The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

Ursula K. Le Guin

Language: English

Pages: 336

ISBN: 1590300068

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

people are chirping on the roof.” And like the sparrows her thoughts go hopping and flying and trying out words. And like the light of morning her thought impalpably touches shape, and reveals it, brings seeing from dimness, being from inexhaustible chaos. That is the good time. That is the time when this she-plural writer finds what is to be written. In the first light, seeing with the eyes of the child waking, lying between sleep and the day in the body of dream, in the body

your own. The selection of samples is whimsical. I picked writers whose style interested me and whose books were handy at the moment, and let my finger fall on a passage without any real selection, though I did avoid passages with back-and-forth dialogue. “The Three Bears” is included as an oral touchstone. Twain, Tolkien, and Woolf are here because I admire them as stylists. The textbook was chosen because it is a well-written one, not a horrible example of academic mumble. Darwin is here

a writer to be sheltered and shielded while at this intense work, given solitude and freedom from human responsibilities, like Proust in his padded cell, or the people who keep going to writers colonies and having their lunch brought in a basket; delightful indeed, but dangerous, because it makes a luxury into a condition of work—a necessity. What you need as a writer is exactly what Virginia Woolf said: enough to live on and a room of your own. It’s not up to other people to provide either of

grief and patience ignored and devalued, and I thought Twain himself had joined in the wicked game. I thought he approved of it. I didn’t understand that he was satirising the cruel mockeries of Reconstruction. I needed that historical knowledge to understand what Twain was doing: that he was honoring me by including me in the same humanity with Jim. Throughout Huckleberry Finn, the boy’s unquestioned assumptions (which are those of his society) and the author’s convictions and perceptions

without dreading revision as a destructive process, or a never-ending one, as many inexperienced writers do. I spoke of the psychological acuteness and sensitivity I have learned to count on and call on in workshop groups. I think it rises from the fact that the people feel that they are working hard together at hard work, and that they have experienced honesty and trust as absolutely essential to getting the work done. So they will use all their skills to achieve that honesty and trust. If the

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