The Wild Girls by Ursula K. Le Guin

the downtime between novels as like waiting patiently at the edge of the woods for a deer to walk by. Are you a bow hunter?
    Of the mind.
    “Travel is bad for fiction but good for poetry.” Huh?
    Just reporting my own experience as a writer.
    I share your modest enthusiasm for Austen’s
Mansfield Park
. I didn’t like the movie, though. Do you like any of the recent Jane movies?
    Oh, as movies, sure. Not as Austen. There is no way I can dislike Alan whatshisname with the voice like a cello.
    What’s your house like? Does your writing room have a view?
    Nice, comfortable.
    My study looks straight out at a volcano which blew off its top two thousand feet thirty years ago. I got to watch.
    Perhaps your most famous and influential novel is
The Left Hand of Darkness
. What’s it about?
    People tell me what my books are about.
    One problem writers have with utopias is that nothing bad can happen. You don’t seem to have this problem. Is this a function of literary technique or philosophy?
    Both. Places where nothing bad happens and nobody behaves badly are improbable, and unpromising for narrative.
    You mentioned as your favorite repeated readings Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, etc. Are there any Americans you go back to? Any SF or fantasy?
    Let me off this question. I read too much.
    What kind of car do you drive? (I ask this of everyone.)
    Ha ha. I don’t.
    Charles is currently driving a Honda CR-V with about 120,000 on it. My favorite car we ever had was a red 1968 VW bus.
    We all know better than to rate our contemporaries. But I would love to know your take on the late Walter M. Miller Jr., since he seemed to share your deep and radically humane conservatism.
    He was a very, very good writer who I feel lucky to have read early on, so I could learn about the scope of SF from him.
    The Ekumen and Earthsea series almost seem like bookends, one SF and one Fantasy. Where would you put
Lavinia
on the shelf between?
    My writing is all over the map; bookends won’t work. Even shelves won’t work.
Lavinia
is what it is.
    Lavinia
shows a great love for Rome, or at least pre-Roman virtues. That seems contrarian for a staunch progressive. Or is it?
    I am not a progressive. I think the idea of progress an invidious and generally harmful mistake. I am interested in change, which is an entirely different matter.
    I like stiff, stuffy, earnest, serious, conscientious, responsible people, like Mr. Darcy and the Romans.
    How’s your Latin?
    Mediocris.
    Dragons are good in Earthsea
.
Or are they?
    No. Nor bad. Other. Wild.
    What have you got against Google?
    Just its mistaken idea that it can ignore copyright and still do no harm.
    In
Always Coming Home
the future looks a lot like the past. What are the Kesh trying to tell us?
    What past does that future look like? I don’t know anybody like the Kesh anywhere anywhen.
    The countryside, of course, is the Napa Valley before (or after) agribusiness ruined it, but gee, we have to take our paradises where we find them.
    The Dispossessed
is about an anarchist utopia, at least in part. So is
Always Coming Home
. Would you describe yourself as an anarchist (politically)?
    Politically, no; I vote, I’m a Democrat. But I find pacificist anarchist thought fascinating, stimulating, endlessly fruitful.
    In your acknowledgements to
Lavinia
, you praise your editor Mike Kandel. Is this the same Kandel who writes hilariously weird SF?
    He has translated Stanislaw Lem and others, marvelously. If he’s written SF himself he’s successfully hidden it from me. I wouldn’t put it past him. Michael? What have I been missing?
    I’m working on the cover copy for this book right now. Is it OK if I call your piece on modesty “the single greatest thing ever written on the subject”?
    I think “the single finest, most perceptive, most gut-wrenchingly incandescent fucking piece of prose ever not written by somebody called Jonathan something” might be more precise.
    Ezra Pound described poetry as “news