In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing by David Naimon is an enlightening and informative collection of interviews with one of our greatest writers by one of our most talented (if not most talented) literary interviewers.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“An enlightening conversation about the writing process. Both authors adopt the tone of artisans discussing their craft, and each’s delight at debating with a like-minded professional is evident throughout. . . [Le Guin’s] expansive knowledge of the SF genre provides, most strikingly, a sharp perspective on how its female practitioners have too often been forgotten in favor of their male contemporaries. Her rapport with Naimon results in an exchange that is both informative and charming.”
In his own words, here is David Naimon’s playlist for his book Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing by David Naimon:
The book that Ursula K. Le Guin and I created together began as conversations between us, one in each genre—fiction, poetry and nonfiction. And as we dived into questions of craft it became quickly clear that the music of words, the non-connotative elements of language, was of great importance to Ursula. As she herself put it:
Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.
Ursula would often borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf, “the wave in the mind,” to describe this very thing.
Today, however I have the pleasure of putting together an actual musical playlist to accompany the journey Ursula and I made through fiction, poetry and nonfiction. In thinking of how best to do so, I’m reminded of something Ursula wrote in the introduction to the book (an introduction she quite amazingly titled “Fear and Loathing in the Interview”!) where she said: “The good interview is like a good badminton rally: you know right away that the two of you can keep that birdie in the air, and all you have to do is watch it fly.”
Given the dialogic nature of our book it seems only right to have this playlist move back and forth between us, to volley between the music of Ursula’s world and the music of mine, as we make a third music together, one that invites you now to join in with us.
ON FICTION
“Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” by Willie Nelson
The question Ursula was asked most often was “where do you get your ideas from” and she often let Willie Nelson answer for her. In Ursula’s words: “One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought of his tunes, and he said, ‘The air is full of tunes, I just reach up and pick one.’ Now that is not a secret. But it is a sweet mystery. And a true one.” Similarly, elsewhere she has said, “A story or poem may reveal truths to me as I write it. I don’t put them there. I find them in the story as I work.” So, in the honor of Willie’s wisdom here is the song he himself considers one of his favorites.
“Misty Mountains Cold” The Hobbit: The Complete Original Soundtrack (1977)
The two writers that come up most often for Ursula when we talk about the musical rhythm of prose are Virginia Woolf and J.R.R. Tolkien. One of the unique strengths of her engagement with writing craft is her refusal to keep so-called “literary” writers and “genre” writers siloed, to instead present them together like this. Likewise she wouldn’t hesitate to cite an indigenous oral story as an example, alongside Dickens or Tolstoy. In honor of Tolkien’s rhythms I chose a song from my childhood, from the 1977 animated film The Hobbit. This song is an adaptation of a sung poem in the book itself. For the Spotify playist I was limited by what was available (the soundtrack of the recent Peter Jackson directed film) but I’m really thinking of the version of this song from the 1977 animated film, a film that was so formative for me growing up. I hope you’ll listen to the much more charming version as well. You can also hear a recording of Tolkien reading the original poem-song from the book here.
“Scene 2: Recantation” from Philip Glass’ Opera Galileo Galilei
Ursula loved opera and found Philip Glass’ Galileo “completely beautiful.” In speaking about craft she liked to distinguish between writing rules that are genuinely useful and writing rules that were really simply there to uphold the status quo, whether around class or gender or level of education. She also cautioned against getting swept up in the latest trend in style, to take a longer historical view on what is available to you as a writer. Both of these impulses speak to the importance for Ursula of puzzling out how to stay true, which sometimes means violating norms, either of tradition or contemporary (often capitalistic) pressures on what writing is supposed to look like. This scene in the opera is a dramatization of when Galileo is forced to recant his astronomical findings which he nevertheless knows are true.
ON POETRY
“Promise is a Pendulum” by Big Thief
In the introduction to our book Ursula reveals she was nervous for our poetry conversation, even as poetry is the writing practice that is the true throughline of her writing life. In the 1950s, the work she first submitted for publication was poetry, and she continued to meet with her poetry writing peer group and write poems long after she stopped writing novels. It wasn’t until the Poetry Foundation commissioned me to write a piece reflecting on what her poetry tells us about her more well-known work that I learned that it was only with her final collection of poetry—in a long wonderful career as a poet—that any true editorial attention was given to her poems. We talk about how, for her, poetry is more contemplative than imaginative (perhaps one of the reasons we don’t have science fictional poems by her) and I got the sense that to be a poet in this way required always putting yourself back in beginner’s mind. Quieting the mind, becoming acutely aware of the limits of human knowledge and welcoming in influences from the more than human world (as much of her poetry engages with the natural world and our role within it). It makes me think of one of my favorite songs from Big Thief with lines like:
I could never build a rainbow
Or any kind of flower
I could never make a sparrow
Or a meteor shower
I could never build an earthworm
Could never make the earth turn…
I’ve been listening to the laughing
Of the fox down the trail
I’ve been clasping to the listening of the moss to the snail
The shimmer of the beech leaves
As the wind does a big sneeze
“Beautiful Reward” by Bruce Springsteen
One of the things that Ursula notes about poetry is that dictators are afraid of poets. And in one of her most powerful moments, receiving the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she delivers a fiery speech warning against the commodification of books by the likes of Amazon who were both a sponsor of the event and sitting just below her as she spoke. In that speech she uses the phrase “beautiful reward” four times, but because few caught the reference, she later clarified she was referring to the song by Bruce Springsteen, one of her favorite songwriters. So in honor of the poet facing down the powers that be on behalf of art, we have to include this song on the playlist.
