4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Collection of Non-fiction Essays, Story-Teller Style, July 16 2004
This review is from: The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (Paperback)
I love (almost) all of Ursula K. LeGuin's fiction. She is a wonderful storyteller whose rhythmic prose struck me and stuck with me even before I gave much thought to the idea of rhythm in prose. (Having children and reading aloud brings a new dimension to story telling.) Her imagined worlds and characters resound deeply with me, and she has earned my trust as one of the consistently best authors I have read.
This non-fiction collection is just as thought-provoking as her best stories. I had to be careful not to "gobble it up" by reading too fast. I'm sure that I will read it again and again. It gives much hope to an aspiring fiction writer whose story hasn't arrived yet. (Turns out I'm just too young; maybe next year.)
I had also worried that perhaps I had read too much to ever be creative in writing; maybe if I begin to write something original, it will come out with inadvertently plagiarized bits of Dispossessed, Lord of the Rings, and Little Women, since those seem to get stuck in my head. The admonition of Ms LeGuin that all good writers ought to read, and read a lot, comforts me. All these years I've just been fertilizing my imagination.
Although I have never met her, it seems that through some of her essays, the separation that exists between her writing and her self narrows, and the humor and wisdom and brightness (luminousness, luminosity??) of her personality shines through. I hope someday that one of the highlights of my life might be knowing her for an hour.
There is always the possibility of a writing workshop, but I really wish I could have heard her "moo"...
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