David Mitchell reads "A Note at the Beginning"

[MUSIC] In 2010, her slakeleguin decided to start a blog. She thought the word blog was kind of silly and not euphonious. She was non-social media and she had strong feelings about the pitfalls of high tech in the internet. But at 81, lacking the energy necessary to write an novel, she was interested in new forms of writing. And as you'll hear in a few minutes, she was inspired by another writer whom she held in high regard. Welcome to In Your Spare Time, a podcast of Ursula K. Luguin's blog. My name is Theo Downs-Luguin. I'm Ursula's youngest child and her literary executor. In this podcast, people who knew Ursula and people who've been shaped by her work come together to read her blog, all 130 posts. Now, if you're familiar with Ursula's blog already, you might be wondering why a podcast. After all, the entire blog has been on Ursula's website for years and many of the posts are collected in the book No Time to Spare, published by Harper and available as an audiobook from recorded books. No Time to Spare is excellent. My mother was involved in selecting the posts for the book and I recommend you go right out and buy the book or the audiobook or better yet both. But the focus is naturally on the blog posts that are most polished and timeless, the ones that are like essays. The book excludes posts that are mainly photographic or posts that are super specific or rooted at a moment in time and are a little strange or awkward. These uncollected posts are where I think my mother as I knew her is hiding out, her contradictions, her prickliness and above all, her sense of humor and the absurd. In an ideal world, maybe we would be hearing her read these posts, but it's a real pleasure to hear them read by others and it's a very different experience from reading them to yourself. So that's why we're doing this podcast. Each week will release a post usually in the order in which they were written and almost always read by a different person each week. We ask readers after they read the post to say a few words about the post or Ursula or whatever they felt like. Our first episode is read by the Nimitable David Mitchell, author of Bone Clocks, Cloud Atlas and Seven Other Novels of which Ursula was an avid reader. David's also written Screenplays, articles and reviews and over the years he has said and written many kind and perceptive things about Ursula's art, including a terrific intro for the 50th anniversary edition of the Left Hand of Darkness. David's also just what you would hope and expect from his writing, generous, funny, engaging, a delight to work with a lot the way my mother was when she was collaborating. So he seemed like a good place to start. My name is David Mitchell and I'm reading Post Zero and note at the beginning written in October of 2010. I've been inspired by Jose Sanamago's Extraordinary Blogs which he posted when he was 85 and 86 years old. They were published this year in English as the notebooks. I read them with amazement and delight. I never wanted to blog before. I've never liked the word blog. I suppose it is meant to stand for biologue or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage. Oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible blogs in an oes. I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be interactive so the blogger is expected to read as comments in order to reply to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers. I am much too introverted to want to do that at all. I'm happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me. So though I have contributed a few blog-like objects to book view cafe, I never really enjoyed them. After all, despite the new names, they were just opinion pieces or essays and writing essays has always been tough work for me and only occasionally rewarding. But seeing what Salamago did with the form was a revelation. "How I get it, I see. Can I try too?" My trials attend sephats. That's what essays means. So far have very much less political and more weight than Salamago's and are more trivially personal. Maybe that will change as I practice the form, maybe not. Maybe I'll soon find it isn't for me after all and stop. That's to be seen. What I like at the moment is the sense of freedom. Salamago didn't interact directly with his readers except once. That freedom also, I'm borrowing from him." Dear Oshila, when I was a boy there was nothing I would have given to have woken up as a permanent resident of Earthsea. If I had the power to pick and choose, I would have opted to be one of the wrath people who rescued Ged Naron in the farthest chore, but really I wasn't fussy. Maybe just spare me the car-guard raiders please. Life was no fairy tale for the inhabitants of Earthsea, but your world had a purity, a balance and an appeal that I couldn't find in England of the