Ursula K. Le Guin is one of Portland’s greatest enduring gifts to the world of letters. I keep three of her so-called “young adult” books in my nightstand and I have obtained several copies of her rendering of the Tao Te Ching over the years, partly out of forgetfulness, but mostly out of enthusiasm for the spirit that she fires into these ancient teachings.
Ms. Le Guin received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards ceremony last week in New York. Her acceptance speech has gone viral online (people still care that much about authors and books!?) and a follow-up interview with the Oregonian explores how the speech came about and her ideas on authoring, publishing, science fiction, and capitalism. Read the speech, the Oregonian interview, and listen to NPR’s coverage.
Some speech highlights:
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. …
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. …
We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.
