Tagged writing

Ursula K. Le Guin

As I’ve written elsewhere, one of the very wisest voices in contemporary literature is Ursula K. Le Guin. Her fiction (and poetry, and essays) have shaped and reshaped my sense of story. She recently read my novel Goblin Secrets, and this is what she had to say about it:

It was hard to stop reading Goblin Secrets, and I didn’t want the book to end! The author’s imagination is both huge and original, taking us to a truly new place, rich with  lively, vivid scenes, fascinating people, and marvelous inventions. He doesn’t explain things, yet everything is clear. And he tells his fast-paced story in language that’s a pleasure in itself — subtle, tricky, funny, beautiful.  More, please, Will Alexander! 

-Ursula K. Le Guin

You know the happy dance that muppets do, with little muppet arms flailing? I’ll be doing that for the next several hours…

***

I don’t yet have a bedtime story memory from Le Guin, but on the topic of early influences she credits Lord Dunsany’s Dreamer’s Tales for showing her the way to her native country. Go find “A Citizen of Mondath” in The Language of the Night if you want to know more–and I know that you do.

 

Words, Webs, and Scott Westerfeld

I met Scott Westerfeld this weekend. A fine fellow. I did, of course, ask him the question that I always ask, the one this blog is based on: What’s the very first bedtime story you can remember?

Scott claimed to have very few childhood memories. He did not reveal where he put them, or what he might have purchased with them. But he did remember Charlotte’s Web. He hasn’t bartered that particular memory away.

Charlotte’s Web–and the words woven into the web–made a significant impression on Scott’s young self. “The right word at the right time can save your life,” he said. “Those words might be ‘some pig,’ or they might be ‘Don’t step on that land mine,’ but they can save your life. Finding the right words is important.”

Hwyl-Dreams of Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones died earlier this year. We never met. But she did write an autobiography—long for an essay, and painfully short for the book it should have been. You can read the whole thing here, and you should. It includes a violent encounter with Beatrix Potter.

This passage is not really about bedtime stories, but it does involve both bedtime and stories:

Then my grandfather went into the pulpit. At home he was majestic enough: preaching. he was like the prophet Isaiah. He spread his arms and language rolled from him, sonorous, magnificent, and rhythmic. I had no idea then that he was a famous preacher, nor that people came from forty miles away to hear him because he had an almost bardic tendency to speak a kind of blank verse – hwyl, it is called, much valued in a preacher – but the splendour and the rigour of it nevertheless went into the core of my being. Though I never understood one word, I grasped the essence of a dour, exacting, and curiously magnificent religion. His voice shot me full of terrors. For years after that, I used to dream regularly that a piece of my bedroom wall slid aside revealing my grandfather declaiming in Welsh, and I knew he was declaiming about my sins. I still sometimes dream in Welsh, without understanding a word. And at the bottom of my mind there is always a flow of spoken language that is not English, rolling in majestic paragraphs and resounding with splendid polysyllables. I listen to it like music when I write.