ON NONFICTION
“On the Banks of the Wabash” by The Mills Brothers
One of the things that concerned Ursula out in the real world, and which she wrote about in her nonfiction, was the erasure of women. Sometimes she would write about direct theft and erasure, like that of the case of Wallace Stegner and Mary Hallock Foote but other times she would worry about women who in a given contemporary moment are being celebrated and centered and then as time passes, unlike similar male contemporaries, they seem to not only drift out of the conversation but never fully enter the canon. When we spoke about this, she said she worried about Grace Paley in this way.
It made me wonder if Grace Paley ever wrote about songs she loved and I came across her short story Mother which begins with the lines: “One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: “Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway.” By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway.” I believe she is referring to the song “On the Banks of the Wabash” with its lines: “But one thing there is missing in the picture;/ Without her face it seems so incomplete./I long to see my mother in the doorway,/As she stood there years ago her boy to greet.” I imagine this incomplete picture without Grace Paley, and with Ursula imagining her in the doorway, and now us doing the same with Ursula. (another resonance is that the Wabash was also the site of a 19th century utopian socialist settlement called Harmony and later New Harmony).
“Heron Dance” from Music & Poetry of the Kesh by Ursula K. Le Guin and Todd Barton
Even if Ursula was most nervous for our poetry conversation, as a genre she seemed most uneasy with nonfiction, even as she has written not only some of the most unforgettable ground-shifting essays, but also some of the most insightful critical appraisals (i.e. book reviews) of her writing peers’ works. These book reviews often serve as deep instructional insights into craft themselves. I suspect her uneasiness with the genre, something we explore in some detail in the book, partly has to do with her ideas about the imagined and fantastic. In many ways she saw them as fundamental to reality, more real than realism. It reminds me of her oft-quoted declaration: “I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.” Or the line: “Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”
Thus, for this penultimate song, I choose a work of Ursula’s herself, a “real” work of an “imagined” people, the Kesh, from her 1985 novel Always Coming Home. The original 1980s edition of this book came with a cassette with this very music on it. The track I chose of this future imagined culture, became the real theme music for the 2022 limited series I did on my podcast, Crafting with Ursula.
“Try” by Dolly Parton
If you were lucky enough to see the exhibition in Portland, Oregon in 2025, called A Larger Reality, on the life, thought and work of Ursula (an exhibition that will hopefully one day travel), you would’ve encountered a large mural of a giant tree whose branches were populated by many of Ursula’s influences and loves, whether Charles Dickens or Joy Harjo or Dolly Parton. After seeing Dolly in that tree, I looked to see if I could uncover any instance of Le Guin mentioning Parton and even better, particular songs of hers she loved, but I couldn’t find anything. But somehow I stumbled upon the perfect Parton song, performed in a perfectly strange circumstance, to serve as a final song for this journey.
The third time we talked about writing, it was no longer at the radio station but in the upstairs reading room of her house. We had established a warm rapport by then, and because of it we were both notably more relaxed. Her cat Pard even came into the room in the middle of it, checked us out, unimpressed, and returned to the bed in the other room. In this warm, loose moment, at the very end of the conversation I ask her to read a piece of hers, that I don’t believe she has ever read out loud before. Ironically, this incredibly funny, over-the-top and snarky piece is called “On Serious Literature” and it made her laugh so much to consider reading it that she snorted. My proudest moment. In the spirit of that moment of uncontainable unseriousness, while reading about serious literature, I present Dolly Parton’s song “Try.” Again, not because of its version on the Spotify playlist but mainly because of the video of her performance of it during her cameo on the sci-fi comedy drama The Orville. Where she sits on a very human couch to sing it to a very appreciative alien audience of one. You may or may not snort when you see it, but thinking of the meeting of a very real human celebrity with a very imagined reptilian alien, I return to the realness of the imagined for Ursula. To wit, at the very end of our third conversation I say something like, “I can’t imagine who else I could’ve done this with, to look back across a writing life together, not only in one genre, but in all three.” And she said, let’s make it into a book.
And here it is.
David Naimon is a writer and host of the radio show and podcast Between The Covers in Portland, Oregon. His work has appeared in Tin House, AGNI, Fourth Genre, Boulevard, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. His writing has been reprinted in The Best Small Fictions 2016 and cited in the 2016 Pushcart Prize volume, The Best American Essays 2015, and The Best American Travel Writing 2015. His podcast and writing can be found at: www.davidnaimon.com.