Wordriver: Celebrating Ursula K Le Guin
Ursula K Le Guin’s work is celebrated at this performative reading, marking the publication of Space Crone, a new collection of her writing.
Wordriver is inspired by ‘Dangerous People’, Le Guin’s text within a text featuring the character of Pandora. She is a feminist archaeologist studying the Kesh, a people who ‘might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California’.
Pandora’s research provides the framing device for Always Coming Home, Le Guin’s 1985 experiment in worldbuilding through textual artefacts. Pandora includes chapters of the novel Dangerous People, alongside examples of Kesh performance, with an emphasis on storytelling flowing outward to audiences.
Wordriver explores the confluence of the written and spoken, the currents of truth in fiction, and the flows between daughters and mothers in a matrilineal society still marked by the legacies of militarism and toxic masculinity.
Reading at the event are So Mayer and Sarah Shin, the editors of Space Crone, which brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender, including ‘Dangerous People’, for the first time. They are joined by Nisha Ramayya, the poet and academic.