantzakis. In Report to Greco, when he recalls his childhood, he describes a state of “believing one’s own lies.” The young Kazantzakis insists that when he tells his friends the peacock feather he holds is an angel’s feather and that his grandfather is Jesus, he is not lying—he is recounting what he truly believes. Le Guin, I think, would have understood and embraced this semi-fictional mixture of truth and falsehood with affection. Yet her own assertion that fiction is “nothing but lies” is, paradoxically, a mark of realism. “I lie for a living,” she once said, summing up her craft with admirable candour.
So, what might be the underlying reason for constructing her lies in new worlds? Le Guin offers indirect answers. She was a serious reader long before she was a writer—drawn to Russian literature, that realm of “serious” texts—so when she began to write, genre was of no concern to her. All she ever did was tell stories, invent facts, propose new realities. Perhaps she unconsciously merged the mythic and epic tales of her childhood with the gravity of Russian prose. Long before her formal education, she had already been made a writer by what she read. To me, the fact that she spent her life writing—and kept growing through writing in every stage of life—is what gave her such a profound awareness of authorship. Raised in an intellectual environment, surrounded by books, and encouraged by her father to write at a young age, Le Guin wrote her first story at nine and even tried to have it published.
This was revealed in her 1982 interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory. When Gregory reminded her that Astounding, edited by John Campbell, had rejected her early submission, Le Guin responded:
“Writing was never a hobby for me. It was always what I did. Honestly, I was thrilled to receive a rejection slip meant for grown-ups—it didn’t discourage me at all.”
In her adolescence, however, she admits to getting stuck on the conventional advice that one should “write about what one knows.” “That is the worst thing you can tell an eighteen-year-old,” she remarked. “What does anyone know at eighteen?” Her solution was clear: “Forget it—I’ll invent a country,” she decided, giving herself over to the realm of fantasy. At that time, she wasn’t even aware that such a genre existed. What she knew was science fiction, and what intrigued her was its rigour—the constraints imposed by the laws of the worlds it built, and the creative tension this produced. Once she freed herself from the pressure to publish and began writing for herself, her art was liberated. Though she never put it quite this way, she often implied that the concern for publication hinders creativity and interrupts the process of writing.
Le Guin’s thought trajectory regarding writing reveals her to be at once ordinary and exceptional. The ordinariness lies in her oscillation between the passion to write and the desire to be read; the exceptionality in her refusal to distinguish between constructing an event and inventing a world, thus achieving a mode of writing that transcends genre boundaries and becomes emancipatory. Her writing practice is not only instructive for writers but also illuminating for readers in general, offering an exercise in thinking that extends beyond fiction or nonfiction.
Before moving to the details of how this book was written—the conceptual grounds on which its chapters are built, the works associated with its thematic titles, and the evolving relationships between Le Guin and her texts over time—I should elaborate on some of the questions raised above. The list of names who influenced Le Guin, and those whom she influenced in turn, is of course extensive, but I will illustrate and expand upon these connections where relevant. The relationship between her personality and her writing, meanwhile, offers a fruitful path for examining the correspondences and contrasts between the experiences of a woman raised in a “special” family, well educated, and surrounded by a cultivated circle, and the works that emerged from that context.
Her parents, her husband, her education, her brothers, and her children—Le Guin herself often found it necessary to discuss these. Likewise, I will refer to them when relevant, using quotations and commentary to trace how fields such as archaeology, history, and mythology shaped her imagination, and how her desire to invent languages was rooted in these disciplines.
Finally, concerning the relationship between Le Guin’s political identity and her creative work, I must note that this topic remains open to discussion. Yet in Le Guin’s case, it is possible to speak of a certain consistency and balance. Intellectually an anarchist and feminist—and, by virtue of her social engagement, perhaps also an activist—she sometimes used these labels for herself. Her faith in social transformation and in the potential for change that is always left ajar in her stories point to a direct link between her political stance and her literature. Even when her works are fictional, they circle around philosophical questions. Still, Le Guin always maintained that she never sought to use writing as a political act; she kept the two spheres distinct in her life. She herself drew a line between the activism of holding a protest sign and the solace of writing a text—yet she also provided examples of how the anger that could not be expressed in action seeped into her fiction.
