At the New Yorker, an elegant and comprehensive essay by Julie Phillips from a visit with Ursula Le Guin at her home in Portland, Oregon touches on the importance of place, both geographic and imaginative. Phillips writes, “[Le Guin] has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or “McMagic” but the imagination as a subversive force.” She quotes Le Guin: “Imagination, working at full strength, can shake us out of our fatal, adoring self-absorption and make us look up and see—with terror or with relief—that the world does not in fact belong to us at all.”
