The National Book Awards happened last night. The prize for fiction went to Redeployment, Phil Klay’s collection of short stories about the Iraq War and its aftermath. This was a bit of an upset—I suspected that the award would go to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. The award for young people’s literature went to the book that I (and many others) predicted: Jacquelyn Woodson’s excellent Brown Girl Dreaming. (Go buy a copy now.) Awards for poetry and nonfiction were also awarded, to Louise Gluck and Evan Osnos, respectively.
But the night really belonged to sci-fi/fantasy master Ursula K. Le Guin, who was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The award was presented to her by Neil Gaiman, and Le Guin proceeded to give a short but fearless speech that was, for many, the highlight of the evening.
Le Guin began with a shot at the literary elitism and anti-genre attitudes that too often prevail at literary awards:
I rejoice at accepting [this award] for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
Boom. From there, Le Guin went on to diagnose what she sees as a problematic treatment of literature as a commodity rather than an art in culture and in the publishing industry at large—and if you think it didn’t take bravery to say this stuff, remember that Le Guin was talking to an entire roomful of prominent publishing professionals!
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.
Le Guin’s diagnosed the issues in the publishing industry thus:
I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write.
She didn’t call out Amazon by name, but they’re the “profiteer” mentioned above—one of the profiteers who Le Guin believes is selling art like deodorant, and telling publishers what to publish and writers what to write. (In this point she was echoing what she’d told Laura Miller more pointedly the day before, at Salon.)
Apparently not content to throw down with literary elitism and the most powerful players in the publishing industry, toward the end of her speech Le Guin turned her attention toward capitalism itself:
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.
Really, it was a great speech. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings” is a powerful call to arms that deserves to spread far and wide. Write it down; emblazon it on your walls.
Also, read good books—and if you’ve never read one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s before, hers are a fantastic place to start. She’s the kind of writer we need more of, a “realist of a larger reality” who can see beyond the limitations of our fearful, greedy society and imagine some real grounds for hope.
For someone who speaks so passionately about the freedom to publish and express, it is unfortunate that she did not address the radical revolution in publishing that is providing true freedom to authors: self-publishing. With the ability to directly publish our own words through ebooks and print-on-demand, there is more freedom than ever to put new ideas and stories out there and directly reach readers without having to overcome the hurdles of the traditional gatekeepers (including the sales departments of publishers).
It is not profit motive that gets in the way of this new found freedom, it is the all too human tendency to resist new ways of doing things, including the publishers who have resisted the adoption of ebooks by pricing them too high to protect their paper book sales. But fortunately the publishers are being dis-intermediated and writers can now much more directly reach their audience. The only two parties that are fundamentally necessary in this new world of self-publishing are the writers and the readers. All other services from editing to retailing to formatting and design can be hired out directly by the writer, and in this way the writer keeps complete control of their own words. This is the true freedom a writer seeks, and it is too bad that Ms. LeGuin did not address this profound shift in the publishing world.
And contrary to the assumptions in her speech, Amazon has been a driving force behind this newly won freedom for writers.