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Transcript of Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin 1 You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky. I was halfway through my Doctor Who mini-series when something very significant happened in the world of science fiction. The great novelist Ursula K. Le Guin passed away. And I was contemplating how to address her legacy on my podcast when a listener told me about a documentary that being made called Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. The director Arwen Curry spent almost ten years with Le Guin, and now she’s in the final stage of putting the film together. Her production office is in Berkeley – and since I was in the Bay Area recently, I wanted to stop by and hear about the film. It’s funny interviewing someone who is so adapt at doing interviews. She was adjusting her own mic, and she even knew the question I was going to ask to get her sound levels – which the question every public radio reporter asks to get your levels: tell me what you had for breakfast. ARWEN: I was going to say Oatmeal. You know my question! ARWEN: I’ve done a little bit of radio. Arwen Curry was raised in Berkeley. She says her father was a big influence on her childhood imagination. Her was an early Dungeons & Dragons player, and he enlisted his kids on adventures that went way beyond the D&D manuals. And his bookshelves were filmed with fantasy novels – books like The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. ARWEN: I loved the Lathe of Heaven which is one of the books on my father's bookshelf and that's a book in which the protagonist. His dreams change reality. So he wakes up from one of these powerful dreams and the whole world has changed but no one knows it except for him. And I just loved that idea. Ursula Le Guin was also raised in Berkeley. And even as a kid, Arwen felt there was something very familiar about Le Guin’s voice. ARWEN: There are things that I have in common with Ursula that have become clear to me over the course of working on the documentary and that may be what it is in this case is that sort of a you know a deeply humane deeply sane kind of 1 2 rational scientific but very you know very measured and poetic approach that seemed familiar to me perhaps because my own father was a scientist and she was being inflected by that in her work. Ursula's father was an anthropologist and mine was a chemist and that kind of conversation about understanding things scientifically about proving a problem approaching a problem in a really open minded and creative way with an eye always toward looking to the truth with something that I was familiar with that voice seemed very in tune with the kinds of voices that I had in my own family. And it wasn’t just a scientific way of looking at the world. Ursula Le Guin’s father was an anthropologist. Both her parents were academics and experts on Native American cultures of California. ARWEN: And so her childhood was textured with an understanding of many cultures many voices many kinds of ways of approaching the world and she knew in a way that most people don't. From early on that hers was only one way that the primary way that she lived as a as a young kid in Berkeley in America was only one way of seeing the world and that there were many others out there all equally valid which was the approach of her father's anthropology. Which was very unusual perspective for an American kid to have in the 1930s and ‘40s. Also: ARWEN: She was not treated differently in any significant way from her four brothers. She was encouraged to participate in their lively conversations and arguments and to do all the rough and tumble play and to really put herself right in the middle of it. Yeah I remember I read some interviews that you were she was saying that people thing that she's sort of very assertive and suffers no fools and throws her opinions out there but she's like this is this for me that is just starting a conversation is what I had to do with the youngest of all these children just to get myself heard. ARWEN: Exactly. And now that we're talking about it I can say that this was another real similarity with how I grew up and something in her voice which was very familiar to me was just this kind of embrace of the argument as a way of communicating a way of getting to the truth. And then we live in a society that fears that strong opinion being put out there at the dinner table that feels like an argument. It feels like conflict and people back away from it. And in my family and I think also in Ursula's family this lively intellectual discussion was just the way that people spoke. 2 3 So when did you have the idea to make the documentary about her? ARWEN: First let's see I first began to think about the documentary probably 2003. The idea first came into my head and in fact remained in my head as I went to get my master's degree at the University of California Berkeley journalism school. Initially I valued her as a kind of feminist godmother and as a reader to find that person in fiction was where kind of my heart went but I didn't know very much about her story. I didn't know how it would be connected to so many other things that I found fascinating and that I cared deeply about. So the more I began to investigate it the more it became clear to me that I really did want to get into that story and that it was a video that it was film. Why did you feel like this is definitely got to be a film? ARWEN: There are many good reasons to make to tell stories in film but I think in this case I wanted to share the experience of knowing her and speaking with her in a way that was more direct and immediate and intimate than happens in fiction – of course fiction can be intimate but it’s not the same as being able to look at someone's gestures and to see their expressions and to of course hear their voice and then to tell the rest of the story as well. So going back to the beginning of the documentary you had to approach her of course. How did that go at first? ARWEN: First I had to go get the training that I got the training Oh the training really? ARWEN: Yeah. You had made some didn't you --? ARWEN: No, when I will when I first had the idea I was working in print. Then I decided to work on this and it was part of the reason that I went to journalism school where I did the documentary program to learn how to make documentary films of this of this scale. Wow. So with that in mind the idea that you would eventually make a film. Oh wow. ARWEN: So it in fact kind of drove my -- the direction of my storytelling and my career. Right so step one -- go to film school. Step two was to establish herself as a filmmaker. Finally step three: contact Ursula Le Guin. By the way, she had done interviews in print and on the radio, but she didn’t like being on camera – so there had never been a documentary about her before. ARWEN: Well I had a little bit of help. We had a mutual friend who was a member of a collective of house cleaners who up until the end and I think still cleans Ursula’s house and kind of helps take care of things there. And I knew this 3 4 mutual friend Mo who basically could put in a good word for me so I sent Ursula my only film which was a short documentary about compulsive hoarding and sent it to her and said this is my work. This is some of the writing that I've done. Basically this is who I am in the most simple terms that I can express it. And this is what I'd like to do. And then this mutual friend Moe Boaster put in a good word for me which I think also swayed Ursula to kind of entertain the idea and then at a certain point early on before we had met she sort of backtracked a little bit and was looking like she was maybe having second thoughts. And that's when we met. I said basically let me let me come over and talk to you. What was that conversation like and also where you and him needed to finally meet her? ARWEN: I was a little intimidated to meet her -- but I was more driven to convince her to let me do this, and so that was primarily the energy that that I was bringing there. I wanted to really share with her why I thought it was important and see if I could get her to see that and what she had to overcome on her end is really significant is just her natural kind of shyness and discomfort with being in front of the camera.
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