Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Ursula Le Guin's home is a mail-order house. The original owners bought the plans for a pittance, hired local craftsmen, then had it built high on a hill above the city in 1899. It turned out to be a good deal all around.
"It's a very well-built house," says Le Guin, author of the famed Earthsea fantasy series. It sold millions and is often compared to C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
The turn-of-the-century bungalow has proven such good shelter that Le Guin, 76, has lived here happily with her husband, Charles, since 1959, raising their three children in a leafy neighborhood where dog lovers walk yellow Labs and side yards bloom with roses.
The good life.
Although a notoriously private person, Le Guin gladly shows off the home that has served as her muse for almost 50 years. (Charles and their cat, Zorro, were "up in the attic hiding.")
It's easy to see why Le Guin has stayed put.
From the second-floor window of her 6-foot-square study is an amazing view of Mount St. Helens, 80 miles north in Washington state.
And, no, she didn't get much work done when St. Helens erupted in 1980, killing 57 people.
"I just sat at the window," says Le Guin. Even on this day she's transfixed by the volcano. "She's smoking just a wee bit, isn't she?"
Le Guin thinks her tiny corner writing nook was originally a sewing room. Then it was her son's bedroom. "But I kicked him out," she says. "I sent him to the attic, which he loved."
The small space is filled with stuffed animals from her childhood ("They're good lions!"), little boxes, postcards, photographs, pieces of driftwood and tins of pens. Open on the desk is a notebook filled with Latin. She's translating Virgil as an intellectual exercise.
But when Le Guin finishes her daily writing, or translating, in what she describes as her "one person at a time" office, the view doesn't go away. A wraparound porch circling the first-floor dining room in the back of the house offers a similar view. She calls it "a riverboat's rear end," a place where "the family spent a lot of time over the years."
Although Le Guin's work often deals in fantasy, her home is no-nonsense. The immaculate kitchen has a 1950s feel to it, right down to the old white GE appliances.
And the dark woodwork throughout gives the house an Arts and Crafts feel. There's even a wood and leather-seat William Morris chair (Le Guin refinished it) by the living room fireplace, where she and Charles read in the evening.
"I grew up in an Arts and Crafts house in Berkeley, so it just seems natural to me," she says.
Large landscapes hang here and there, works of art she calls "bar paintings. You know, the kind that hang over a bar."
"We just like them."
Hints of Le Guin's sense of humor are sprinkled around. On the bulletin board over the telephone table hang photo postcards, one showing nothing but the rear ends of a woman and her dog, another of four nude men. "You just know they're Germans, don't you?"
She even writes notes to herself, like the one posted over her computer upstairs in her office. "Pull your chair up, Fathead!
Her husband is the gardener of the family, filling the yard with roses and vegetables and dozens of other lush green things that love Portland's climate.
"I just enjoy it," she says. "I sit in it and watch him slave away."
Not that Le Guin hasn't made a contribution now and then. A fan presented her once with a blue ceramic dragon.
"And what do you do with a blue dragon but put it in the garden?" she asks. It has been there a while now, weathered and slightly battered with a broken tail.
Although she grew up in the Bay Area, she has grown fond of Portland. She came here when her husband got a teaching job. He retired from Portland State's history department a decade ago.
"It's a really nice place to live. It's a real city, but it isn't very big."
She thinks she'll stick around.
The house is "too big for us now, but where would I go?" she asks. "Who would watch after her?"
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
