Street roots., August 01, 2014, Page 4, Image 4

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street roots
Aug. 1, 2014
The otherworldly and utterly Portland
BY SUE ZALOKAR
S T A F F W R IT E R
Ursula K
rsula K. Le Guin started writing
when she was five and has been
publishing her work since the 1960s.
Throughout her career, she has delved into*
some of the most insightful, political,
and it went ori and on. The column, it
ecological and socially important topics of
moved very slowly. You could see it sort of
our time. She has created utopian worlds
swirling and there was lightning in it,
and utopian societies. She boldly challenged
striking all of the time. It was something
gender barriers by simply doing what she
else.
was bom to do: write.
Her first major work of science fiction,
S u e Zalokar: I can only imagine. I don’t
“The Left Hand of Darkness,” is considered
know muck about the history o f the eruption.
epoch-making in the field for its radical
investigation of gender roles and its moral
Did you have much warning?
and literacy complexity. At a time when
U.K.L.: There was lots of warning. The
women were barely represented in the '
mountain had been rumbling and shaking
writing world, specifically in the genre of
and dumping black matter on her snow all
Science Fiction, Le Guin was taking top
spring. lt Was really bad luck. They thought
honors for her novels. Three of Le Guin’s
she’d gone into a sort of a quiet phase and
books have been finalists for the American
so they told people they could go that
Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and
weekend to their cabins, run in and get
among the many honors she has earned,
their belongings out. Well, that was the
her writing has received a National Book
weekend she blew. So that’s why there were
Award, five Hugo Awards and five Nebula
60 to 70 people killed. You can’t predict a
Awards.
Volcano.
In Paris in 1953 she married Charles A.
I got really fascinated with the volcano.
Le Guin, a historian, and since 1958 they
About a year and few months after the
have lived in Portland. They have three
eruption, the whoie mountain was called
children and four grandchildren.
“The Red Zone.” You could go part way up
After some correspondence, Le Guin
and then above that, you had to. have a
invited me to her home to talk. I arrived
permit to go in and the only people that
bearing fresh-picked berries from Sauvie
were going in were loggers dragging dead
Island. She took me into her study and
trees out. The roads, were destroyed, there
showed me the view she had of the éruption
were just logging roads. Me, a photographer
of Mt. S t Helens in 1980.
and an artist, got a permit to go in (to the
Red Zone) as a poet, a photographer and an
Urusula K. Le Guin: It was the biggest
artist
thing I’ve ever seen and I don’t want to see
anything that big again. It was just
S.Z.: Awesome.
inconceivable. It was kind of overcast in the
morning, after the eruption, but (before
U.K.L.: How about that? I hardly ever pull
that) the clouds were burned off and there
strings, but we pulled a few and we got a
was this pillar of - it looked like smoke -
day pass into the Red Zone. We drovè
but it was really mostly dirt being blown
around in this awful, unspeakable landscape
upward by the heat of the eruption. I think
of ash. Nothing but ash and dead trees. And
it was 80,000 feet It was awful and beautiful the trees, just like grey corpses, all pointing
H
Guin
the same direction where the blast of the
eruption blew them down.
Twenty-five years later, a few years ago, I
went back to that same area, which they
thought would take at least 100 years to
come back and regfow. It’s all green. There
are trees coming up and flowers blooming
like mad, birds, deer, elk. That mountain,
she makes herself over and over.. It’s quite a
story.
S.Z.: Was there a specific piece o f writing
that came out of that experience in the Red
Zone?
U.K.L.: Yes. I wrote poems called “In the
Red Zone” and I wrote a piece with the
same title.
S.Z.: What distinguishes experience from
imagination in writing and is one more
essential to the process o f writing than the
other?
U.K.L.: Well, imagination is based on
experience. The way everything m the
world is made out of the elements combined
in endless ways, everything in the mind is
made out of bits of experienced reality
combined in endless ways. So a child’s
imagination deepens with living, with wider
experience of reality. And so does a writer’s.
But the imagination needs training in how
to combine, how to invent, how to
understand, just as much as the thinking
mind does. We get that training mostly by
reading and writing fiction and poetry.
S.Z;: Your father, Alfred L. Kroeber, was an
anthropologist and your mother, Theodora
See LE GUIN, page 5