Rabbit, rabbit! Climbing Lightly Through Forests: A Poetry Anthology Honoring Ursula K. Le Guin is now officially out from Aqueduct Press. It was edited by R.B. Lemberg and Lisa M. Bradley and features a wealth of tribute, challenge, exploration, and remembrance from poets including Jo Walton, Merlin Cunniff, Kiya Nicoll, Brandon O'Brien, Ada Hoffmann, Izzy Wasserstein, Leah Bobet, Jeannelle M. Ferreira, Gwynne Garfinkle, Shweta Narayan, Sofia Samatar, David Sklar, Nisi Shawl, and me. I said I would talk about my contributions when the time came.
"The Other Lives" is not hard to talk about. I wrote it for R.B. after a discussion of differing reactions to Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), specifically what it means to lose a character in whom you have seen a glance of yourself for the first time; it was published originally in The Cascadia Subduction Zone 6.4 in 2016. It falls on the side of challenge, or perhaps transformative work. I am honored to have it reprinted in this company.
"The Keystone Out of Your Arch" requires a little more explanation. Against stiff competition, "Brothers and Sisters" (1976) may have finally emerged as my favorite short story by Le Guin; it is part of her Orsinian Tales (1976) and is difficult to describe without making it sound either overengineered or bleak. The plot concerns two sets of siblings unexpectedly entangled by an accident in the limestone quarries of a company town on the karst of northwestern Orsinia in 1910. It's a hardscrabble life, everything crowded too close and yet isolated between the plains of stone and sky. Scene by scene, characters pair off, change partners; the action includes a couple of fights and a couple of near-romances and finally, wonderfully, an ending that sticks between two characters whose interactions until then have been so awkward and oblique as to have to mean something. It can be read on its own, but it works best in triptych with "A Week in the Country" (1976) and "Unlocking the Air" (1990), all together tracing five generations of the same family against the griefs and transformations of the twentieth century. I always wanted another in the twenty-first, but there were no more stories out of Orsinia after the fall of its Communist government in 1989. Le Guin herself said that she missed hearing from its inhabitants.
Insofar as there is a central character in the pointedly plural "Brothers and Sisters," it's Stefan Fabbre, whose namesake grandson and then great-granddaughter feature in the other stories mentioned above. The text agrees that he is "nothing at all to look at," a slight, light-haired, light-voiced man always leaving his sentences and intentions half-finished, doing the wrong thing instead. "He was supposed to be a genius and go to college, but they kicked him out." Everyone knows he won a scholarship to the Normal School in Brailava and came back to keep the books for the Chorin Company, clever but not respected, a restless misfit. "He acts the clerk among the quarrymen, and the quarryman among the clerks," his older brother observes with concern and frustration, the splendid Kostant who has been wounded in his body but never in his sense of self. "Why don't he be what he is?" He has never not known how; Stefan is still figuring it out, or at least the reader hopes that's what he's doing with his moody, messy drinking and quarreling, dreaming and afraid of trying again for the world beyond the "ant-heap" of Sfaroy Kampe. "I always lose fights," he tells the woman he loves, in the aftermath of a spectacular example. "And run away." He's twenty-three years old.
I read Le Guin's Orsinian Tales for the first time in 2000, in my narrow rectangle of a single in East Quad whose next-door neighbors played Dr. Mario so that I heard the chill and fever themes alternating through the cinderblocks all night. I loved the overall conceit of a small country in Central Europe that was fantastic only by virtue of being fictional, but I loved "Brothers and Sisters" at once and best and of the three Fabbre siblings and the two Sachiks, my favorite was Stefan who "blew in gusts like autumn wind, bitter and fitful; you didn't know where you were with him." I don't recall that I ever thought much about why. I did keep a list of favorite characters, just to see if it showed any patterns. He matched a few. My experience of college was already quite different from his.
I left my graduate program in 2006 under still different circumstances, but I left without wanting to: without my degree, without my health, without most of my apartment, without the future that had seemed natural and achievable. "Knocked the keystone out of your arch, didn't it?" Stefan says early in "Brothers and Sisters," referring to the suddenness of a shock which has altered the landscape of all their lives; he has no idea yet by how much. "Wham! One rock falls, they all go." He extends the image to encompass himself, his family, perhaps everyone going through life "lying around each of us under our private pile of rocks." I spent years after grad school under mine. Occasionally I still have to shift off the rubble. Now when I returned to the story, as I kept doing because I had not ceased to love it, there seemed a strange, sharp irony running through my old affinity for Stefan Fabbre. "An education, I'm a real professor, sure. Christ! One year at the Normal School!"
Le Guin had a knack for phrases that became part of a personal lexicon: holding your hand out in the dark, feeling the wheel turn under your hand. The keystone out of your arch. It was the first thing I thought in 2018 when I heard that she had died. I wrote the poem for her memory, but it turned out so personal that even now I feel I have evaded talking properly about it, letting someone else's imaginary country once again do the work for me: it seemed especially important then to have it out in the world. That was the weight Le Guin's work had for me.
