In January 2018, just a few weeks before Ursula K. Le Guin passed, David Naimon had received her final copyedits and notes in pencil for their upcoming book, Ursula K. Le. Guin: Conversations on Writing. Naimon, writer and host of the “Between the Covers” podcast in Portland, Oregon, and Le Guin had sat down for three conversations on fiction, poetry, and non-fiction over the previous years. The book, published by Tin House in early April 2018 with an In Memoriam by Naimon, was an edited written version of those chats about craft, imagination, the “wave in the mind,” the sounds and rhythms of writing, story, ego, the future of the world, the fantastic, writing as exploration, and so much more.
A new edition of Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing (Tin House, 2026) has just been released. Who else but one of the wisest and greatest to have done it to guide us not just in our personal writing journeys, but also in the journey we must all undertake, as global and local communities, to create better, more sustainable, and equitable futures, even as we resist all the forces that want to destroy it?
David Naimon and I corresponded via a shared Google document, but instead of all my questions being present in there from the start, I was thrilled when he suggested a more dynamic and organic flow, which is so rarely possible given hectic schedules and deadlines, not to mention time difference. I would add a question which he’d answer, with my following question then having the opportunity to be informed by the same, and so on. We chatted about his relationship with Ursula, how their original conversations came about, the ways in which they changed him and his life in unexpected ways, what makes a good interview, Ursula’s wisdom for our current times and lives, making art, the power of imagination, and the importance of small choices.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Rumpus: This is probably the most-asked question when it comes to the book, but how did the original interviews come about? Were they intended to be both an introduction to and an overview of all of her writing?
David Naimon: Our entire relationship, Ursula and mine, grew from a lucky guess on my part. I was volunteering at a community radio station in Portland, hosting a book show, when an expanded and revised edition of Steering the Craft (Harper Perennial, 2015), her book about writing, was published. I thought to myself, “I wonder if this legendary writer of science fiction and fantasy novels ever gets asked about her work outside these books?” I imagined not only that she didn’t, but also the possibility that it would be very welcome. Little did I know how true my intuition would turn out to be.
Buoyed by the success of our first deep dive into writing craft, I asked her to return again to discuss a newly arrived collection of her poetry [Late in the Day]. And it quickly became clear that not only did she welcome these discussions about this work at the margins of her public reputation, but that these writings of hers were central to her writing practice and to her sense of herself as a writer. Having had two conversations now, one about the craft of writing stories, and another about the very different practice of writing poems, the third conversation suggested itself. When her next book of nonfiction [Words are My Matter] appeared, an essay collection, we completed this journey through the genres and I said to her—in the upstairs reading room of her home, where we recorded this last conversation—something like: “I can’t imagine who else I could’ve done this with, not only looking back across a half century of one’s writing life in one genre, but in all three.” It was then she suggested we make it into a book.
So the book itself begins from these three conversations, which we polished together into a conversationally written form. But also where we interweave examples referenced in our conversations, whether passages by Woolf or Tolkien when discussing syntax, or translations of hers of the Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, and of course excerpts of various essays and speeches she gave too. Lastly, we both wrote material specifically for the book, most notably her introduction, with the amazing title “Fear and Loathing in the Interview.”
Rumpus: It’s such a great introduction too! I loved how straight to the point she got in terms of her experiences with interviews and what makes a good one: “It’s the one you wish could go on. It’s a conversation between people who have thought about what they’re talking about, and are thinking about it now in the light of what the other person is saying. This leads each of them to say things that they may be just discovering.”
In the introduction, she also mentions that you both love talking shop. Going back to the original interviews, how did you prepare? You were already someone used to interviewing big names when you recorded the interviews with her, so I’m assuming you had a sort of routine or process by then. Did you need to change any of it?
Naimon: This is yet another lucky happenstance of our encounters with each other, or put another way, another example of how our interviews felt charmed in a certain way. I didn’t come to these conversations knowing in advance that Ursula loved to talk shop, nor that we would find pleasure together in doing so. But I did have a sense that these conversations shouldn’t be from a bird’s-eye view, about her importance to the history of science fiction and fantasy. Instead I allowed the book we were discussing each time to both set the terms of our conversation and serve as a useful constraint for it, one that preferenced depth over breadth. In other words our conversations weren’t retrospectives, but in-the-moment engagements with the questions that animated the book that we gathered to discuss.
Rumpus: Did these conversations change you as a writer, an interviewer, as a person? What did you take away with you that you carry still?
