Happy birthday Ursula Le Guin!

[altariel]

Happy 80th birthday, Ursula Le Guin! Hardly a day goes by without me finding yet another sentence of yours that I love, but here are a few more I found yesterday, from the 1986 Bryn Mawr Commencement Address:

"...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."

Thank you for this and for everything.

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

It's fantastic, isn't it? I'm so glad I posted it.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

I was a student at Portland State University in 1982-84, and got to hear Ursula Le Guin deliver an early version of this talk. It changed my thinking about the content of my education, about myself and my writing, about feminism, about everything, and I've never forgotten it.

Revisiting it today, in light of all that I've learned from fandom in recent years, is especially moving. She would have been then the age that I am now, so it stands to reason that I am now finally and fully understanding what she had to say.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness!

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

RRRAAAAWWWWWWRRRR!