Words Are My Matter

Writings on Life and Books

Ursula K. Le Guin

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780358212102
• eBook ISBN: 9780358212119
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

A collection of essays on life and literature, from one of the most iconic authors and astute critics in contemporary letters.

Words Are My Matter is essential reading: a collection of talks, essays, and criticism by Ursula K. Le Guin, a literary legend and unparalleled voice of our social conscience. Here she investigates the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction—and, through the lens of literature, gives us a way of exploring the world around us.

In "Freedom," Le Guin notes: "Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now … to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality."

Le Guin was one of those authors and in Words Are My Matter she gives us just that: a vision of a better reality, fueled by the power and might and hope of language and literature.

The Hope of Rabbits: A Journal of a Writer’s Week

Hedgebrook is a writers’ retreat with a difference: it accepts only women. As Gloria Steinem said of it, it’s not a retreat, it’s an advance.

Gender segregation, like any segregation, is open to question as to its motives. I attended a women’s college that was embedded like a seed pearl in a gigantic male oyster. I taught at Mills and Bennington, and many times at the great writing workshop The Flight of the Mind, and I attended or taught at many mixed-gender schools and workshops. My judgment is based on experience. I hold it self-evident that so long as we live in a man’s world, as we still do, women have a right to create enclaves of learning or work where, instead of obeying or imitating what men do and want, women can shape what they do, how they do it, and why they do it, in their own way and on their own terms. No enclave is the whole reality, no exclusivity is entirely rightful, but when a great injustice prevails, any opportunity of counteracting it, undoing it even temporarily, is justified. Intellect and art have been so wholly owned by men, and that ownership so fiercely maintained, that no woman can assume society will simply grant her a rightful share in them. Many women still find it difficult, even frightening, to name themselves thinkers, makers, to say I am a scholar, a scientist, an artist. A place where such fear has no place, and a period of time given purely to doing one’s own work, is for many men a perfectly reasonable expectation, for many women an astounding, once-in-a-lifetime gift.

The six cottages of Hedgebrook, in a beautiful farm-and-forest on the coast of Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, have offered that gift to many of us. (If you want to know more about it, the website is Hedgebrook.org.) I was kindly invited there over twenty years ago to come for a month. I chose to go only for a week. I had never been at any kind of writer’s colony before, never wanted to—a room of my own in my own house had always seemed quite enough. But I was curious, now, about what this one would be like, and the timing was good. I had been having intimations of a new story that felt as if it might be a long one, a novel or at least a novella. What would it be like to work on it all day every day for a week, without any distractions, without grocery shopping or house cleaning or making dinner—alone for twenty hours a day or more?

What follows is the record I kept of what it was like.

This diary and the novella were written in bound notebooks, possibly the last long pieces of prose I composed entirely by hand. I don’t want to rant about the suppression of teaching cursive writing in American schools, but I’m very glad I was taught it. Remembering writing outdoors at Hedgebrook and elsewhere, I think about the humane pace of longhand, and how one is constantly looking away from the notebook at things around it, near or far, changing position as one sits, doodling in the margin while working out a transition, half-consciously noticing the slant of the sunlight, the advance of shadows, the color of the sky: fully absorbed in the work, and yet open to the surrounding world, as we are not when working at a computer screen. A good pen or pencil and a well-made notebook are a genuine climax technology: simple, sustainable, fixable, lasting, and extraordinarily adaptable. It seems a pity to throw it entirely away by omitting to teach people how to use it, simply because a new, wonderful, and infinitely less sustainable technology has come along. I hate to think of a writerly great-grandchild silenced in the midst of a story by the failure of her power source, dumb as an unplugged machine. Well, she’ll swear, and find a pencil, and start laboriously printing, and presently reinvent cursive. Nothing, not even our incalculable wrongheadedness, can keep human beings from telling stories.

DAY I. 20 April 1994.

12:30 pm.

I am sitting in bright sunlight on the little front porch of Cedar Cottage at Hedgebrook. Linda picked me up at the Alexis in Seattle and drove me here, crossing on the Mukilteo ferry—silky water; a sea lion catching a fish and then playing about; fog low on the mainland, hiding the Cascades behind us; but as we approached Whidbey Island the snowy Olympics stood above the clouds, and there is no fog here on the island. The sun’s hot, brilliant on the grass, making the shadows of the trees all round very dark. A tiny, dusty lizard under the porch wants to come out into the sunlight, but is scared of me.

