“The Art of Words” 15/31 #SOL2024

My mind is still spinning threads of wisdom and writing advice from Ursula Le Guin this week which prompted a flashback to a soundcloud audio file that I had used in a grade 12 English class. In the clip, Le Guin speaks to a large audience of writers in defence of arts over profits. This was 2014; she was accepting National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This was ten years ago, yet this seems increasingly more relevant today, and all of this connects with another Slicer’s post. After reading Mr. Fornale’s blog post, “Literary Profecy” I felt this tension between naive optimism and skeptical realism.

“We will need writers who can remember freedom. poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. We need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Resistance and change often begin in art and very often in our art – the art of words.”

Coincidentally, I had coffee and walked with a friend, (Cathy, who happens to be a librarian) then we made our way to the local bookstore. The owner of the bookstore specializes in translations and tries to focus on small print publications. Cathy picked up Denison Avenue which I blogged about here, and she started talking about the convergence of forms and the ways that new writers are resisting traditional narratives. A student told Cathy that they had read all five of the Canada Reads books and told her to “ignore all the other books” and to “just read this one because it’s the best”.

This felt like a strange weaving of Le Guin’s advice – “resistance and change begin in…the art of words.”