Space crone writing

Le Guin was writing before I was born and I’ll be reading her long after she died. The first Earthsea book came into the world seven years before I did, and I loved them. Like her, it took me a little while to notice that the heroes were men. To notice the women were on the margins of that earthair (maailma = world in Finnish, maa = earth, ilma = air). After Steering the Craft and Words are my Matter, I read her Left Hand of Darkness a lot later. The joy that the king was pregnant in that story was marred by the same old pronoun. Le Guin wrote later about how her thinking on pronouns changed.

Space Crone is a selection of essays and a few shorter fiction pieces on exactly that: le Guin’s developing views on gender. She ranges back to Oliphant, Alcott, and Woolf, and forward to possible future worlds. If you’re familiar with le Guin’s work, there will be old friends in here. Indeed it might be better to read those pieces in their original collections.

But I was drawn into this collection, for Silver Press, by the Crone. Now I’m dipping into the beginning of menopause, I was glad to read how le Guin got through it. I look to in her now for how to turn into a crone, or ways of being an older woman. The one worth sending into a spaceship to both communicate what she knows of life, and to understand what lives she encounters.

One of my favourite essays here was on women writing, including the both/and, not either/or, of books and babies. A woman writing around and with her family uses every snippet of writing time to the full — this much I knew from watching other women writing. A woman close to life, helping lives grow and unfold, may have more of a story to tell. Men writing and speaking in the father tongue of politics and public reason may well miss this life source. Le Guin herself admits here that her thinking on the borders between genders, or lack thereof, may still change. But I loved her love of Jo March writing. I grew up with the same illustrations of her and her sisters by Frank T. Merrill.

When writing doesn’t come, le Guin says, she tries to write something else, to write about how the writing isn’t working. She published one piece like this, here. When a fiction character doesn’t enter her imagination, she can’t force it, but can put words one in front of the other in an essay. Or — better — try not to fill the empty space up, with new words, but — like Ogion? — let in the silence. Because out of the silence, the story can grow.