“How should we remember Ursula Kroeber Le Guin? Together,” Nisi Shawl writes. Like many others of Ursula’s friends and readers after her death, I wanted to honor her memory. I don’t think I’d ever worked and written as hard as I did that week, but I wanted to do something, and it seemed like the work I had to do. From me and others, I’ve collected a few of the many tributes to her life and art.

I was interviewed for the radio by WYNC’s Brooke Gladstone, who did a beautiful piece on Ursula’s life and on how her work “cuts to the heart of gender, politics, morality, and what it means to live and to die.”

https://www.wnyc.org/story/le-guin-legacy/

On the Library of America website, along with tributes from Zadie Smith, Michael Chabon, Nalo Hopkinson, Elaine Showalter, Gary K. Wolfe, and others, I wrote about my first meeting with Ursula, when I was in college. It’s a pretty typical first-meeting-with-Ursula story: I was young and dumb, and she was kind and offered me a new way of seeing.

https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1375-fellow-writers-remember-ursula-k-le-guin-1929-2018

Ursula’s friend and webmaster, Vonda N. McIntyre, has been collecting tributes on ursulakleguin.com. Here are just a few:

“To enter her books is an extraordinary experience: it is to learn something about yourself that you did not know, it is to feel you are about to discover your place in the world….[In person as well as in her work she was] a union of opposites: tiny and fragile, but with an indomitable personality; humble and generous, but with the pride of one who is aware of her talent; poetic and light as a breath of air, but with a demolishing intellectual capacity. She aspired to serenity and illuminated the shadows with a fine sense of humor. ” —Rosa Montero (in Spanish)
https://elpais.com/cultura/2018/01/24/actualidad/1516816747_713174.html

“The fact that we may have no conscious experience (or knowledge) of something right now does not mean we can never become conscious of it under the right future circumstances….Le Guin was always able to imagine (and evoke) states of mind and soul that were not her own.”
—Carol Cooper
https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/01/30/in-celebration-of-ursula-le-guins-fantastic-legacy/

“[For] nonwhite writers of fantasy, horror and science fiction….she was our best and most powerful ally. She made our presence in her stories a matter of course.” —Nisi Shawl
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/author-nisi-shawl-remembers-a-literary-hero-ursula-k-le-guin/

“I want to see Ursula Le Guin described for future generations, and for ourselves, as a destroyer of common myths, as a fighter against hierarchical horseshit, as a radical, as a maker of worlds…” —Maria Dahvana Headley
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stop-calling-ursula-k-le-guin-a-grand-old-dame

“When i wondered if imagination could be necessary for revolution and transformation, you said yes, you said our dreams and visions matter, they are the way we make oppression temporary.” —Adrienne Maree Brown
http://adriennemareebrown.net/2018/01/24/final-letter-to-ursula-le-guin-sent-the-day-after-your-departure/

“Write what you want to write. Add as many dragons as you like.”  —Karen Joy Fowler
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/25/ten-things-i-learned-from-ursula-k-le-guin/

The latest books in the Library of America’s Ursula K. Le Guin series are out now. “The Hainish Novels & Stories,” vols 1 and 2, collects much of Le Guin’s science fiction, including “The Left Hand of Darkness,” “The Dispossessed,” “The Telling,” and some of her best short stories in one handsome boxed set. The Table of Contents is on the Library of America website, here.

The series editor, Brian Attebery, wrote a lovely brief essay on Le Guin’s work, “Around the Corner from the Revolution,” which is also on the LoA site. Read it here.

Le Guin’s own introduction to vol. 1 is on Tor.com, here.

Amsterdam’s wild-eyed feminist magazine Girls Like Us calls for a future that is “fair, fun, furry, fabulous, fierce, free and not fucked up.” I helped out a little with the editing. Read more

I gave a talk on Doris Lessing’s early life and young motherhood at De Balie on May 29, as part of a special evening on Lessing in the series Grote Denkers. I also discussed Lessing and mothering with journalist and columnist Sarah Sluimer. More info and a video of the evening can be found at DeBalie.nl.

The photo is by the fabulous Manjit Krishna Kaur.

Sam Maggs, author of WONDER WOMEN and THE FANGIRL’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, will talk about women in geek culture, feminism, science, and more at Spui25, Amsterdam, on Monday, March 27. I’ll do the Q & A. You can read more about the event at abc.nl or read more about Sam at SamMaggs.com.

This December 2-3 the University of Oregon will hold a symposium to honor the life and work of Ursula K. Le Guin. Tentative guest speakers are novelist Karen Joy Fowler, comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Professor Brian Attebery, editor of the Library of America’s Le Guin series. I’ll be there to moderate a panel discussion. On Dec 1, Dr. Alexis Lothian will speak on “Queer Longings in Straight Futures: Notes Toward a Prehistory for Lesbian Speculation.” Read more at https://library.uoregon.edu/tiptree-symposium-2016.

Sometime between October 9 and 14, 1797, Coleridge wrote the poem “Kubla Khan” but was interrupted before he finished it by “a person on business from Porlock.” So instead of America’s Columbus Day, the second Monday in October should really be Porlock Day. I propose we spend this day celebrating, not adventure, conquest, and exploitation, but distraction, daydreaming, interruption, and the unfinished work. Let us on this day honor the Person from Porlock, in whose name we procrastinate.

“You’re always using a persona when you’re writing, and there’s a certain amount of distortion for effect, especially with writers, and the story that is told to an audience of one may not be the complete story. But the story I want to tell you here—and it’s an unofficial story, full of outtakes and digressions—is about who your friends can help you to become, when you’re alone and don’t know what to say or which self to be.”

The text of my talk for the Tiptree Symposium, given on December 4, 2015, is out now in the April 2016 issue of the literary science fiction journal The Cascadia Subduction Zone. In ‘“I Begin to Meet You at Last”: On the Tiptree-Russ-Le Guin Correspondence’ I spoke about Alice Sheldon’s exchanges with her two closest pen-friends, and more generally about archives and letters, friendship and the joy of encountering like minds.

If you wait long enough for it to load, you can watch the talk on video at http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/archives/10353.

In part 2 of the symposium video, http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/archives/10366, at about 26:15, you can hear Ursula Le Guin read the magnificent letter she wrote to Alice Sheldon after Alli ‘came out’ to her as Tiptree.

Ursula Le Guin reading, me tearing up. Photo: Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Here’s more info on the Tiptree symposium at the University of Oregon, December 4-5, 2015. It’s going to be a remarkable group of people, including the writers Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, David Gerrold, and Karen Joy Fowler; my editor for the Tiptree book, Gordon Van Gelder; Alice Sheldon’s good friend and the executor of her estate, Jeffrey D. Smith; Jacob Weisman, who publishes Tiptree at Tachyon Publications; members of the Motherboard of the James Tiptree, Jr., Award; and many more. You can find more information at http://library.uoregon.edu/tiptreesymposium. The plan is not to hold an academic conference but to celebrate Alice Sheldon’s life and work. I’m planning to speak about the Tiptree-Russ-Le Guin correspondence, which will give me a chance to read some of my favorite bits. I’m looking forward to it.

A moving letter to Tiptree from Gwyneth Jones: http://strangehorizons.com/2015/20150824/1jones-c.shtml