From Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand
In 2015, when she was 86, Ursula K. Le Guin recalled on her blog how, three decades earlier, she had arrived home from a book tour “so strung out” that her husband suggested she go to the Oregon coast to spend a few days by herself:
He put me in a nice little run-down motel, kitchenette and geraniums, two blocks from the ocean. I didn’t speak to anybody but the grocery store clerk for three days. I spent them walking or sitting on the beach. In the evening I’d wander back to my room and sit down with a shot of bourbon to call Charles before I made dinner. Dr Le Guin’s Pacific Therapy worked. It wasn’t too long after that that we bought a house, a few blocks from that motel, so we could both do beach retreats, jointly or in solitude — with a kitchen that had more than two saucepans, one lid, no teapot, and those damn serrated motel knives that won’t cut butter.
The home they bought was in Cannon Beach, Oregon, a resort community with a population of about 1,500. In an interview she told Watt Childress, the owner of the local bookstore:
Our little house is a wonderful, quiet place to work. Also a very good house for dreams, many people who’ve slept there have told me that. Dreams and the kind of writing I do have some connection. One morning when I was waking up in our Cannon Beach bedroom, the whole idea of one of the Earthsea books came to me as the light grew. When I got up, it was daylight and I had a novel to write.
I wrote most of Searoad, and the first Catwings, and large parts of many other books, and many, many poems, here in Cannon Beach. The sound of the sea is a good sound for a poet to have in her ears.
During the late 1980s and early ’90s, Le Guin wrote the stories that make up Searoad, which is set not in Cannon Beach but in Klatsand, a much smaller fictional town resembling many of the communities along the Oregon Coast Highway. While she worked on the pieces that make up the story cycle, Le Guin wrote the following poem describing the solitude and isolation of the coastline; it was privately published in the illustrated chapbook No Boats and reprinted in the Library of America edition of her collected poems:
At Cannon Beach
The day goes out grey
with the low tide,
still, cold: twilight
colorless under cloud.
I have not said a word
aloud all day.
Sounds cease.
Silence, solitude,
peace.
One selection in Searoad, “The Ship Ahoy,” is set at the most rundown of the three motels in Klatsand, and we’ve featured it at our Story of the Week site, along with a brief introduction describing the publication of the book.
Read “The Ship Ahoy,” by Ursula K. Le Guin
“At Cannon Beach” © 1991 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Reprinted by arrangement with The Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust.