I am apprehensive, feeling strange to the place, despite a kind welcome. The usual nervousness about being among people I don’t know, forgetting names, being awkward. Plus an unusual apprehension: Seven days with no obligations, no routine, no society except at dinner time—but not exactly vacation days, not holiday: workdays for the real work, without any distractions except those I invent. This is austere, this prospect. A Shaker week, silent, celibate. A week of listening where there are no sounds (but the birds and the wind). A test? Will I pass it? Will I be able to keep the woodfire going to keep my Cedar Cabin warm, when the clouds and rain return? Will I be able to keep my own fire going?

Not wanting to use this week for “trivial pursuits,” I did not bring the material for an essay I must write about Cordwainer Smith—not a trivial writer, but it didn’t seem appropriate work for this week. I decided that I should hope to be blessed by a story, and should hold the days free for that. And if I am not blessed, I have several heavy books to read. I will read seriously, I said, not skim and gobble, for once. So I have Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz, Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca and Bernardo Diaz, and Sanday on Gender, and Leanne Hinton on Californian Languages: surely enough! For novels I have only Angélica Gorodischer’s, in Spanish, and my Spanish dictionary; and Joaquin Miller’s Life Amongst the Modocs, which Dan Crommie lent me. I didn’t bring anything easy. My choices were stern, austere. Will I be sorry?

I brought a tiny sketch book and colored pencils, but no camera. Nothing easy.

Lunch came in a pretty basket: two kinds of pasta salad. Greens would have been nice and something in the way of juice, but I guess one gets one’s own juice and stuff in foraging for breakfast after dinner. Water seemed fittingly austere.

But how perfectly beautiful it is, this little clearing of mown green grass ringed in by dark firs and bright, new-leaved, April-blossoming shrubs and trees! What utter luxury, to sit here like a lizard in the sun!

5:10 pm.

A little rabbit: the longest I’ve ever watched a wild rabbit (I was indoors in the windowseat). Brindle brown-grey, with flour-dust along the flanks, and the white scut elevated now and then. A healthy young rabbit, glossy fur. The great, black eyes, light-circled, are still visible from three-quarterback view, so that Her Elegance can see what’s behind her as she grazes in the grass like a nervous little cow. Slender, reddish hind legs. She stands, the nose twitching and wiggling, one front paw dangling; she hops on; tucks her hindquarters under like a cat (like my cat, whom I miss).

Denise showed me about after lunch—the farm, the paths and pools. We heard the he-goat scream. Recently he had to have his penis cut off because of bladder stones, and now pees forcefully backwards through a tube; and the vet had to clear the tube, which evidently hurt. Beautiful herb and vegetable gardens, an orchardlet, berry bushes, root cellar, greenhouse—the dream farm. Oh money what wonders you perform (and how rarely are you so well spent). Beyond the farmhouse lie the wetlands and Useless Bay, a most endearing name, and blue land over the water—part of this or another island or the mainland, I don’t know.

I drew and colored a picture of Cedar Cottage as the ring-encircled sun faded into white sky and the temperature dropped; now, as the sun crosses my windows to the right behind the trees, it has cleared up again a good deal; but I don’t trust it to be fair. Now westering sunlight shines through the small young pale-apricot-color leaves of a sapling maple, and dapples the grass again. I am in my windowseat with a shot of whiskey; must leave for dinner in a short while. I have read the kind effusions of women who have stayed in this cottage in the record-books kept here. I felt somewhat unworthy; cynical; bad. We women do work so hard at keep the weaving from unravelling!

A rabbit just traversed the grass in a charming loping hurry—same one? Only rabbits know.

8:20 pm.

Dinner at the farmhouse table—rice and beans, cottage cheese and fruit, a lovely mushroom filo triangle, and green salad; wine and coffee—With the other residents—one young and black from Brooklyn, one from Calcutta, one Native Hawaiian; one young and Asian-American—and Linda, the manager, and Nancy Nordhoff, the founder. Laura cooks, eats, serves, clears. One resident is away.

I walked the paths after a tiny spatter of rain—first north to a lovely black pool, and along the east perimeter; to the supply house, where I called Charles at home; then on round the northwest perimeter, back to the black pool, and home. It is strange, there are so many paths, and between them the forest is so thick, evergreens and currant and salmonberry and a laurelly tall shrub with white panicles—elder, that’s what it is—I thought at one moment of the Sleeping Beauty’s hedge—the red salmonberry flowers nodding down from high above me on their thorn-furred stems. Yet it is all within a fence, and all only 33 acres. You can get lost and never be lost. It is dreamlike. The little cottontails are everywhere, quite fearless. A great contestation of crows above my roof broke up at my approach, swooping off blackly.

