Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship.

I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers – the

And thus it is important that instructors should not be writing teachers but writers teaching: people who have published professionally and actively in the field of the workshop.

The minds of animals are a great, sacred, present mystery. I do think animals have languages, but they are entirely truthful languages. It seems that we are the only animals who can lie. We can think and say what is not so and never was so, or what has never been, yet might be. We can invent; we can suppose; we can imagine. All that gets mixed in w

The pursuit of art, then, by artist or audience, is the pursuit of liberty. If you accept that, you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts, labeling them as “escapism.”

they had. The instructor directs their practice. Practice is an interesting word. We think of practicing as beginner’s stuff, playing scales, basic exercises. But the practice of an art is the doing of that art – it is the art.

It is conversation, a word the root of which means “turning together.”

“Professions for Women,”11 where she gives her great image of a woman writing. I figure her really in an attitude of contemplation, like a fisher-woman, sitting on the bank of a lake with her fishing rod held over its water. Yes that is how I see her. She was not thinking; she was not reasoning; she was not constructing a plot; she was letting her

“Liberty is a better husband than love to many of us,”