Throughout Le Guin’s body of work, one can see her constant effort to look from the other side, to maintain balance—to explore contrasts such as being and nothingness, darkness and light. Similarly, the relationship between her activism and her writing as a form of action reveals this dialectic. Thus, it is intriguing to consider how readers who do not share her worldview nevertheless respond to her work—a question I will also address in relation to her texts.
The chapter titles of this book already outline its conceptual framework. These single-word titles—broad in scope and deliberately elastic in meaning—follow Le Guin’s authorship, her writing, and her modes of self-expression while also exploring the limits of those meanings. At least, that is my intention.
“The Road” addresses fantasy as one of Le Guin’s principal themes, reading her alongside other writers of fantastic fiction while also considering how she approaches the genre itself. This opening chapter links biographical fragments to the relationship between her life and writing, touching on issues such as writing across genres, addressing certain age groups, and the temporal and spatial distances her characters traverse. “The Border,” the second chapter, explores the many boundaries in Le Guin’s work—between countries, worlds, people, times, and societies—ranging from the personal to the planetary. The third chapter, “Encounter,” revisits The Left Hand of Darkness, situating it before The Dispossessed and reflecting on its language, its engagement with gender and sexuality, and its reception over time. The fourth, “Other,” focuses on later stories where gender roles and family structures are reimagined—particularly The Birthday of the World and Four Ways to Forgiveness. Finally, “Distant” examines Always Coming Home, Le Guin’s “anthropology of the future,” a work that defies easy categorization.
To write thousands more lines about an author who has already inspired thousands is a daunting task. Yet I can only say that these pages are an expression of gratitude—for all that Ursula’s reading and writing have given me—and a humble gesture of respect to a spirit that has already reached “the farthest shore.” Should you find any parts lacking or think differently about certain points, I would be delighted to continue the conversation and to collaborate in further thinking and writing about Le Guin.
To the possibilities of other lives—to all the lives that writing makes possible.
Seran Demiral
Datça, 2018
"(…) and if we think we shall find hatred, there we shall find a god;
if we think of killing another, there we shall kill ourselves;
if we hope to go outward, there we shall come to the centre of our own being;
if we believe ourselves alone, there we shall be with all the world."
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
While reflecting on this chapter, the first work that came to my mind was the Earthsea series. My initial intention was to begin by recounting the author’s journey through her own work — how the trilogy that began in the 1960s was completed decades later when she returned to it in 1990, ultimately comprising five books. I would then connect Le Guin’s journeys back into the worlds she created — her revisitations through the stories set in Earthsea — with the journeys undertaken by her characters. That was my plan.
But writing, like life itself, is such that not adhering to a plan is itself a form of fidelity to it. Every journey hides within it new and unforeseen routes, surprises that had never before been imagined. The quotation above, from Joseph Campbell, is not far from this thought: to go outward is to turn inward; loneliness is equivalent to union. Therefore, my deviation from my plan is in fact a part of it. What I write in pursuit of something original about Le Guin inevitably becomes yet another variation of all that has already been said about her.
When we look at her personal and biographical life story, of course, we must begin with where, when, and into what kind of family she was born. Le Guin was born on October 21, 1929, in the state of California, and spent her childhood in Berkeley. She described herself as a true Westerner, though not a Southerner — at least, we may say that her spirit was not Southern. If one’s homeland is defined not by the place of birth but by where one chooses to live one’s life, then perhaps it is accurate to say that Le Guin was not Californian but Oregonian. Yet it is worth underlining how the South, the geography of her childhood, nevertheless pervades her writing.