Naimon: It would not be an exaggeration to say that these three conversations with Ursula, our making of them into a book, and its arrival into the world, changed the trajectory of my life. We were in the final copyedits of the book when Ursula died. There happened to be one spare page at the beginning of the book where I could speak to this sudden and unexpected loss as the book went to press. I had always imagined we might’ve had an event together at the flagship Powell’s in downtown Portland to celebrate the book’s arrival with our shared community. To have a public conversation about our conversations. But it wasn’t to be.
Instead, because this was one of the first books by her to arrive in a world without her, and one of the last books she worked on in the final months of her life, I was approached frequently to write about her. I suspect this happened based on the presumption that I was either an expert on her or a close friend, neither of which were true. But for the next year and a half my writing life became Ursula-centric.
A rabbi I studied under once said to me that grief is the highest form of praise. And in a way, I felt like the praise I was practicing during that time was also a form of mourning for me. As I stepped up to these solicitations of my thoughts, I discovered that the more I learned about her the more I wanted to learn. A good example of this was when the Poetry Foundation commissioned me to write an essay (ultimately called “Always Beginning”) that explored what Ursula’s lifelong poetry writing practice told us about her more known and celebrated works in science fiction and fantasy. I quickly learned that there was little to no scholarship on this aspect of her life and went to Port Townsend to interview the editor of her final work of poetry, published by Copper Canyon Press. Coming up with a thesis about how her poetry practice differed fundamentally from her storytelling, and also the ways they interrelated and cross-fertilized her writing life, did shed new light on her works of prose. As well as, I hope, provide a first attempt of many future ones to take this aspect of her writing life with the seriousness it deserves.
This all led to the development of the 2022 limited series on my podcast, done in collaboration with the Le Guin estate, called “Crafting with Ursula” where I invited twelve writers to discuss their own work in relation to one aspect of Ursula’s—whether Maria Dahvana Headley talking about feminist translation and classical retellings, Isaac Yuen about nature writing, or adrienne maree brown about science fiction and social justice.
The more I learned, the more there seemed to be to discover, not less. This wasn’t self-evident at the outset, that her concerns—feminism, ecology, anti-capitalism, anarchism, Taoism, to name a few—would be not only so far reaching but also evolving over time within her own life. And while my own writing life is not so intensively orbiting her world as it was for many years before, even last year I was asked to write for an anthology on Ursula’s relationship to maps—something I knew little about at the onset, and now can’t stop thinking about!
Rumpus: I’ve just made a note to look up the maps anthology because that sounds fascinating! It seems like your relationship with Ursula’s work as a whole has been and perhaps will continue to be—given the context surrounding the publication of your conversations with her and the breadth and depth of her interests making it so there are many underexplored areas for you and likely for others—a journey of discovery even though she is no longer with us. What questions do you wish you could ask her today?
Naimon: One of the things that has particularly kept my interest over the years is Ursula’s own relationship to her past self, to her limitations and imperfections, to being wrong. She was changing and growing across her writing career, and she chose to reevaluate and revise herself in a really unique way. Namely, she did so publicly and without disowning her previous work. For instance, when she revised her essay “Is Gender Necessary?” she annotated the original, so one can see the journey she took. When she re-entered the world of Earthsea—for books four, five, and six—she retroactively changed the rules of the world from the first trilogy, without stepping away from it. This feels like a really generous thing to do, to reevaluate and change in this public way, within one’s own writing, facing the world. And I wonder if this was a difficult thing, if it required courage, if she debated not doing so in this way. I would ask her how she came to this relationship with herself and her readers.
Rumpus: This is such a great point. My next question is in two parts. There are so many areas and issues today where I feel like we could really use her wisdom, whether in publishing, politics, culture, technology, and more. What lessons from your conversations do you find helpful today, and feel would similarly help others? Looking back on your conversations with this reissue, are there any new insights from your current vantage point, so to speak?
Naimon: Perhaps one of the greatest things I appreciate about Ursula’s exploration of writing craft is itself two-fold. For one, she teases apart the elements of writing advice which are genuinely helpful to learn, from other aspects of “proper” writing which are really veiled ways to defend and uphold a status quo, whether around gender or class or otherwise. And secondly, because she was writing over such a long span of time, she saw many writing trends come and go. Taking a longer view she suggests you resist the pressure of whatever is most en vogue (e.g. the upswell of writing in present tense) and truly consider a wider array of options, including ones that are, in the moment, less popular, but that might be the better tool for your particular story.
