Ursula Le Guin passed away a few days ago.
As I writer, I know the kinds of emotions that her passing should evoke in me. I should be writing a fitting tribute, carefully crafted, that incorporates the kind of profound insights into human nature that Le Guin was so capable of making.
Instead I must confess the truth.
On the surface, I don’t feel the literary loss or the collegial grief. And while the words in the Tweets of authors such as Neil Gaiman and Stephen King resonate somewhere deep within me, I am gripped with guilt that I have another, stronger memory that is rising.
Quite simply, I feel like I am seventeen again, sitting in a relocatable classroom, listening to my senior English teacher. Her lipstick is pink and her beaded earrings sway and pull her ear lobes down longer than I am comfortable with having to observe. As she paces across the front of the room, her dress billows behind her and her hand gestures in a manner that will be expertly mimicked at our Valedictory concert at the end of the year.
She reads from her well-loved copy of The Left Hand Of Darkness. I pass a note to my best friend.
‘Does this author only ever think about sex?’
We hold our teacher and everything she represents in contempt. We are adolescents, shaped by the creation of the life-stage that didn’t exist a hundred years earlier, formed by the expectations that we must bite our thumbs at the education system and rebel against authority.
We cannot love school, English class, Text Response Common Assessment Tasks or being forced to read The Left Hand Of Darkness.
If only we knew how much Ursula understood us in that moment.
In her interview with Patt Morrison in 2016, Le Guin said: ‘I think a lot of adolescents, the world comes after them and says, this is the way I am and you can’t change anything, and you can’t do anything about it. Which is not entirely true…through imaginative fiction, they can live in alternative worlds and find out that they are possible.’
Today, almost twenty-seven years later, I sent my best friend from that time a text.
‘Did you hear that Ursula Le Guin died two days ago?’
She responds: ‘No I hadn’t. Looks like writing those kinds of stories did wonders for her heath considering she lived to be 88.’
It looks like writing those kinds of stories has done wonders for our capacity to think beyond what we have come to believe is possible.
Rest in pease, Ursula.
Your ability to feel like you are seventeen again will be one of your most potent assets, as a writer.
Whether it be Ursula or the lobe-stretched teacher that has helped you to find, and command your words – find them you have. Your capacity to “think beyond” should make for some interesting, and entertaining reading.
Thankyou for your affirming words, Neil. Finding my child voice was something I explored as I completed my Masters thesis, and then again more recently in a writing workshop I attended. You are absolutely correct – it is a potent asset.