For Le Guin, there was no allure in living in the South — that is, in what she called “the easy place.” On the one hand, she admitted that she lived “within a utopia,” in a geography like California, because what is generally meant by utopia is indeed something close to this: everything should be simple, pleasant, and appealing to human pleasure. Yet her utopia was not like that. She described, for instance, the islands of the South Seas as comfortable, easy, and therefore repulsive. Her utopias always contain the hardship of living. When designing her worlds and planets, she did not consciously choose harsh climates; yet the fact that the egalitarian forms of life on Winter in The Left Hand of Darkness or on Anarres in The Dispossessed emerge from geographical and climatic difficulty highlights precisely Le Guin’s holistic understanding of life — the idea that without hardship, a utopia would be meaningless, and that utopia, the non-existent distant place, must remain just that: distant and unattainable.
If the first thing shaping a person’s life is the place of birth, geography itself, then the second must be the family and the cultural background it provides. Le Guin’s family background, perhaps even more than her life itself, determined and shaped her writing and her authorship. It might be said that it was one of the primary things that made Ursula who she was. Let me approach the writer’s family through a small example: in a recent commentary on Le Guin’s literature, I came across the question “Is the surname Kroeber significant?” Indeed, the name Kroeber is significant.
Of course, family background is influential in every field and context; one cannot choose one’s country or one’s family, and though one can to some extent renounce them, one can never entirely escape their influence. This is particularly true for a family belonging to the educated, upper-middle intellectual class of a geography like America. The more respected the family, the greater its formative effect on the children — this can certainly be said. These are, of course, subjects for another discussion, but it is impossible that Le Guin, who grew up surrounded by books and conversations — in a household where academics and people from many different communities, including Indigenous guests, constantly came and went — could have remained unaffected by all the discussions, theories, topics, and concepts she overheard as a child. She herself mentioned in nearly every interview the influence of her father’s profession and her upbringing on both her writing and her personality.
Le Guin’s father, Alfred Kroeber, was an important anthropologist and academic. Raised in Manhattan, he studied at Columbia University, where he became a student of Franz Boas, the German-born scholar who profoundly influenced twentieth-century anthropology with his culturally centred approach. Boas brought together traditional physical anthropology with cultural ethnography and linguistics, breathing new life into the discipline. Thus, it is natural that his student Kroeber had an anthropology that placed culture, language, and the human being at its centre. One could say that Kroeber carried with him the mindset of working with Native Americans rather than studying them, and this approach was reflected in their family life and domestic relationships.
Kroeber’s ethnological research focused on California’s Indigenous peoples, and his archaeological work took him to various regions of Peru. The age difference between Alfred and Ursula was greater than the typical one between father and daughter — Le Guin noted that her father had been in his fifties when she was born, and therefore no longer continued his travels and fieldwork. Yet even if she did not personally witness his research expeditions, her life was shaped — as much as his — by the friendships, knowledge, and experiences that emerged from those endeavours. Throughout her childhood, their home was filled with immigrants, Indigenous visitors, and scholars. As she put it, her great fortune was to have had a “Papago uncle” that not everyone could have.
Juan Dolores, a Papago (now Tohono O’odham) man from the American Southwest, was one of the Indigenous visitors who frequently came to their home, and as a child, Le Guin believed for years that this man was truly a distant relative — an actual Uncle Juan. Perhaps this was what first led her to reflect on kinship and family bonds: that someone without a blood relation could still be family, that a person considered part of the family might speak an entirely different language. This can be seen as an early rehearsal for the recurring themes in her novels — cultural difference, alternative forms of relation, and understanding across languages.
The woman who took the surname Kroeber, later Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi in Two Worlds, was Ursula K. Le Guin’s mother. Although Le Guin is known as “the child of an anthropologist father and a writer mother,” Theodora had already begun writing at a time when Ursula was herself a young woman publishing her own books. The two did not exactly influence one another, yet it can be said that while writing simultaneously — albeit in different styles — they read and discussed each other’s work.