History catches up with everyone in these stories eventually, but "Brothers and Sisters" ends well, in a splash of sunlight and two young people laughing. I had no idea until people started e-mailing me that "Tea with the Earl of Twilight" had made the 2020 Locus Recommended Reading List. It is a surprise I am glad to add to the day and further company I am glad to keep. In the meantime, icy snow is rattling against my window, uncapitalized Winter. You should check all of this writing out.
"The Other Lives" is not hard to talk about. I wrote it for R.B. after a discussion of differing reactions to Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), specifically what it means to lose a character in whom you have seen a glance of yourself for the first time; it was published originally in The Cascadia Subduction Zone 6.4 in 2016. It falls on the side of challenge, or perhaps transformative work. I am honored to have it reprinted in this company.
"The Keystone Out of Your Arch" requires a little more explanation. Against stiff competition, "Brothers and Sisters" (1976) may have finally emerged as my favorite short story by Le Guin; it is part of her Orsinian Tales (1976) and is difficult to describe without making it sound either overengineered or bleak. The plot concerns two sets of siblings unexpectedly entangled by an accident in the limestone quarries of a company town on the karst of northwestern Orsinia in 1910. It's a hardscrabble life, everything crowded too close and yet isolated between the plains of stone and sky. Scene by scene, characters pair off, change partners; the action includes a couple of fights and a couple of near-romances and finally, wonderfully, an ending that sticks between two characters whose interactions until then have been so awkward and oblique as to have to mean something. It can be read on its own, but it works best in triptych with "A Week in the Country" (1976) and "Unlocking the Air" (1990), all together tracing five generations of the same family against the griefs and transformations of the twentieth century. I always wanted another in the twenty-first, but there were no more stories out of Orsinia after the fall of its Communist government in 1989. Le Guin herself said that she missed hearing from its inhabitants.
Insofar as there is a central character in the pointedly plural "Brothers and Sisters," it's Stefan Fabbre, whose namesake grandson and then great-granddaughter feature in the other stories mentioned above. The text agrees that he is "nothing at all to look at," a slight, light-haired, light-voiced man always leaving his sentences and intentions half-finished, doing the wrong thing instead. "He was supposed to be a genius and go to college, but they kicked him out." Everyone knows he won a scholarship to the Normal School in Brailava and came back to keep the books for the Chorin Company, clever but not respected, a restless misfit. "He acts the clerk among the quarrymen, and the quarryman among the clerks," his older brother observes with concern and frustration, the splendid Kostant who has been wounded in his body but never in his sense of self. "Why don't he be what he is?" He has never not known how; Stefan is still figuring it out, or at least the reader hopes that's what he's doing with his moody, messy drinking and quarreling, dreaming and afraid of trying again for the world beyond the "ant-heap" of Sfaroy Kampe. "I always lose fights," he tells the woman he loves, in the aftermath of a spectacular example. "And run away." He's twenty-three years old.
I read Le Guin's Orsinian Tales for the first time in 2000, in my narrow rectangle of a single in East Quad whose next-door neighbors played Dr. Mario so that I heard the chill and fever themes alternating through the cinderblocks all night. I loved the overall conceit of a small country in Central Europe that was fantastic only by virtue of being fictional, but I loved "Brothers and Sisters" at once and best and of the three Fabbre siblings and the two Sachiks, my favorite was Stefan who "blew in gusts like autumn wind, bitter and fitful; you didn't know where you were with him." I don't recall that I ever thought much about why. I did keep a list of favorite characters, just to see if it showed any patterns. He matched a few. My experience of college was already quite different from his.
I left my graduate program in 2006 under still different circumstances, but I left without wanting to: without my degree, without my health, without most of my apartment, without the future that had seemed natural and achievable. "Knocked the keystone out of your arch, didn't it?" Stefan says early in "Brothers and Sisters," referring to the suddenness of a shock which has altered the landscape of all their lives; he has no idea yet by how much. "Wham! One rock falls, they all go." He extends the image to encompass himself, his family, perhaps everyone going through life "lying around each of us under our private pile of rocks." I spent years after grad school under mine. Occasionally I still have to shift off the rubble. Now when I returned to the story, as I kept doing because I had not ceased to love it, there seemed a strange, sharp irony running through my old affinity for Stefan Fabbre. "An education, I'm a real professor, sure. Christ! One year at the Normal School!"
Le Guin had a knack for phrases that became part of a personal lexicon: holding your hand out in the dark, feeling the wheel turn under your hand. The keystone out of your arch. It was the first thing I thought in 2018 when I heard that she had died. I wrote the poem for her memory, but it turned out so personal that even now I feel I have evaded talking properly about it, letting someone else's imaginary country once again do the work for me: it seemed especially important then to have it out in the world. That was the weight Le Guin's work had for me.
History catches up with everyone in these stories eventually, but "Brothers and Sisters" ends well, in a splash of sunlight and two young people laughing. I had no idea until people started e-mailing me that "Tea with the Earl of Twilight" had made the 2020 Locus Recommended Reading List. It is a surprise I am glad to add to the day and further company I am glad to keep. In the meantime, icy snow is rattling against my window, uncapitalized Winter. You should check all of this writing out.
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