Within the UK and USA the price you see is the price you pay - you won't be charged any extra fees. Gough, Noel. 1998. “Reflections and Diffractions: Functions of Fiction in Curriculum Inquiry.” In Curriculum: Toward New Identities, edited by William F. Pinar, 93–127. New York, NY: Garland Publishing Inc. She explains that in perpetuating the tradition of telling stories in a linear way we miss out so much ‘stuff’, parts of the story that don’t fit the ordained narrative perhaps or aspects of ourselves or experiences that aren’t seen as relevant to the story we are writing. Plenty of stories have conflict to the max. I love looking at the Hero’s Journey. And I love horror movies and westerns and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the tortured psychodramas of Tennessee Williams. Haraway, Donna J. 2014. “ SF: String Figures, Multispecies Muddles, Staying with the Trouble.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1uTVnhIHS8.

Gough, Noel. 2010. “Performing Imaginative Inquiry: Narrative Experiments and Rhizosemiotic Play.” In Imagination in Educational Theory and Practice: A Many-sided Vision, edited by Thomas William Nielsen, Rob Fitzgerald, and Mark Fettes, 42–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Her best books are the first three Earthsea novels, which reached British audiences during the glory days of Puffin in the early 1970s. They had it all. An archipelago of islands in a world where there are dragons and wizards, sea voyages, dark worship of the powers of death. Writing for children pushed Le Guin slightly against her natural inclinations in three respects. It forced her to do plot. It also made her dampen the cultural relativism of her SF: Earthsea does have different peoples with different skin colours and different islands with their own cultures, but in a relatively low-key way. The main thing it did, though, was to enable her to draw on big Arthurian myths (dragons, kings-in-waiting, multiple Merlins), which sent her imagination into overdrive. Writing for children also had less liberating consequences: Earthsea has more conservative intellectual foundations than her writing for adults from the same period. Wizards of Earthsea get their power by speaking the Old Speech, or ‘the language of the making’, by which Earthsea and all in it were summoned into being in the first place. This remains the natural language of dragons, but can be learned by (male) wizards. The language-magic of Earthsea has its roots in the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, which Le Guin described as ‘my father’s favourite book’. She published an English version in 1997: Fisher, Elizabeth. 1979. Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press. The students who signed up were asked to find 3 objects which were somehow related to their research or to the experience of doing their doctorate, put them in a bag and bring them to the online pop-up session. These objects could be linked in practical ways (eg a coffee cup used every day), academically (a favourite book) or for more esoteric reasons related to reflections, memories, dreams, conversations or experiences that were meaningful to them even if tangential to the actual business of writing a doctorate. Bailey, John. 1991. The Search for Signs of Inteligent Life in the Universe. Los Angeles, CA: Orion Classics.I am definitely going to be buying more Danielle Nicole Disney bags, god bless this woman for making them. Right now I’m about to tweet and ask her to make Maleficent bags because she is my all time favourite Disney Villain.

But sometimes we need more than goodies and baddies, or triumph and defeat – not least as in someone’s defeat lies resentment and the seeds of future conflict.The conversations stimulated by these objects and activities were fascinating, informative and insightful, although private to the group who participated so I will not share them here. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1997. “enlightenment@science_wars.com: A Personal Reflection on Love and War.” Social Text 15(1): 123–129. doi: 10.2307/466820. Barad, Karen M. 2008. “Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman, 120–154. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

The advantage that children’s fiction has over other types of writing is its near irresistible appeal to the reader to identify directly with its characters. This gives it a kind of directive power which fiction for adults tends to avoid: the greatest children’s fiction can lead its readers into a dark hall with dim mirrors on the wall, which leave you wondering where or who you are. Even now, reading about Ged’s loss of power, provokes the same temptation I felt when I was ten – to see myself as him: surely there is nothing here a grumpy late-middle-aged man hasn’t felt, I think privately. You see the world change around you in ways you don’t quite get, you fight it, feel the power go, and then decide the only thing you can still do is look after the goats – at which Ged turns out to be pretty good. But always in Le Guin there is a sharp ironical turn against any reader who wants to be a hero. Ged without his powers is a self-pitying mess who doesn’t realise that he still knows what he knows, even if he can no longer control the winds with words. And anyway, Le Guin makes us ask, what’s wrong with looking after goats? I relate this to something Ocean Vuong says in a 2019 podcast, where he is critical of the dominance of conflict-driven plots in the conventions of creative writing: Næss, Arne. 2005. “Creativity and Gestalt Thinking.” In The Selected Works of Arne Næss, edited by Harold Glasser and Alan R. Drengson. The Netherlands: Springer.Wagner, Jane. 2012. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers Inc. Original edition, Original screenplay published in 1986. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures). Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.