Twilight now, and nearly clear. Very still. Evening bird remarks. The white, sweet-clove-scented, ball-shaped flower clusters of the shrub just facing the windowseat windows grow whiter as the light fades.

DAY 2. 21 April.

11.45 am.

I hoped to rise at dawn, but lay instead till 7:30 in the broad loft-bed as the day brightened in the beautiful arched window with its tulips of colored glass. I sought my story. I did tai chi. I made my breakfast of granola, banana and orange juice, and tea, and ate it in the windowseat, which is where I think I will spend the week.

I didn’t bring the laptop, because Charles wanted it for the coast and because I decided I didn’t want the baggage of it, either physical or psychic; I brought three notebooks, this being one of them. I’m glad I did, so that I can write in the windowseat with the triple window all along beside me to the right and another narrow light at my feet, so I have the sky and trees, the white-flowered shrub, a fine romantic stump sheltering a rhododendron, and always the hope of rabbits.

After story-planning, I leapt up to walk before the rain—it threatens, though blue patches still show; the wind is strong in gusts from the south, not cold; I haven’t yet lighted the woodstove. I went down past the waterfall pond and round by the goats, whom I gave a twig apiece of elder, which they stood up politely for, gazing from their goat eyes; walked west along the Millman Road to where it rises to Double Bluff Road, the only route down to the beach—a goodish walk it must be. I hope it doesn’t rain so I can’t walk, as I love that alternation of writing and walking. I found two fine stones on the roadside among many pretty granites and interesting composites and generally good pebbles. And a tuft of rabbit fur by the farm driveway; a hawk at dawn? Came home by the pond with its lovely bronze statue of two otters under a great dark cedar. Two white seashells in the leafmould—an offering, surely.

5:30 pm.

Scribbled story, sun came out, I took off sweater, moved out onto porch; mowers mowed lanes of grass down vistas of forest; I drew the Blasted Stump that leans so picturesquely in the SE of my windowseat view (I drew it sitting on the same hummock, or Tussock, that I drew the house from); I scribbled more; the sun went in, and so did I.

Now have read some more Lévi-Strauss and sewed a little on my difficult Mimbres birds and geometries, having some whiskey. I wait for rabbits. Only flies come. But a fine, young, coppery-colored lizard came out from under the porch and glared balefully, fearlessly at me, just as I went in. This must be the lizard Denise inquired after. It has a fine new tail. The one I saw yesterday was dusty and a bit scrubby looking; it had lost its tail, and was very small. This one was maybe four inches long. Well, maybe three.

DAY 3. 22 April.

7 am.

By going to bed at 9:30 I woke up at 5:30, and listened to the birds’ dawn chorus (not numerous, but sweet) and saw the treetops in the charm’d magic casement. So I was up before six and finding it clear, the brightness showing through the trees behind the house, went out with my boots on (it rained a little in the night and the dew is very heavy) and did tai chi exercises on the only flat bit of Cedar House’s clearing, and then went walking, thinking it would be fine to see the Black Pond at the break of day. I wandered a while before I found it. What it is, east and north of the house, is a Labyrinth—a true, random one, where all the paths lead into other paths and branch away from them and reconnect. A rabbit started me on my wanderings, a fierce brave rabbit as in Beatrix Potter; it really didn’t want to run away, moving in short, grudging little runs, and then I’d catch up to it again, till finally it left the path in one disdainful lollop over a bush into the darkness of the undergrowth, gone. I finally found the Black Pond again. I saw my reflection in it, edging cautiously onto moss on the spongy rim, leaning over. Trees and sky reflect perfectly in it, the black water making a mirror. My head was a black, uneven round, featureless. It is an uncanny little pool. I guess it feeds all the other, lower, livelier pools, with their waterfalls and duckweed.

At dinner last night A. joined us; she had been in town for sonograms of the baby she is carrying. She and B. are both black, beautiful, and pretty young. I am by far the oldest. L., who has four children in Hawaii, leaves today. As we walked back from dinner and stood at the parting of the paths under the trees, she told me her children’s names and what they mean and how they imply the child’s destiny, what that child must do in life.

It is utterly silent now. This will be a silent day; we don’t meet for dinner, but will have it brought with lunch, as Laura has to drive two residents into town. I will cultivate silence. Maybe I will not cultivate it but leave it fallow.

I’m curious to have a weather forecast, but hate the idea of turning on the radio, spoiling, polluting the pure silence. I only did so once, for less than a minute.

9 am.

The rabbits use the paths.