As far as thinking about those conversations from my current vantage point, I think about how she was well aware of how the pressures of capitalism—of thinking of your book as a commodity before you think of it as a work of art, of what length the book should be to best find a market for instance—was the great enemy of the writer. She spoke of this in her 2014 National Book Foundation speech. An event sponsored by Amazon with Amazon execs sitting at a table just below her podium, and her repeatedly calling out their influence, and lamenting writers who let “commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant.” Likewise, she resigned from the Author’s Guild after forty years of membership, protesting their support of the Google Book Search Settlement which she called a “deal with the devil” due to its widespread digitization of books without regard to copyright. Ursula is not around for all that is happening with AI since then. But it feels like it is all of a piece with what she did protest. That we can learn from her around this, and speak out rather than capitulate to the large-scale theft of artists’ work and vision. What could be more dystopic than AI companies (including Amazon) being accused of buying up large quantities of rare books to train their AI models on, and then destroying the books?
Rumpus: I’ve been wondering what Ursula would have made of generative AI (I can take a guess based on what we know about her views and what she stood for!) and the advice she would have given us to navigate it, and everything that comes with it. In your memoriam thoughts, you note that one of the things that made Ursula stand out as a writer was how she imagined we could live a better future. You say, poignantly, that it’s now up to us to imagine the world we want, “to create the language that reflects it, to honour Ursula by honouring the Earth she has attended to so well.” How can we begin to harness imagination, which was vital to her, to help us achieve a better world?
Naimon: I’m going to sidestep this question as I wouldn’t want to try to paraphrase what the book itself is, in part, about. That said, Conversations on Writing does touch on how these big impossible questions can be found within the smallest choices we make as writers, within syntax, voice, point of view, and narrative. And the gestures toward a different world can begin with what seem like small choices there, on the page. I’ll quote Ursula herself rather than try to answer this myself: “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.” And: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
Rumpus: I should have clarified that I was also wondering how you, if you had done, were imagining a different world, a better world, using Ursula’s words and practices as inspiration. You referring to the small choices and gestures offers me the perfect segue into the next question. In your In Memoriam, I found it moving and inspiring to read about how Ursula put “nothing being too small to contain the world” into practice in her own life and work. Could you elaborate on some of the ways in which her legacy lives on, and how we, readers, writers, creatives of all stripes, can continue to honour the same?
Naimon: Thank you for clarifying, Anushree. Let me try to answer the last question, as you hoped I would answer it, alongside this new one. Shortly after Ursula died I wrote a piece for Lit Hub that they titled “Editing to the End” but whose original title, my title, was “The Holographic Universe of Ursula K. Le Guin.” I used the framing of holographic film as a way to capture this notion that you mention of nothing being too small to contain the world. Because if you take a holographic film of some image, let’s say a chess board, and you cut that film into tiny pieces, you can choose any of those pieces, shine a laser through it, and it reproduces the entire image. I think Ursula viewed herself within an ecosystem, a literary one and a literal one, both. And that she was constantly doing small things outside the spotlight to nurture, sustain, and recreate the whole she was a part of.
For one, we would’ve never talked in the first place if she didn’t have an affinity for the small radical community radio station I did my show at. The station didn’t have a large listenership; it wasn’t the local NPR affiliate. No one would’ve slighted her if she had wanted to maximize her impact by picking opportunities with the greatest reach. But she gave countless interviews for community radio, published with feminist sci-fi micropresses and small anarchist presses, showed up at the public library, taught classes at Malheur Wildlife Refuge field station, was dedicated to her writing groups with peers, corresponded with and encouraged women writers in the field early in their careers, and more.
In a way I feel like, if there is a lesson to be learned about imagining a different world, it is by living it now, in our everyday choices. Of course you need to imagine the world you want to be able to make these choices, but it is still ultimately about the way we move through the world and across the page right now, today. I think of the quote from The Dispossessed: “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
I hope this might answer the second question—that you could look to her works or to her life lived, look to her relationship to community with her readers or her writing peers; her relationship to herself and her own evolving and self-reevaluating imagination, or to the worlds she conjured, whether of gender-fluidity or Indigenous sovereignty, of animal and plant intelligence or human collective justice, of the power of language and names, or the power of women, and the promise within of a different potential relationship to everything from how we organize society to how we relate to the land to how we explore what we don’t know to how we resist forces destroying what we love. There is so much there, being thought through, all of it in the process of being thought and re-thought. And because it is a process, not a manifesto, we are all invited to take part.
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