Writing and Falling in Love - To Honor Ursula K. Le Guin

"I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the 
child . . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane of these faculties is the power of imagination."

 -Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin left this world on January 22 at 88. She lived most of her life in Portland, Oregon, writing speculative fiction and fantasy. She did not want to be pigeonholed as a science fiction writer, preferring novelist and poet as her genres. In her later years she began an online Blog.

Although Le Guin did not wish to write "confessional" pieces, she did believe writing involved falling in love. She felt her work, "contained elements of direct personal experience so it transformed as to be entirely fictional rather than confessional."  

"What it is I suppose is the creative condition as expressed in human emotion and mood. So it comes out curiously the same whether sexual or spiritual or aesthetic or intellectual, " Le Guin believed.

Le Guin explained, “Being in love — falling in love” — now I understand it — now I know what it means — what happens to me when I am writing: I am in love with the work, the subject, the characters, and while it goes on and a while after, the opus itself. I function only by falling in love: with French and France; with the 15th Century, with microbiology, cosmology, sleep search etc. at various times."

Ursula Le Guin has moved on to another dimension. Her writing will continue to amaze readers and reveal the many ways she explored the imagination.  

She will search for more dragons high in the sky.

In Tehanu, the last book of Earthsea, Ged and Tenar stand on a cliff above the sea, their enemies about to push them over the edge, Tenar, mute by a spell, points up at the sky and laughs, "in the fluffs of light, from the doorway of the sky, the dragon flew, fire trailing behind the coiling, mailed body." Tenar spoke then, "Kalessin," she cried and then turned, seizing Ged's arm, pulling him down to the rock, as the roar of fire went over them, the rattle of mail and the hiss of wind in upraised wings, the clash of the talons like scytheblades on the rock."