Theodora Kroeber was, in fact, a social psychologist who had taken anthropology courses with Alfred before marrying him. Ishi was a real person — the last survivor of the Yahi, a Northern Californian Indigenous group who endured famine, disease, and massacre. His name means “man” in the Yahi language, and his story is remembered as one of Alfred Kroeber’s most significant “discoveries.” Yet in line with Alfred’s approach to life and research, their relationship went beyond that of researcher and subject. When Alfred’s first wife, Henriette, was dying, Ishi, with the wisdom and power of his Yahi belief system, helped him find comfort and recover from grief. Long after Ishi’s death from pneumonia and a cold, Alfred met and married Theodora, and this ultimately led Theodora to write her semi-fictional, semi-biographical account of Ishi’s life.
The book that made Theodora Kroeber a popular author was titled Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America, and Le Guin spoke of both her mother and this work with deep respect. Theodora’s other books reveal a diversity that parallels her daughter’s — Ishi, Last of His Tribe, a children’s version of the same story; The Inland Whale, a collection of nine Native American tales; and A Green Christmas, another children’s book. Thus, we are speaking of a woman who, like Le Guin, wrote across genres — fiction, folklore, and children’s literature. Most of her other books were non-fiction, reflecting her academic side; yet, when considering Le Guin’s own non-fiction, it is hardly wrong to say that this versatility came from her family.
Nevertheless, although in interviews Le Guin frequently mentioned the influence of her father’s anthropological background on her writing, it is noteworthy that she rarely drew connections to her mother’s authorship. She emphasised that it was her father, not her mother, who always encouraged her to write. Even though she shared the practice of writing with her mother, her shared interests and affinities lay with her father. She often spoke, for instance, of her father’s fascination — much like her own — with artefacts: his curiosity about what something was made of, how and why it worked the way it did. She preferred to express her love for such questions — of material, function, and form — through stories of her father’s relationship with objects, earth, history, and people.
It seems she was influenced by her mother more as a reader than as a writer. In interviews from the 2000s, she mentioned that the stories in The Inland Whale — though she had not been particularly drawn to Native American tales — had deeply impressed her, and that these non-European narrative forms later inspired her own work Always Coming Home. Still, she often described her authorship as a fictional version of what her father did through anthropology: Alfred described real cultures and alternative ways of life; Ursula invented countless ones that never existed. What influenced her was not his writings but his personality.
Like Alfred, Theodora too had been married before and lost her husband. From her first marriage, she had two sons; with Alfred, she had one more son in addition to Ursula. Thus, Ursula grew up with three older brothers — two half-brothers and one full brother — and was both the youngest and the only daughter in the family. Yet being the only girl and the youngest did not entail any hierarchy. Her parents made no distinction between their children based on gender; she maintained good relationships with her brothers, played with them, and told them stories. She often said she was not particularly brave — that she was not “raised like a boy” among her brothers, that she was afraid of climbing. Theirs was, in the truest sense, a kind of gender equality: everyone did what they could, and this produced no inequality among them.
It seems that Ursula’s understanding of feminism was shaped by the education and experiences of her childhood. In her adolescence, when the Second World War broke out, all her brothers went into military service, and she spent long, solitary days in the wild orchards of Napa Valley. The war, the feminist waves that unfolded during her lifetime, and her father’s prominent place in the history of anthropology all left traces on her life and writing that can be clearly discerned.
In fact, what is more important than family background or the land on which life is lived is time itself — because time encompasses both space and people, exerts its influence silently, and therefore tends to be overlooked.
The way Ursula’s seemingly timeless texts refer to historical events proves how much she valued time, yet at the same time reveals her distinctive perception of it. Her narratives are not linear but cyclical; they contain returns instead of progressions. Thus, although she regarded herself as Western in the context of civilisation, as a result of what she had read and learned from an early age, she also bore an Eastern sensibility. Perhaps her writing and her life may best be described as timeless, placeless, borderless, landless: her journey and her life are entirely shaped through words and stories, and the stories she tells — the very words she uses — are the road itself.
