I would never have proposed this exhibition in her lifetime. This is, after all, a writer who said in an interview, “Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.”
PORTLAND — Under an acrylic case in an exhibition I curated about my mother, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), sits the first typewriter she purchased. Compact and impossibly heavy, the machine comes from an era of word production so distant as to feel alien. The keyboard has no exclamation point. To create the favorite punctuation of tyrants and optimists, one must type an apostrophe, then backspace and type a period.
The Underwood waited in my parents’ attic for decades as Ursula and the world moved on to electronic typewriters and eventually to computers. I hoped visitors to A Larger Reality, at Oregon Contemporary through February 8, could experience a little of the residual magic that I find clings to it, pecking out whatever they please, taking home the original and leaving a carbon copy for posterity.
Ursula K. Le Guin's Underwood typewriter (photo by Mario Gallucci, courtesy Oregon Contemporary)
I’m happiest when the case is removed and the gallery is filled with the sound of metal meeting paper. Visitors who’ve never used a manual typewriter, or who don’t touch type, peck tentatively. Others engage physically, producing the familiar percussive clack-clack sound of my childhood. Either way, I feel I’m sharing not just a machine but a sacred trust with strangers who love my mother’s writing and words in general.
People type poetry, memoir, fiction, epistles, articles, political statements, and fan mail on the Underwood. Some offer short tributes to Ursula or variations on “I can’t believe I’m typing on Ursula K. Le Guin’s typewriter.” Others compose prose or poetry on the spot. A few write nothing, go home to draft several pages, and return later to type something polished.
A scan of one of Le Guin's replies to fan mail (image courtesy Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation)
One visitor’s letter wondered how Ursula would feel knowing that her writing and cultural presence are no longer her own after death. The question is apt for me as curator and literary executor. Even a very private writer, while she is alive, exercises a restraining influence on people’s ability to misinterpret her words or life story. I can take comfort in my mother’s respect for the agency and necessity of readers in creating literature. For many years, her stock fan mail reply was a thank-you note, in her handwriting, acknowledging that “a book is just a box of words until a reader opens it.”
Over the past year, I’ve experienced cycles of grief and joy as I pored over my mother’s letters, manuscripts, and drawings to exhibit. I listened to hours of her voice, recreated an oak tree from her childhood and the room she wrote in from my childhood home. Curating an exhibition about your parent is a strange experience. Many visitors intuit this; the most common question I’m asked about the exhibition is what my mother would think about it.
Muralist Ursula Barton's 38-foot-long (~11.6-meter-long) painting of a dragon on the gallery walls (photo by Mario Gallucci, courtesy Oregon Contemporary)
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