It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
On a cold and windy Sunday afternoon in 2015, Bill and I settled into our seats in UCLA’s Royce Hall to listen to Ursula K. Le Guin in conversation with Meryl Friedman from UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance. It was a 90-minute dose of inspiration.
I have carried around Ursula Le Guin’s book of poems Going Out With Peacocks for 25 years. The 81-page book contains five poems that have repeatedly consoled me, inspired me, and given me courage. They are tabbed so that I can find them easily. The lines from “The Hero” gave me the courage I needed to begin my documentary film “Women of Mystery: Three Writers Who Forever Changed Detective Fiction” (available for streaming on Vimeo/go to our “Films” page for Vimeo link). I felt the “The Hero” was describing the fictional female detectives I had fallen in love with, who I felt were uncovering a provocative new story about truth and justice:
There are better things to do
with anger, with beauty,
with a headful of serpents
who can hiss wisdom; there must
be a story for my dear young hero.
it will not be the old story.
Her poem “The Years” reminds me, when I need reminding (all of the time!) that life is filled with unexpected joys, challenges, textures…
The years come all colors
like the rags
in the rag-basket my great-aunt
made her round rugs from…
Here are a few notes I jotted down on that wintry day in 2015 when Ursula spoke in UCLA’s beautiful Royce Hall:
Hear what you write. When Virginia Woolf took a bath, she recited her dialogue.
Most people like to be read to… Reading aloud isn’t taught much in schools (it isn’t taught enough).
She has read “Lord of the Rings” aloud three times (to each of her three children).
Early in her writing life, she reached a fork in the road. One road had a sign that said the road’s name. The other road’s sign didn’t say. She chose that road. She paused. Then added, “I went my own way.”
She will always remember being in an audience where someone asked the composer Philip Glass what was required to be an artist. He answered: Commitment. She agrees.
And here is a piece of loving advice she offers to writers in her book The Wave of the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination “…for a fiction writer the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it’s there, and you just reach up and pick it. Then you have to be able to let it tell itself. First you have to be able to wait, to wait in silence. Wait in silence and listen. Listen for the tune, the vision, the story. Not grabbing, not pushing, just waiting, listening, being ready for when it comes. This is an act of trust. Trust in yourself, trust in the world.”