She does not aim to reach a destination but chooses to experience the journey — and in doing so, she takes the reader on a journey as well.
If we briefly touch on the similarities and differences between the hero’s path described in Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the narratives of Le Guin’s literature, we can say that, like Campbell, Le Guin also “separates her character from home.” Campbell’s hero’s journey is, in fact, a highly traditional form of narrative, but it is meaningful in that it encapsulates the logic underlying fantasy — particularly epic fantasy.
We may roughly think of any narrative as exposition – complication – resolution: what is presented first is the character and the problematic situation; then the journey begins. This journey represents both the progression of events leading to resolution and the character’s transformation. The hero discovers something essential about herself, allows the inner “essence” to be revealed, or becomes accepted into a community, a time, a situation — in Campbell’s terms, a “rite of initiation.” With the resolution comes triumph: the hero returns to the starting point as someone changed, victorious because she has transformed.
Sometimes this transformation is not entirely positive; often, alongside what is gained, something is lost — perhaps the death of a friend, or the loss of a feeling. And it is precisely here that Le Guin’s literature most closely resembles the traditional narrative: her characters never evolve only toward the good, events do not merely resolve but grow more complex… in fact, often there is no “plot” at all in the conventional sense.
Le Guin is, of course, a master of analytic thinking, yet what matters in her stories is not their analytical structure but the underlying idea or emotion. She experiences, and we as readers sense, that it is the emotional and conceptual essence that carries value. In her own words, she preferred not to “construct plots” but to “move people.” For this reason, what she narrates is not the destination reached but the journey undertaken; and the return is not always spatial — it may also be the result of an inward journey.
If we recall Campbell once more: to go outward is to turn inward.
Self-return naturally begins with self-knowledge. As Le Guin sends her characters on journeys, she lets them grow. The discovery of the self becomes possible through experience — through encounters with stone and soil, people and events, concepts and feelings. To see Le Guin’s writing as an exploration of different ways of life does not require us to wander the borders of fantasy. Every woman she writes is a form of resistance against patriarchy; every figure she creates from the lower classes is, in a sense, a rebellion against servitude.
The Earthsea series I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter is particularly worth examining in this respect, as all its stories are, in essence, journeys of growth.
Before turning to Ged’s search for himself or Tenar’s discovery of womanhood, allow me to begin with the discovery of my own authorship. I was one of those fortunate children who grew up among the bookshops of Kadıköy, getting to know editors by chance. The culture I encountered through that environment, beyond blood ties, drew me toward books and toward finding myself among them.
I cannot say with Le Guin’s certainty whether a child or an adolescent has a story worth telling, but I, too, was among those who, quite early on, said, “Never mind, I’ll create a universe.” I must have been thirteen — either in the final year of middle school or the beginning of high school. Thanks to family members who read science fiction, I had already come to know and love the classics: Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series, Frank Herbert’s Dune universe, and, at the age of eleven, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I was indeed lucky.
At that time, tabletop role-playing games had entered my life; I had become familiar with Tolkien’s Middle-earth not only at the table but also through his texts. And I was determined: I would create a universe.
So at thirteen, I began my first novel. Stories and poems were fine — but a novel was something else. It was long, it required patience, it needed to be woven thread by thread, thought through carefully. Yet adolescence allows for no plans or programs; what it allows is impulse — to plunge in with excitement and passion. And so I plunged in.
I often recount this part with a bit of humour: even the title of the novel reeked of adolescence — The Curse of the Sacred. The sacred was a stone; the cursed, a shadow. I was telling the story of a young girl — or rather, the intersecting stories of a young girl and an older, wiser man. The man was pursuing a stone, and the girl followed in the shadow. The landscape was harsh; a journey was underway, and I followed the rules of epic fantasy as faithfully as I could.
As if stone and shadow were not enough, there were names — true names — from which people derived their power, and which they therefore kept secret from one another.
