The Writing Life Too

A brooding sky this morning. When I arrived home late last night from Mexico the cold and damp lanced into me and I had to laugh at myself. For the whole time I was visiting down there everyone rhapsodized about the sublime weather and blue skies and I kept protesting how I loved four seasons and adored winter but now that I’m back I’m missing the blue, the warm, the lake, the hillsides and bougainvillea tumbling down beautiful old walls. I fell in love with the walls-(Now the so-called cobblestone streets were another things altogether since they are barely passable they are so uneven and treacherous). I had been teaching at the Lake Chapala Writer’s Conference in Ajijic, Mexico along with the talented freelance journalist Vince Beiser. Besides the fact that I had a hard time acclimating to the altitude, the whole experience was amazing, I met delightful people, was given a breathless tour around the lake that included passing an agave field, a colorful graveyard as festive as a children’s birthday party and people busy decorating graves on a Friday afternoon, and burros loaded with piles of firewood. I’d still be down there except I’ve got a book deadline. If you want to visit a part of Mexico that is magical and sweet and far from the glitz of Puerto Vallarta, this is the place to go…..I’m planning on returning.

While on the plane I read Ursula Le Guin’s intriguing essay in the February issue of Harpers, “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading." A while ago the NEA issued their latest dire report about the decline of reading claiming that 43% of Americans hadn’t read a book in the previous year. Now, on first glance the report is troubling indeed. In this report one of these non-reading Americans was quoted as saying, "I just get sleepy when I read."

But if you look deeper into the report you’ll discover that creative nonfiction isn’t classified as literature, that on-line reading doesn’t count, nor do graphic novels. This has puzzled me enormously, because spring, summer, winter and fall when I step into a bookstore or library here in Portland, they’re throbbing with life and with, well, this apparently endangered species, readers. I meet readers everywhere I go. In her essay Le Guin simply insists that books are here to stay: "It's just that not all that many people ever did read them."

Le Guin's sharpest barbs are aimed at publishing executives who "think they can sell books as commodities" and are disappointed if their holdings don't increase "yearly, daily, hourly." She then goes on to compare selling books to selling corn.

Until the corporate takeover of independent publishing houses, she points out, publishers didn't expect expansion: "They were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, flatly."

It’s also a beautiful rhapsody to reading and Le Guin writes: “Besides, readers aren’t viewer; they recognize their pleasure as different from that of being entertained. Once you’ve pressed the ON button, TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed aloneness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge; it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it…”

In the closing sentences she writes: “Since kids coming up through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleaser and anyhow are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book readers is unlikely to see any kind of increase and many well shrink further. What's in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don't you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?"

A number of Le Guin's science fiction works, including her award-winning novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, are set in a future. Over nearly 50 years she's published novels, children's books, more than 100 short stories, essays, poetry, two volumes of translation and screenplays of her works. She's received the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and several "lifetime achievement" awards among dozens of other honors. She’s crosses genres and in her sci fi she examines contemporary problems by placing them in her imagined worlds--for example, an anarchic society in The Dispossessed, (1974) and life in an androgynous world, in The Left Hand of Darkness, (1969). LeGuin is also the author of a fantasy series for children, the Earthsea trilogy, and has received many awards, including the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award for juvenile fiction (1968) and the National Book Award (1973) for the children's book The Farthest Shore.

Le Guin once said, "The writer cannot do it alone. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."