(Ursula Le Guin: “We will need writers who can remember freedom.” Click.) We asked Le Guin about the speech, the new edition of Steering the Craft, and why exactly the word fucking is, as she writes in the book, “a really big tick.”

“I think hard times are coming,” Le Guin said into the microphone after accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, “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.” In what was one of very few National Book Awards speeches to go viral, Le Guin uttered one line in particular, “We will need writers who can remember freedom,” that seemed to get cut-and-pasted into tweets en masse, stopping many in their Twitter-scanning tracks. Since last November, when she delivered those arresting remarks at the National Book Awards, Le Guin has become something of a moral authority on the weird, chaotic situation we’re in. Le Guin, but by another person of the same name.” Playboy printed it. It read: “It is commonly suspected that the writings of U. “At once, I saw the whole panorama of U.K.’s life,” Le Guin remembered, “as a gaucho in Patagonia, a stevedore in Marseilles, a safari leader in Kenya, a light-heavyweight prizefighter in Chicago, and the abbot of a Coptic monastery in Algeria.” Eventually, Le Guin did submit an author bio.

“Unwilling to terrify these vulnerable people,” Le Guin wrote, “I told Virginia to tell them sure, that’s fine.” After a couple of weeks, Playboy asked for an author bio. _Playboy’_s editors responded that they would still like to publish the story, but asked if they could print only Le Guin’s initials, lest their readers be frightened by a female byline. “When it was accepted,” Le Guin wrote of her agent, “she revealed the horrid truth.” The horrid truth, of course, was that the two initials at the front of her pen name, U. Her agent, Virginia Kidd, had sent the story, “Nine Lives,” a work of science fiction in which most of the characters were men, to the magazine’s fiction editor. Le Guin once recounted in an essay for The New Yorker an anecdote about submitting a short story to Playboy in the late sixties.

Steering the craft by ursula k le guin