No, when I began to write that novel attempt — literally, when I started to put pen to paper, filling notebooks with handwriting — I had not yet picked up Earthsea, nor had I even heard Le Guin’s name. By coincidence, one day, when I tried to buy Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation at a bookshop, the shopkeeper — the “big sister” behind the counter — tried to prevent me from reading Foucault. So I turned toward the fiction shelves and, among the fantasies, found a series I didn’t know, with covers unlike the others, and each book — compared to most fantasy series — remarkably thin: the Earthsea series. I bought the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea.
At the time, although the shopkeeper sister probably thought it was perfectly suited to my thirteen-year-old self, I didn’t know that. I had almost no awareness yet of the idea that one must write “differently” for adolescents, for children, for adults. My personal story continues with the cliché I briefly mentioned in the introduction: if such a magnificent universe as Earthsea could be created and such books written, then it was fine if I never wrote at all! Thus my first novel adventure ended.
Within three years, when I began to tell stories set in cemeteries, I learned not to overthink what had already been told — just as Le Guin herself did, not to read too much or be influenced by other books while writing. Years later, I occasionally went back and reread my first novel attempt, and I read it with pleasure — with the kind of understanding and smile peculiar to those absurd things done in adolescence. It meant I had grown up!
If we ask Le Guin, growing up is a task that never ends. In interviews where she spoke about the first book of this series — quotations from which, in Turkish editions, were used on the back covers of the books, quite fittingly, I think — she said:
“Growing up was a process that took me years; I completed it at the age of thirty-one — as much as it can ever be completed.”
According to her, growing up is the essential task of most young people — and indeed, it is. In fact, growing up is nearly identical to living itself; it never ends throughout a lifetime. One could say that a human life suffices only to know and cultivate oneself. From Fernando Pessoa’s perspective, decay is a form of ripening; that is, one might claim that the work of growing continues even at life’s end, in old age, when everything seems about to conclude.
On the topics of maturity, adulthood, and how childhood comes to an end, it is worth looking at Le Guin’s more recent short nonfiction pieces. In one of them, where she connects childhood and adulthood to creativity, she points out the absurd intensity of meaning imposed upon the child. For her, to become an adult means for the child to die, and the child is an incomplete adult. This way of thinking, which runs counter to the dominant understanding in the social sciences, does not entirely align with what Le Guin writes — yet perhaps these nuances in her thought are proof that Ursula herself was growing and changing as she grew.
On the other hand, the absence of a strict division between child and adult can be traced both to her insistence that she wrote for an ageless readership and to the way she placed responsibility upon the child just as upon the adult.
By confronting canonical children’s books, Le Guin actually defends the idea of the child as an individual through her child characters. Beyond the fact that every writer must first be a good reader, she — a woman who read books voraciously — was also a devoted reader of children’s and young adult literature. She begins her critique with the irresponsibility of Holden Caulfield, whom she identifies as inspired by “Peter Pan, the victim of society.” Holden, the rebellious adolescent of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, is a child who rejects adults, never feels understood, a perpetual “victim.”
Le Guin’s criticism lies in Holden’s inability to grow up. Seeking comfort in blaming adults, Holden refuses to take responsibility for his actions. Ursula prefers Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Tom Sawyer dislikes victimhood and does not pity himself. He stands by what he does and knows how to laugh at himself when the time comes.
Perhaps Le Guin’s understanding of growing up can be simply summarised as “standing by one’s own actions.” In other words, growing up means acquiring the capacity to take responsibility for one’s actions. Only through such competence can the child survive as an adult, and this state of being responsible for the consequences of one’s actions corresponds to Le Guin’s notion of freedom.
It follows that only the person who grows, matures, and learns to stand on their own feet can be free; such freedom is not given but earned. It is attained through struggle. Just as her utopias are never easy, neither growing up nor reaching adulthood comes easily. Surely, the secret of her fiction lies somewhere here. Even in worlds like Earthsea, where magic exists, nothing descends from the sky by zeppelin; every act has a consequence. To take is to give; to go is to return.