Should wild things use paths? But after all they make their own, why not use ours. 9:30 am.

A large, dark rabbit has made himself Guardian of the path to the woodhouse. He sits, erect or in classic bunny pose, ears erect, motionless, in the middle of the path. Occasionally he patrols it for a few feet. Then he returns to his post.

From the rear they are like little short-legged deer. The behavior is very like deer: the grazing, the motionless alertness, surveillance. I live with a small predator, at home. It is interesting to watch small prey.

He’s off guard now, grazing just out of the sun near the Blasted Stump. He doesn’t “nibble,” he grazes. Big leaves of grass go in very quickly, twitching up and down as he chews, like spaghetti.

The light ring around the great, dark eye is also deerlike, and the leaf ears.

5 pm.

Unease of the gut and a bad taste in the mouth grew in me today and have kept me close to the cottage and perhaps depressed my mind. I wandered about in mid-afternoon and drew the view south from the largest, lowest pond, over the cattails, to Deer Lagoon and blue Useless Bay; then came home and sat out, finishing Lévi-Strauss, reading a good bit of Geertz, and a little Gorodischer, and wrote more, on and off, at my story; very ‘productive’ and industrious, but lacking vitality and spark. “I work as a cow grazes,” Käthe Kollwitz said of herself when her children were grown. I feel a bit like that, with nothing in my present life but the work; I would (I think) really prefer some regular variety, not necessarily company, at least not of strangers, but of other work—physical work—to cook, or clean, or garden, or something, at a regular time, or for a regular length of time, daily. As it is, I walk; but today didn’t feel fit to walk far, and so am a bit stale. Being outside ever since eleven in the variable sunny, hazy, breezy, mild day has been very good, though my tail is tired from sitting on the

hard porch. Both lizards visited. Dinner will be alone, here, tonight; I’ll try to call Charles, who was out last night. The story alas is very slow and circumstantial—probably overly so—I thought it would be nice to write short things, tiny stories, here; but what I have hold of is the tail of a very lar...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Foreword
• Talks, Essays, and Occasional Pieces
• The Operating Instructions
• What It Was Like
• Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love
• “Things Not Actually Present”: On Fantasy, with a Tribute to Jorge Luis Borges
• A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti
• The Beast in the Book
• Inventing Languages
• How to Read a Poem: “Gray Goose and Gander”
• On David Hensel’s Submission to the Royal Academy of Art
• On Serious Literature
• Teasing Myself Out of Thought
• Living in a Work of Art
• Staying Awake
• Great Nature’s Second Course
• What Women Know
• Disappearing Grandmothers
• Learning to Write Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf
• The Death of the Book
• Le Guin’s Hypothesis
• Making Up Stories
• Freedom
• Book Introductions and Notes on Writers
• A Very Good American Novel: H. L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn
• Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle
• Huxley’s Bad Trip
• Stanislaw Lem: Solaris
• George MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin
• The Wild Winds of Possibility: Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake
• Getting It Right: Charles L. McNichols’s Crazy Weather
• On Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago
• Examples of Dignity: Thoughts on the Work of José Saramago
• Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic
• Jack Vance: The Languages of Pao
• H. G. Wells: The First Men in the Moon
• H. G. Wells: The Time Machine
• Wells’s Worlds
• Book Reviews
• Margaret Atwood: Moral Disorder
• Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood
• Margaret Atwood: Stone Mattress
• J. G. Ballard: Kingdom Come
• Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain
• T. C. Boyle: When the Killing’s Done
• Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book
• Italo Calvino:
• Margaret Drabble: The Sea Lady
• Carol Emshwiller: Ledoyt
• Alan Garner: Boneland
• Kent Haruf: Benediction
• Kent Haruf: Our Souls at Night
• Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver
• Barbara Kingsolver: Flight Behavior
• Chang-Rae Lee: On Such a Full Sea
• Doris Lessing: The Cleft
• Donna Leon: Suffer the Little Children
• Yann Martel: The High Mountains of Portugal
• China Miéville: Embassytown
• China Miéville: Three Moments of an Explosion
• David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks
• Jan Morris: Hav
• Julie Otsuka: The Buddha in the Attic
• Salman Rushdie: The Enchantress of Florence
• Salman Rushdie: Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights
• José Saramago: Raised from the Ground
• José Saramago: Skylight
• Sylvia Townsend Warner: Dorset Stories
• Jo Walton: Among Others
• Jeanette Winterson: The Stone Gods
• Stefan Zweig: The Post Office Girl
• The Hope of Rabbits: A Journal of a Writer’s Week
• Sources
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH