Ursula Le Guin: Don't Push the River

Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives

In October of 2000, Ursula K. Le Guin sat down with CBC's Marilyn Powell to discuss her novel, The Telling. Listening to their conversation now feels like opening a time capsule – one that paradoxically contains prescient observations about how we both preserve and erase our past. Le Guin speaks of editing with razor blades, of physically cutting away words from paper – a practice that feels almost mythological in our age of ephemeral keystrokes and vanishing digital drafts. Yet within this seemingly dated discussion emerges a timeless truth: that our past exists only through the artifacts and stories we choose to keep. As she weaves between discussing myth-making and the tactile nature of writing, Le Guin reveals how community-held stories become the framework through which we understand our history. These aren't just tales, she suggests, but rather the very architecture of human memory, the scaffolding that holds our collective past in place. There's something haunting about hearing the author, now herself part of our literary past, contemplating how we maintain connections to what came before. Yet in her voice, we hear not anxiety but wonder at how each generation finds new ways to tell its stories, to make sense of where it's been.

Perhaps that's the most enduring message from this conversation across time: that while the tools we use to record and share our stories may change, the essential human need to weave meaning from memory remains constant, evolving and adapting like a living thing.

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The audio recording of Ursula Le Guin in conversation with Marilyn Powell was recorded on stage at in Toronto in October of 2000 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.

Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.

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Works by Ursula K. Le Guin:
The Telling (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Lathe of Heaven (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Left Hand of Darkness (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Word for World is Forest (ebook)

Other works about Le Guin and other materials mentioned:
Ursula Le Guin: the Last Interview and Other Conversations (print edition)
Ursula K. Le Guin and the Ambiguous Utopia (emovie)
Earthsea, 2005 (DVD)
TPL Blog piece from 2018 on Le Guin and her legacy (link here)

About the Host of Writers Off the Page

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.

Music is by Yuka

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.