Ursula LeGuin Gives It To Us Straight

Ursula LeGuin’s speech upon accepting the National Book Foundation Medal for “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters” merits our attention. It’s fairly gloomy and a little cranky in tone but very clearly states her views on publishing and publishers today. Here it is:

Photo © by Marian Wood Kolisch

“To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being,

Congratulations are in Order!

Nancy Peacock, a fine North Carolina writer, has won first place for Mainstream Fiction in the 22nd annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards for her novel, THE LIFE & TIMES OF PERSIMMON WILSON. (NancyPeacockBooks.com)

Peacock’s first novel, LIFE WITHOUT WATER, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and her second one got a stellar review in the New York Times Book Review, which noted Peacock’s “simple prose that possesses a rhythmic,