URSULA K. LE GUIN: I don’t know that I can explain it. This is my fourth or fifth book of nonfiction but, in fact, I don’t think of myself as a nonfiction writer. So I suppose it was a backhanded apology in a way. Here I am doing this again, even though I’m saying, “It’s not my thing, it’s not really my shtick.” But here I am, waving it around.
DN: So, as a reader, what is the nonfiction that you gravitate toward? What in your mind elevates a work of nonfiction to a type of art that is compelling to you?
UKL: It’s what I find I can read. It partly has to do, I think, with old age. I need a narrative, but I’ve always really needed a narrative. I’m just no good at abstract thinking. That means I tend to read biography and autobiography, and sciences such as geology, which tell a story through history, and history itself. And not very much that is abstract or theoretical. I have real trouble with philosophy. I took it as a freshman in college. We all had to. And I liked it but it never would stick. I can’t keep it in my head. It has to be a story. If it is a parable then I remember it.
DN: You said in the foreword to Words Are My Matter something that you alluded to here as well. You said that writing fiction and poetry is natural for you, you desire to do it and are fulfilled by doing it and feel like you can judge its honesty and its quality in a way that you can’t with your nonfiction. That writing nonfiction feels like work, and that, unlike your stories, it will be judged by people who know a lot more than you do about whatever the topic is at hand. Given that unnerving uncertainty how do you ultimately find solid ground and know an essay is finished and stands on sturdy legs?
UKL: Getting started is hard. I throw away endless first pages grinding the gears until I can get the machinery going. As for knowing when it’s done, that’s a real poser sometimes. I wrote a piece for a talk years ago, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” and every time I gave it as a talk the audience would give me so much feedback that I’d have to rewrite the article. Finally I just said, “Enough! I have to stop rewriting it!” and published it as it was. But doing that means you didn’t finish something per se, you just had to stop. And I feel that, for any piece that is a matter of opinion, you really have to try to leave the door open at the end of the piece.
DN: You name one particular essay in the book, entitled “Living in a Work of Art,” as perhaps your favorite piece in the collection. And it is one of the rare pieces that wasn’t commissioned. It was something you wanted to write, on the pure principle of it. You say something very interesting about the process of writing this piece: “When I can use prose as I do in writing stories as a direct means or form of thinking, not as a way of saying something I know or believe, not as a vehicle for a message, but as an exploration, a voyage of discovery resulting in something I didn’t know before I wrote it, then I feel that I am using it properly.” I would love it if you could tell us a little about the process of exploration in putting together “Living in a Work of Art,” because I know, as a reader of it, one of the pleasures was the sense of exploring with you, of discovering things as you were discovering them.
UKL: Probably that piece is as near to autobiography as I’m going to come. It goes back to my childhood, to a house that I left when I was seventeen, though I stayed there as a visitor for many years. So I was thinking back a long way—part of what is going on is an old woman exploring her childhood. What about this place where I lived, which simply was home, the universe for me when I was little? I was trying to explore what it was like, the ramifications and meanings of that, how that house shaped me. And I know it did. And then there was the simple pleasure of writing about this house that I loved so dearly. Being there and thinking about it.
I don’t know what novel our Maybeck house could be compared to, but it would contain darkness and radiant light; its beauty would arise from honest, bold, inventive construction, from geniality and generosity of spirit and mind, and would also have elements of fantasy and strangeness.
Writing this, I wonder if much of my understanding of what a novel ought to be was taught to me, ultimately, by living in that house. If so, perhaps all my life I have been trying to rebuild it around me out of words.
DN: You grew up in a house built by a remarkable architect, Bernard Maybeck. One of the things that struck me in reading this essay about it was how you talked about the house being built in anticipation of its future inhabitants, as if the imagination of the architect is creating a space for people he hasn’t yet met.
UKL: When Maybeck planned a house he was imagining the family that might live in it. He was not designing a “machine for living,” or expressing his ego, as so many architects do and are praised for doing. He was doing anything but, and yet “Maybecks” are instantly recognizable. One thing I didn’t know when I started writing the essay was that Maybeck had expressed himself so clearly about what he saw as his goals as an architect. It was very useful to me, very interesting, and I hadn’t known it. He was a quiet person. The ego was not huge and formidable the way it is with the “star-chitects,” as they call them.
DN: We’ve talked before, when we were talking about fiction and poetry, about the role of the ego, the role of the intellect being secondary, in service of something more mysterious. We talked about the deeper meaning of the words, beyond their definitions, the meaning that comes from the syntax, the music of their arrangement, the “wave in the mind,” as you called it, citing Virginia Woolf. And also the way Taoism and Buddhism, the way wu wei, or not-doing, has informed some of your poetry. Hearing you talk about this architect, and his approach to building your house that is not ego-directed, that perhaps was built with a similar ethos to how your own writing is constructed, I wonder if this is where the split comes for you around nonfiction, that so much of nonfiction is ego-driven, so much of it is about saying what you believe or think.
UKL: Yes, saying what you think explicitly. Not being able to sneak around it and imply it. This tends to lead me toward… sometimes ranting. Being overexplicit and defensive.
DN: Perhaps the most polar opposite essay in the collection from “Living in a Work of Art” is your speech you gave when you received the National Book Foundation medal in 2014. It’s the most polar opposite in the sense that you were asked to deliver a message.
UKL: I think they just asked me to say thank you. [Laughs.] But if you have a message it is a chance. You’ve got six minutes. They can’t stop you!
DN: I read that you spent six months reworking this six-minute speech, and hadn’t felt that nervous delivering a speech since you were in junior high. Tell us a little more about this anxiety and uncertainty that motivated the reworking of this speech prior to delivering it.