I have been thinking lately of writing a list. A long list of all the women who have influenced me. My mother, certainly, and my sisters. My daughter. My best friend from high school who I don't see often enough but who knows me. Teachers, both those who taught me and those who taught with me. Gymnastic coaches and ballet instructors. So many librarians, both now and once-upon-a-time. Friends from my childhood and friends from my neighborhood and friends I met online. My nieces; my cousins. My aunts, but long ago. My grandmothers in entirely different ways. My great grandmothers who I never met.

In fact, the list would have many women on it who I never met. Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevenson, Marge Piercy. Tori Amos and Kate Bush and yes: Olivia Newton John. Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt. Poets, musicians, artists, politicians, women in history. Even some imagined women.

High on that list would be Ursula K. Le Guin, whose books and ideas and fierceness have been a part of my thinking since I discovered her via her short story “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” in one of my literature courses at BYU. That child in the dungeon…it still comes to my mind often, reminding me that my life is built, on many invisible ways, on the misery of someone else.

When I was teaching, one of the first things I had my sophomores read was Le Guin’s short story “Texts.” It is a very short story, about a woman who starts seeing words in everything, the foam the waves leave behind on the sand, a piece of manufactured lace. It ends with the haunting refrain “sister, sister, sister, light the light,” which is another bit of Le Guin’s writing that stays with me. As does the first sentence of the story, “Messages came, Johanna thought, usually years too late, or years before one could crack their code or had even learned the language they were in.” It is the same truth from a poem that also shapes me, “We go by going where we have to go.” It is the same thing that life has taught me: you can look back and understand but when you are in the present it’s hard (if not impossible) to decipher meaning. I started my students with this story as an introduction to what my goal was as a teacher: not just learning grammar and how to write well and some things about literature, but how reading—how someone else’s written words in many forms, and we did read many forms—can inform your life with knowledge, compassion, understanding, and little hints at how to go.

A few years ago, for our citywide reading experience, we read A Wizard of Earthsea. And for a few days, I knew that one of the librarians who runs all the programs was working on bringing the author to our library. Ursula K. Le Guin! At my library! Those were some of my hopefullest days. Alas, she didn’t come—I don’t remember if it was just too expensive to bring her, or if she had some other thing planned, but the thought of meeting her! (I am, I confess, still disappointed that didn’t happen.) It’s a little bit like the emotion you see in those old videos of the crowds of girls waiting to catch a glimpse of the Beatles. Except, you know. A bit more librarian-ish.

Why would I get so excited over meeting a writer? I think most people are most excited over meeting someone truly famous, a rock star or a movie star. For me, though, it’s not the level of fame, but the level of impact the person has had on my life.

And le Guin has impacted me.

It’s hard to classify her writing; you could use the “fantasy” label or the “science fiction” one, but it doesn’t exactly fit or follow all the genre expectations. She didn’t follow genre rules or the snobbery of Literary Fiction. Instead, she just wrote. She wrote so well. Her Earthsea series is the only Tolkien-informed fantasy I can stand to read, because while there is something of Gandalf in Ged, the writing is so good, the striving for self-control and retribution as well as understanding and knowledge, that I don’t care. (And if you know me, you know how picky I am about my fantasy.) Her ideas about women, gender, and social influences were astounding to me when I first read them, not because they are entirely revolutionary but because of how skillfully she takes a theoretical idea and turns it into a story and, in doing so, makes the theory into a possibility.  She is unequivocally feminist, not in that man-hating way that the media and the uninformed think that feminism displays itself, but in real, practical, living-your-life sorts of ways.

It’s not only her novels and short stories, a few of her poems (the non-rhyming ones) and a whole lot of her essays. It is her perspective on life, a sort of no-bullshit approach to the world’s bullshit. She harbors no fools. She was unafraid to speak her mind on many topics: literature, yes, but also women’s rights, abortion, the book industry. Amazon. One of my favorite pieces she wrote was a critique of Margaret Atwood’s objection to her books being labeled as “science fiction.” I mean…Atwood is possibly my favorite writer, but followed closely by le Guin, so the two of them in the same room (metaphorically)? Magic for me. Possibly because I think Atwood’s protest is actually bullshit. As does le Guin.

Her last novel for adults, Lavinia, is on my top-ten-favorite-novels-of-all-time list. Not only because it does one of my favorite things that novels can do—takes a marginal character mentioned in someone else’s work and turns it into a character with a believable story within the structure of the existing work—but because it is powerful. It tells Lavinia’s story (from Virgil’s The Aenid) in a historical context (le Guin learned Latin before she wrote it, so as to bring more authenticity), imagining the early Italians within the context of their mythologies, bringing to life the society’s morals and ideals. But it is also a story about power, and how women, who rarely have any, try to work within power structures. At its heart it is a story about men and women, not just in the romantic sense but in the real, living struggle of abuse, trust, misunderstanding, affection, social roles and personal roles and the push-and-pull of relationships. There is also an edge of tired frustration in the story: this happened so long ago, and yet so little has changed. “Women are born cynics,” Lavinia understand. “Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.” As we still could. Finally, it is a story about story itself, how it endures, how it shapes both individuals and civilizations.

I’ve read Lavinia three times since it was released, and each time I finish it I think “Oh how I wish she’d write one more novel.” She did say that Lavinia would be her last book. But I kept hoping that she’d surprise us with another one anyway. Alas: that is no longer a possibility. Nor is meeting her or having her sign my books or just telling her thank you in person. Because Ursula K. le Guin passed away this week. There will be no more new books from her.

But that is also the magic and durability of writing. She’s gone but I can still revisit her creations. They will last as long as people last, perhaps. At least far longer than her one human life. I realized when I put this post together that I don’t have my own copies of most of her novels. I think I need to remedy that. I think I’m going to go in search of some cool copies of her works, and reread them. And I am going to reengage with the process of writing—not blogging, but writing, all of it, but especially the submitting, the act of asking to be noticed. I am remembering her words:

I am sick of the silence of women. I want to hear you speaking all the languages, offering your experience as your truth, as human truth, talking about working, about making, about unmaking, about eating, about cooking, about feeding, about taking in seed and giving out life, about killing, about feeling, about thinking; about what women do; about what men do; about war, about peace; about who presses the buttons and what buttons get pressed and whether pressing buttons is in the long run a fit occupation for human beings. There’s a lot of things I want to hear you talk about… We can all talk mother tongue, we can all talk father tongue, and together we can try to hear and speak that language which may be our truest way of being in the world, we who speak for a world that has no words but ours. I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively—they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

That’s what I want—to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you—I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you’re writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a woman’s tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don’t let us sink back into silence. If we don’t tell our truth, who will?

I am not young anymore. I don’t know if I have the power of any volcano. But maybe there is a bit of magma left. Right now, so much of my life is about change. I am coming up against the difference between what I hoped my life would look like when I was here—45 years old, my children no longer small but going out into the world—and what it actually is. I am working on letting go of what I hoped for and embracing what I have. And I am also learning something new and exciting: If it will not be what I wanted, what I hoped for, there is a freedom here in what is. I can choose. I can make it what I want it, shape it how I will. I still have paths to follow and choices to make. I still have a voice. It’s not just le Guin’s death that is sparking me. But she is right: my experience as my truth is something to share, to create from, to let influence more than just my own life. This is why I admire writers the most, and why I get excited about meeting them: because they make things that influence other people. That drop little hints about the way to go. I don’t know of any other higher praise than, at the end of a life, to have someone say “I want to be like you.” And that is what I would have said to her if I had ever met her: “I want to be a person who influences others with words. Like you did.”