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The farthest shore le guin5/28/2023 ![]() If I can’t publish anything except for the occasional poem in a tiny, tiny poetry magazine what am I doing? Am I kidding myself?” I was beginning to feel a little desperate. Le Guin tells Curry: “When I started writing, the basic assumption about fiction was that men were at the centre of it … I don’t know how many times I was told I write well, but, ‘we don’t know quite what you’re doing’. But here you have a book that we feel, regretfully, would be of interest to very few American readers,” and “the basic subject matter and background is so remote that I could not encourage you to recast it from a practical point of view”, and “there would not be a large enough audience for a novel of this kind”. ![]() Rejection letters from publishers in the 50s tell her, variously: “You write well and are obviously very erudite. All of a sudden we are seeing Earthsea … from the point of view of the powerless.”Īlthough Le Guin won many awards during her lifetime, the documentary – which will premiere on 10 June at the Sheffield Doc/Fest – reveals her initial struggle to be published. “What I’d been doing as a writer was being a woman pretending to think like a man … I had to rethink my entire approach to writing fiction … it was important to think about privilege and power and domination, in terms of gender, which was something science fiction and fantasy had not done,” Le Guin tells Curry. ![]() The trailer for Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin. ![]()
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