Abstract
Always Coming Home (ACH) marks a transition in Ursula K. Le Guin’s career, from her meteoric rise in the mid-1960s to the remarkable second half of her career. An appropriate metaphor for the place of ACH in her life and work is the “hinge” that appears as a visual motif throughout the book: the empty space joining the two spirals that her imaginary future community terms the heyiya-if. The novel itself and the essays it inspired her to write show Le Guin rethinking her role and her art. Moving outward from the hinge, we find Le Guin developing its implications in her later work: metafictional play, alternative ways of living in the world, a poetic voice grounded in speech, and alternatives to the heroic conventions of myth.
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Notes
- 1.
The following essays, originally published in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1989), have been reprinted in the expanded version of Always Come Home (2019): “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”; “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”; and “Text, Silence, Performance.”
- 2.
In 1995 Le Guin published a collection of four novellas as a “suite” entitled Four Ways to Forgiveness. She published a new edition with The Library of America in 2017 that included a fifth novella, and she consequently changed the title to Five Ways to Forgiveness .
- 3.
Le Guin continued to think about the world of the Kesh after the publication of Always Coming Home. She sent the author a page of Blood Lodge songs in about 1991, when his wife was expecting a child, and “Sweet Chance” was composed for her after a conversation about the lack of literature dealing with pregnancy. Le Guin later lost track of the Blood Lodge poems but I tracked down the copy in my correspondence and so she was able to include them in the expanded edition of the novel.
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Attebery, B. (2021). Always Coming Home and the Hinge in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Career. In: Robinson, C.L., Bouttier, S., Patoine, PL. (eds) The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_2
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