"The word in silence,
the light in darkness,
life in dying,
the hawk soaring in the empty sky shines."
The Creation of EA
Easily counted among cult works — possessing depth and significance within fantasy as well as a substantial readership in young adult literature, having, so to speak, accompanied many children in their growing — A Wizard of Earthsea opens with contrasts that can be read as the balance between light and darkness within Ged. The story of an adolescent searching for his way thus transforms, in the later books, into the wisdom of an adult wizard: Sparrowhawk (Ged), who acts with awareness of responsibility and reflection, thereby attaining freedom.
Sparrowhawk’s story may be read through the motif of the journey in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces: the calling of the hero, the refusal of the call, and the conformity to archetype through supernatural aid appear more clearly in Tenar’s story — or rather, in the intersections of Tenar and Ged’s stories.
Just as Ged sets out to achieve “victory,” Tenar forges her own path by rejecting the position imposed upon her. She is a girl chosen to become a high priestess; yet she is trapped within contradictions between the life she desires and the life she is “supposed” to live, forced to hide within darkness.
For this text, filled with symbols and with implicit references to sexuality, the most apt explanation comes, of course, from the author herself:
“You can read this book as the growth of a woman.”
Tenar’s growth is a genuine process of adolescence — bloody, painful, destructive. As Le Guin herself states, “The themes are birth, rebirth, destruction, and freedom.” At the end of the growing process lies freedom; or rather, to reach freedom, the heroes must complete their journeys, discover themselves, and decide who they are.
Thus begins the return: the hero, now capable of uttering her true name, can renounce her priesthood and choose to live as an ordinary person. To be free is to choose, and to bear responsibility for whatever follows from that choice.
The first book of the Earthsea series, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), tells of Ged — known as Sparrowhawk — and his process of learning wizardry; to learn magic is to learn life, and on that path he comes to know people, life, nature; he faces the truth that nothing is purely good or evil, black or white. The second book, The Tombs of Atuan (1970), which, as noted above, can be read as “the growth of a woman,” tells of Tenar’s adolescence. Considering its date, it can be said to be the first of Le Guin’s novels with a female protagonist. Perhaps that is why it is comparatively striking — and equally moving.
It unfolds in a much darker atmosphere than A Wizard of Earthsea, and when one identifies with Tenar, its narration can even seem terrifying. In fact, it is a text worth discussing in the context of the gothic elements of women’s writing. As Le Guin notes, it is richly symbolic; aside from its fantasy nature, most of its references to gender and/or sexuality are not stated openly but suggested.
When I recently wondered whether this was a kind of self-censorship stemming from the book’s being written for young readers, I was glad to find the answer again in the author’s own voice — in the passages where she explains how she perceives the distinction between writing for young adults, adults, or children:
“I don’t know why what is ‘made’ for children should be any different from what is made for adults; when writing for children, there may be a few things you don’t do — you may not include certain kinds of violence, or pour certain kinds of despair over a child. Perhaps sometimes you pour them over adults, but as someone who has a child, who loves children and remembers what it is like to be a child, I see that there are things I cannot unload upon them. In this sense, when writing for young adults, I am aware of a moral boundary. But truly, I think that’s the only difference.”
I certainly don’t see this as self-censorship. Because yes, Tenar’s abandonment of the life she was forced to live can be read as a passage from despair to hope. Tenar’s process of growing up was so unfinished that years later, in Tehanu, the author returned to her character and told her adult story.
Originally conceived as a trilogy, the series’ third and final volume, The Farthest Shore, was published in 1972 — that is, the Earthsea Trilogy was completed within four years. The following books spanned from 1990 to the 2000s. Le Guin’s own literary journey is fascinating: she later described Tehanu, the fourth volume, as “problematic” and “careless.” Perhaps she truly could not reenter the universe she had created; perhaps she could not make Tenar grow as she wished. Yet the book she called “problematic” won the Nebula Award, one of science fiction’s most prestigious honours.
