"Do dragons die?" asked Onyx, musing. "Not as we do, I think." "They don't live as we do. They move between the worlds. So says Orm Irian. From the world's wind to the other wind."
I could only take a few books with me on the drive down to the farm because obviously space was at a premium in my car. One of them was Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin.
Of course, I have already read it. But I needed it down here for reasons that border on the talismanic -which you will understand if you too have read it. It helps that it has 'home' in the title, for one thing. But it is also -for my money- the best animist novel by a non-indigenous person ever written.
She was in almost every measure a better writer than Tolkien. I keep them co-equal in my heart on a technicality by calling her the twentieth century's Tolkien. (J.R.R. being born in the nineteenth century. So obviously he could be the nineteenth century's Le Guin if you wanted to work backwards.)
Many of her works have woven into my life over the years. I was reading Tales from Earthsea in my first couple of weeks in London -having bought it under a bridge over the Thames at the Southbank Book Market. We had completely run out of money so a £1 secondhand book and a single beer nursed all afternoon in a pub before a supper of Sainsbury's brand toasted cheese and a breadstick were all we could do. It was so essential for me to be in another world for those hard days, and it was so helpful to get some perspectives on being lost and experiencing hardship from within the stories themselves.
We went to the Isles of Scilly as one of our first ever domestic holidays because Le Guin said that's what Earthsea looked like in her mind while she was writing it. If you are a fan I would recommend doing the same. If you can get a quiet spot on the ferries between the islands and just smell the cold air while watching these tiny islands float by it is wondrous.
She was not only good at writing, she was good at writing (and talking) about writing. Steering the Craft is my second-favourite book on writing after Stephen King's On Writing. And you will find her speeches and interviews on the limitations on genre, on what even am 'fantasy', anyway, and women in the publishing business and just so much wisdom all over the internet.
In my mind she has in some sense been conflated with my grandmother. She was probably the archetypally perfect grandmother for people like us, anyway. But also, in an effort to feel involved in the funeral planning for my own grandmother when she died while I was in London and I couldn't make it back to Australia, I used some of Le Guin's lines in the funeral order of ceremony handout. They were about dragons (which in fairness could some days describe my grandmother) but they were also a perfect, perfect match for how I feel about death and my own Dead. And even now it makes me tear up a little bit.
That was her power. She could write my whole heart and mind and spirit so that no single inch of my inner landscape remained unilluminated. Ursula Le Guin was a genre-defining, gender-redefining, unassailable master and when you consider what she actually achieved, is probably one of the top ten writers who ever lived and ever wrote in any language anywhere, ever.
Leaving aside the fact that her consciousness/spirit continues on after death in the same way all of ours will eventually, she also lives on in Earthsea and on other planets and in that first outpouring of wonder and freedom in young writers -particularly girls- when they realise this is absolutely a space for them and they can utterly create and remake entire worlds that have never existed before but should. When you read the Earthsea Quartet you are reading an explicitly Woman Writer remaking all of the fantasy genre from that point on into something other than a European male shape in real time. And that is True Alchemy.
Ursula Le Guin was a master and one of my heroes. I loved her. And I am so grateful for all the works she left us.
Farther west than west,
Beyond the land
My people are dancing on the other wind.
— the song of the Woman of Kemay