late 1970s or early 1980s. Earthsea had magic, that great equalizer covered by bookish children everywhere and every when. The place was a sanctuary from the daily grind of the Quotidian. So thanks for that. I must have said this 50 times and 50 interviews, but what I'm asked about influences or why I'm a writer by mine goes to you. Every writer is influenced by and seeks to emulate many writers, books and scenes, but my mind still goes to you first, like a marble rolling down a well-worn groove. I have a vivid memory of finishing a wizard of Earthsea one Saturday morning, Bethless and transported and altered and hungry to learn how to do to others what you're writing had just done to me. In a necessary way, talked about how you felt after reading the Lord of the Rings and getting to Sam's ordinary, unbearably poignant closing line, "Well, I'm back." That's what Earthsea does to me. I read the trilogy again and again, until some scenes and lines of dialogue felt as real as events had actually happened in my life. Geds' experience is made my life richer. That might look a little pathetic, but it's not. It's reading. So thanks for that. Why Earthsea? Why you? Well very simply because you're such a good writer. Have it, what is a good in that combo mean? Good writer. Well, it's a whole subjective package of things. Plot, use of language, world building, nuance characters you root for, flow, intelligence, snackable ideas, a kind of moral nourishment, multiple interpretability, rare lines of dialogue or little details that lodge in your mind like a key receipt between your teeth. Who knows why we love the art we love? We just do, and that just do, I like to think, is eternally safe from AI. And human understanding. Gosh, I wish I could hear your assessment of AI in the mid-2020s. It wouldn't stand a chance. I'd address, I loved your art more than anything else on the nearby bookshelves and I wanted to make art like yours. Initially, like yours meant exactly like yours. I used to draw archipelagos on sheets of my mum's artists' eight two cartridge paper mounted on drawing boards. And those maps, boar, are an uncanny resemblance to Earthsea. I never really wrote any narrative setting these maps beyond the first couple of pages, but even when I left these maps behind, even when I evolved my own subject, Maddo and style and was able to stop scolping yours, you never cease to be a professional role model. So thanks for that. You wrote many more books on Earthsea, of course. Many British 18-year-olds undergo a strange 10-week limbo between sitting the A-level exams at the time in which university we go to, or if we go to go to one at all, and receiving those results. Who knows where we'll be comes September. Anywhere we applied or nowhere. My soundtrack to the limbo was Journey Mitchell's Blue and my text to the limbo was your ambiguous anarchist utopia, The Dispossessed, which I read travelling around the Hebrides and the Orgney Islands in Scotland that summer. On that trip, you went from being my favourite fantasy writer to my favourite fantasy and sci-fi writer. The Dispossessed gave a paradigmatic upgrade to my understanding of what science fiction can be, it should be, and raised the bar I set other authors to clear. Not many ever did. Reading you, I realised that the sci-fi authors I had read were so incredibly male. You can practically smell the crusty tissues. You'll physicist Chevek from The Dispossessed, while male and straightish, is at ease with his feminine side in ways I found revelatory, revelatory for my young male self as well as for fixing itself. The Dispossessed shows the value of thinking about every major character's sexuality in any narrative. Of course, the ambigen-de-gathenians in your visionary, precedent left under darkness take gender fluidity to a level all its own. A raw sexuality doesn't feature overtly in every narrative. If the author hasn't considered it, that narrative's characters are missing something vital. To this day, I follow your lead. So thanks for that. As an English major at college, I wrote my third-year thesis on your work. as in your entire work. Now I think my subject was the journey in Urshala Lagoon, which was an absurd theme. I mean a journey isn't even a theme, is it? Just as famously, time is what stops everything happening all at once. A journey is what stops everything happening all in one place. I mean what narrative doesn't include a journey of some kind. I'm glad you never read that thesis. No one else ever read it either. As Brits say, it was a total pile of pretentious pants. But still, I'm glad you wrote it. It gave me a reason to read everything of yours, then infant, from Recanon's world all the way to always coming home via deep cuts and deep dives, the laith of heaven or sinny and tales. Very far away from anywhere else. I always liked that one. To find