Though the importance of awards for a writer’s career is debatable, it’s worth noting that Le Guin was never one to depend on prizes; her struggle was with herself — her journey as a writer lasting from childhood to death. And beyond that, her return to the series with Tehanu aligns perfectly with her belief that every journey is a return; as so often, her act of living parallels her literary journey. Le Guin re-embraced her universe and allowed her characters’ journeys to continue from where they had left off.
In her works, nothing ever ends. Death is not an ending but part of life; life is a long journey.
The most striking, sometimes misunderstood, even unread, but respected work of the trilogy—or, in its final form, the quintet—is probably The Farthest Shore, which also won the National Book Award in 1973, a special and significant prize for young adult novels. Le Guin’s own comment on this work about death is equally meaningful and explanatory:
“The Farthest Shore is about death. That is why it is weaker in plot, more inconsistent and incomplete than the others. The first two books were about things I had lived through and survived. What is dealt with in The Farthest Shore is something you cannot live through and survive (…)”
Yet, in a letter she wrote to Ursula after her death, Margaret Atwood said that she had turned to this book to cope with Ursula’s passing. She was right; however, it can also be read as a text that travels between life and death, a method of coping with grief. Initially, Atwood had recommended the book to a friend as a way to deal with grief, and after Ursula’s death, she decided to follow her own advice.
The truly important aspect of The Farthest Shore, however, is again its readership. In an interview, Le Guin noted that children are more willing than adults to talk about death. This is true: although adults may choose not to discuss sexuality or death with children—the most natural, ordinary, and genuine parts of life—or feel the constant need to invoke mechanisms of censorship, children are open and ready to talk about both. Their judgments are not yet hardened. The death of someone is not frightening; it simply is. Therefore, The Farthest Shore is perhaps a text that will find its true meaning when read in childhood.
“(…) This seemed to me a very suitable topic for young readers, because a child not only understands that death exists, but the moment a child realises that death exists, and that they will die, childhood ends and a new life begins. This is growth, but in a broader sense.”
The Earthsea series holds value in various ways: the completeness within the trilogy, the continuation in later books because nothing is ever truly complete, and the return to the universe in Tales from Earthsea with different characters. Since Le Guin stated that she never worked on more than one work at a time, we can, for instance, assume that no Earthsea text was written concurrently with The Left Hand of Darkness. On the other hand, the proximity in dates—fantasy producing precious works by 1968, and science fiction by 1969—is also worth considering in terms of both her productivity and her way of working.
The works written later under the influence of Earthsea are not strictly limited to its books: the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy—Gifts, Voices, and Powers—felt, years later, like reading another Earthsea trilogy to me. Of course, this does not simply mean the author is repeating herself; on the contrary, Le Guin tries to tell stories with similar heroes, focusing on themes she enjoys—gender opposition, disability, slavery, ageing, helplessness—while giving relatively more centrality to geography. In a sense, writing this trilogy seems like a journey into her own authorship and works. She says myth is a source, and fantasy’s sole source is imagination; at some point, the source of Le Guin’s later period becomes her own writings. Fantasy about fantasy, a new path within the path, another detour offering new possibilities for life…
We can read the “path,” a powerful metaphor not just in literature but in life itself, in various ways through Ursula K. Le Guin’s life and the lives she created. Another reason I chose Earthsea is that Ged inspired Harry Potter, for example. But since there are writings that specifically address this, I won’t go into detail. The only thing I can say is that the journey we take with Ursula’s texts, inspiring new paths—and claiming that the existence of a genius like J.K. Rowling owes something to Le Guin—would indeed be audacious. Yet, as Georges Perec said, literature—or any art form—is like a puzzle, overlapping, first by a single author or artist, then growing and expanding over time and geography, accumulating traces of other journeys. Life itself.
This is the first stop in my homage to the author of the paths that make us, at the moment we think we are alone, part of the entire world. Next comes The Dispossessed, appearing somewhere along the Way…