Ursula Le Guin 1929-2018

Ever since I heard the news this morning of Ursula Le Guin's passing on January 22, I've been searching for a book of her essays. Having not yet found it, with the day ticking away, I'll do the best I can without the hard copy.

I came to Le Guin's work not through her science fiction but through her essays. One in particular sticks with me, "The Fisherwoman's Daughter," which is about women writing.

"Where does a woman write? What does she look like writing?" is the question Le Guin poses, after beginning with an image from Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. Strangely enough, it was through a Google Doodle of Virginia Woolf (in honor of her 136th birthday), that I happened upon Le Guin's obituary.

Woolf, of course, famously said that a woman needs a room of her own to be a writer. But Le Guin, a mother of three, writes here of women who produce great works of art without so much as a broom closet to call their own. One of them was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote her husband a letter saying, "If I am to write, I must have a room of my own," but who then went on to write most of Uncle Tom's Cabin from her kitchen table.

There is much more to say here, but I'm sitting at my kitchen table — and, though I no longer have young children clamoring for attention, have a paying job that does just the same.

To be continued ...