that some of your earlier work was not as accomplished as some of your later work, but as also of encouragement, not disappointment. The writer's truest teacher is their own work over the course of a career, if you're lucky. Young artists don't always understand that the way of the artist is diagonal. And you showed me that. So thanks for that. In 2010, I was on book tour in the US for a novel of mine set in Tokugawa, here in Japan. My thought for the American publicists knew how much I revered you. And so before I went to Portland for my event at Powell's book store, she reached out to you to ask if you'd meet me before my event. I wish I'd asked you why you said yes. Maybe I was afraid it would look as if I was fishing for a compliment. Maybe you'd read Cloud Atlas and Maccurious. I just don't know. But you did say yes. And suddenly, magically and expectedly, there you were, in a big upstairs stock room at Powell's, filmed with late afternoon sunshine as I remember it. The event organized at left as a loan and you looked at this lanky young nervy to be meeting as her own English guy. And with an amused face said, "Oh, an assignation!" I just checked your age in 2010. You were 81 years old. I'm laughing now, 15 years later, just thinking about it. And that memory is one of my most precious. I can't really remember much of what we talked about. It was just a fact you'd given me, mean me, an afternoon and an evening of your life. You stayed for my event too. I remember looking up during my reading and seeing you watching me and thinking, "Okay, if I die now, I won't have any complaints." Thinking back now, maybe there's no mystery at all. You met me that day because you could, because it was kind, because you understood how important your books were to younger writers who came after you. And because you knew, we'd always remember that encounter. And you were right, I do. So thanks for that. Sometimes it is okay to meet your heroes or your heroines. For the last few years, I've enjoyed some zooms and email exchanges with your son, Theo, who was a very fine human, by the way. Good job. One time I told him about reading the review, you gave my realist fantasy novel The Bone Clocks in 2015. I said it was like having my homework looked over by God. And he said something like, "Huh, what do you think it was like being me? I had my homework looked over by God every single day. You had it easy, Mitchell." Or something like that. Your review was kind though. You did want more fantasy and less realism. I emailed you a few weeks later just to thank you for taking the time to read my book and you sent this gracious reply. You described your review as perhaps a little "pursnickety." I'd never use that rare and delightful word made of past snip and snicker. But occasionally I do now, and always I think of you. Pursnickety. Thanks for that. The Pursnickety email was the last time it communicated directly. I didn't want to take even one minute more from your final decade. Wikipedia insists that you left this world in 2018. But it feels as if you're still here, or out there, somewhere in orbit, at the other end of an answerable. I still read Earthsea in the heinous books every few years. You're my most reread author, easily. There's no contest. And like bringing my eye up close to a large polished opal or a chunk of Lebradoite, I find new things in these familiar texts, new colours, new accents, new rhymes. I meet past and future versions of me reading those same pages. As I get older, I understand it better. Those sober, mature, later visits to Earthsea. Books like Tehanu, Tales of Mertzzi, The Other Wind, which kind of undoes the farthest shore. You write about love and death and acceptance. And you help me consider my own life. And what I think about love and death and acceptance, like a conversation. So thanks for that too. And now, from out of the blue in 2025, Theo asks me to read your first blog and to come up with this response. What an honor to be given. What a gift these blogs are. One final Asignation, eh? Warmest from your lifelong admirer, David. Thank you for listening to In Your Spare Time. Our thanks to this week's reader. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and share this episode with friends. You can find us and Ursula's blog online and in the socials act, Ursula K. Le Guin. This week's podcast was collected in the book No Time to Spare, available in print and ebook from Harper Perennial. And as an audiobook from the courted books, this case was recorded with permission of recording books and imprint of our media. In Your Spare Time is brought to you by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation and produced by Richard Stewart Perkins, Molly Templeton, and Theo Dalton Gwyne. Our theme music was composed and performed by Todd Barton. We'll see you next week on In Your Spare Time.