by Jessica Del Curto
and Kathryn Knapp
Daily Lobo
Ursula Le Guin has traveled through many worlds, but she made a stop in Albuquerque on Tuesday.
The Voices of the Southwest lecture series concluded this week with an appearance by Le Guin, the only female author invited to speak this year. She generated more inquiries and phone calls than any other author in the series.
Le Guin is most famous for the popular Earthsea fantasy trilogy. She has published 20 novels, many short stories and six volumes of poetry. She has written over a dozen children's books, along with screenplays and translations.
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Her most recent work, Changing Planes, was inspired by her frustration with airports and airplanes.
"It's about being trapped in an airport," she said. "You have to change planes and wait, and you're stuck. I pretended somebody invented a way of really changing planes; that is to say, go to another universe while you're at the airport. You have adventures there and than you come back and get on your plane."
Le Guin used this idea as a backdrop for what she really wanted to write about.
"This was a gimmick so that I could write short stories about these other places."
Le Guin is considered a science-fiction writer, but says her work shouldn't be confused with "Star Wars."
"It's imaginative fiction," she said. "It's making stuff up. But it's really about us."
Le Guin said she has a reason to write fiction and fantasy.
"Why does anybody tell stories when you could just tell the truth?" she said. "Because it seems like you can tell things better sometimes by making up stories."
Le Guin considers herself a feminist writer, and said this strongly influenced her writing during the late '70s and '80s, when feminism was on an upswing.
"There were a lot of feminists thinking about 'how do you write as a woman?'" she said. "And I hadn't really tried that before. I'd kind of been an honorary man."
She said she had to learn to write during this time as who she really was, and it wasn't easy.
"First you learn to write through your own body, not through a pretend male body," she said. "What if the hero was a woman? What would she do?"
During the lecture, Le Guin talked about her translation of Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral's work. After being sent a book of Mistral's poetry by a friend, Le Guin dedicated numerous years to translating the Spanish poetry into English.
Le Guin said she felt tremendous responsibility when translating Mistral's work.
"She gives me all this beautiful poetry, I'm trying to pass it on, so my responsibility is potent."
She said she wasn't sure what drew her to translate Mistral's poems.
"She is very much darker and in my experience, so different," Le Guin said. "She is passionately Catholic, I am passionately unreligious. But there was just something like, I've got to get closer to this poet."
Le Guin said fan mail reminds her of her influence.
"Sometimes teenagers write me and tell me that one of my books got them through a really bad year," she said. "And I think that is so cool."
Who: Ursula Le Guin
What: book signing
Where: Bookworks 4022 Rio Grande
when: Tonight, 7 p.m.
