I've started reading Ursula K. LeGuin's Steering the Craft, a book that I had feared since the day after I impulsively bought it during the high of believing I could be a writer for the fourteenth time, around October of last year. This lithe, extremely sharply bound little book of perhaps 170 pages sat in my to-read pile, mocking me every time I guiltily moved it to the bottom of the stack, willing it out of existence for another couple of weeks while I read something I knew I would enjoy instead of simply wallowing in the guilt of buying a book of an author I openly (somewhat famously, in my friend group, at least) hate.

But of course, then comes the question: Why, Gabe? Why do you hate one of the most beloved authors of the 20th century with such a passion that you dismiss anything she writes out of hand as "not for me"?

The answer lies in the teacher that almost broke my love of reading: my 8th grade gifted¹ English teacher Mrs. H----. I walked into her class not an incredible student, and in fact an incredibly lazy one, but one that with the proper motivation could be an excellent reader and writer, along with whatever subject they happened to have a good teacher for (Shoutouts to Dr. Conway and Mr. Brower, two of the best teachers I ever had and who made me love chemistry and calculus, respectively). You see, I was the kind of kid who, properly applied, was dangerous: wicked smart, but lazy as all get-out, and refusing to budge on what they cared about and what they didn't. Mrs. H---- didn't care in the slightest about what I wanted, though, or what motivated me; she was as mean as a stereotypical middle school English teacher comes: zero flexibility for late assignments, zero tolerance for alternative interpretations of the text, an assigner of mountains of nightly reading at a relentless pace.

Now, there is a chance I remember this devil-woman far worse than she actually was; after all, I was an impressionable and moody 14 at the time I took her class, and watching my parents' relationship strain under the pressures of the hyperactive tornado that was my kid brother and nearly monthly international work trips. My monthly routine consisted of one parent being gone the first week of the month, the other gone the third, Boy Scouts, piano lessons, ever-increasing piles of schoolwork I simply did not care about, and increasing pressure to apply myself so that I'd get into a good high school so that I'd get into a good college so I wouldn't be homeless by 28 so I wouldn't be dead by 30. However, even trying to remove my adolescent piss-colored glasses from the memories I have of that class, I struggle to remember one single solitary thing I liked about it, other than maybe the flute player I sat two chairs back from on whom I had a massive crush. Mrs. H---- assigned partners for assignments based on who you sat next to, and I sat next to a kid who was a smooth talker but as lousy at getting anything done as I was; the difference was that he managed to convince me that it was my turn to do the work, every time, and I usually listened. We still turned all our shit in late of course, because the only person in the room with less executive function than him was me, but suffice to say there was essentially nothing worth remembering about that class.

And for reasons I today cannot piece together, she assigned us LeGuin's Gifts, a young adult novel about coming of age and inheriting powers that are too terrifying to understand and too much for a child to bear. Frankly, looking back at it now it feels very much like the distillation of everything LeGuin is revered for: it's a terse story (274 pages), built into a rich world that you only ever see a glimpse of giving your brain plenty of space to fill in the corners of the map, and it deals in deeply ancient magic that isn't easily buttoned up behind spellbooks and cauldrons and brooms and magic words and shit. It's deep magic: the kind of stuff that feels like it oozes out of the roots of a million-foot-tall tree, the kind that whispers on the air or shimmers in the water. It's a kind of unknowable magic that I think bothered the ever-loving shit out of me at the time because I was the spellbooks and oogly-moogly magic kid. I was a massive Potterhead (much to my own modern-day embarrassment) and even though the magic was just as squishy and ill-defined as in, say, Earthsea, I felt it was "superior" because it was just so richly detailed and explicated and hell there were fancy magic words! Of course, the difference is that Earthsea and its ilk are built around this inherent lack of definition: it makes the magic feel much greater than any individual character. A "Voldemort" can't exist in Earthsea, because no one person could harness that kind of power. It's like trying to be the man who's read every book or watched every YouTube video, there's too much for any one mind or spirit to bear.

But my feeling of superiority over these silly books about magic where the characters don't even recite spells(!!) made me hate Gifts. I hated it so much that I refused to do the assigned reading. I was an early internet kid and managed to find plot summaries of each chapter on some fan site, so I was able to read a paragraph instead of 30 pages and get the gist of what happened. I limped along through daily reading quizzes (Mrs. H---- was ruthless) for the better part of a month, managing to score just high enough to continue skirting under the radar while not absorbing one goddamn word of the book. I was so proud of myself. Until it came time to write the final assignment: an essay on (and I don't know why I remember it to this day) whether the main character was justified in walking away from his family and community at the end. By the way, if you haven't read the book: the answer is an emphatic yes. The kid lived in an abusive community who gaslit him into thinking he killed his own dog. Fuck that shit.

And I had spent so long cliffs-notesing my way through the book that I forgot it in my locker the weekend before the paper was due. I distinctly remember having to sheepishly ask my dad to drive me to the local Narnes and Boble, purveyor of average books for housewives, so that I could buy a copy of this book I hadn't read. I had to flip through the thing at breakneck speed looking for quotes to back up the point that yes of course this child should have left his abusive community. I went from merely thinking this book was dumb and not worth my time to building an entire room in my mind palace dedicated to hating this fucking book.

Thus began my quiet hatred of Ursula K. LeGuin. It took me thirteen years - THIRTEEN YEARS - to read another book of hers. I finally read A Wizard of Earthsea when it was recommended to me on my Kindle, and I decided to give her a go. And my previous experience with her writing made me hate every goddamn word, but I got through it, I think partially because I was so adamant to prove to myself that her writing sucks. I had to convince myself she must suck because that was the attitude I walked in with...I should go try Earthsea again, huh?

And now I go back to my thoughts about her work and cringe. Obviously it's not her fault that her books found me at exactly the wrong time, pushed by exactly the wrong person. And this takes me back to Steering the Craft. I started reading it last night at around 11:30 PM because I couldn't sleep, and figured that I would fall asleep reading my least favorite author on Earth. It was a brilliant plan, until I found myself still awake at 2 AM, smiling like an idiot and thoroughly enjoying every last word of her treatise on good writing. She's writing about writing, and I'm eating it up! What the fuck?

So now I'm staring at this gorgeous little book. It's got a beautiful, simple design: surgically straight corners, a foldback soft cover with a red-to-blue gradient, creamy paper, a sumptuous readable font. God it's so pretty to hold. And now I'm going to read it and do the fucking exercises, what's wrong with me?

I guess I'm going to do it publicly because I am doing all my writing publicly right now, and it is scary, but I'm excited. Hopefully you'll see my attempts at her suggested writing assignments soon!

Today's Photo

Film grain and Agfa film simulation, fuck you! This is a house near the office I'm working out of right now, goddamn what a gorgeous little house.