A Larger Reality with Theo Downes-Le Guin

Ursula K Le Guin’s earliest years as a writer were spent partly in the Napa Valley, which became the ‘ur-place’ in her imagination. In a talk illustrated with photos and images from the family archive, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Le Guin’s son and head of the Ursula K Le Guin Foundation, will discuss his mother's family life in California and consider how the landscape influenced her upbringing, sense of place and her use of map-making as part of her process of imagination and writing. During summers on the ranch, Le Guin had both solitude and time with an expansive circle of scholars, artists and her Indigenous ‘uncles’ that her parents brought together. These influences ripple throughout her oeuvre as recurrent themes of place-finding and explorations of power and injustice.

Theo will be joined in conversation with Sarah Shin and So Mayer, editors of , which will be available to purchase at the event.

Theo Downes-Le Guin is President of the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation, which continues Le Guin’s legacy of supporting writers and readers of fiction and poetry through programmes such as an annual book prize. Downes-Le Guin also consults on adaptations of his mother’s work. , an exhibition curated by Downes-Le Guin currently on display at Oregon Contemporary, presents a biographical and poetical portrait of Ursula Le Guin, examining important moments and themes in her life and oeuvre. From 2013 to 2020, Downes-Le Guin directed a contemporary art gallery, curating more than 80 exhibitions; he continues to curate independently. Previously he worked in public policy and technology market research. Downes-Le Guin holds degrees in art history and applied social research methods.

So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. With Sarah Shin, they co-edited Ursula K Le Guin, Space Crone (Silver Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Locus Award for Non-Fiction. They are the author of two works of creative non-fiction, Bad Language (Peninsula, 2025) and A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020); a Republic of Consciousness-longlisted collection of speculative (non)-fiction, Truth & Dare (Cipher, 2023); and poetry projects including The God Files: Yentling (2024) with Sarah Crewe, raising funds for #Valentines-4Palestine. They are the editor of catflap #5 for Outburst Arts, and of Culture Club, the webzine of queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes.

Sarah Shin explores dreams, myth, cosmic speculation and transformation through writing, research, publishing and curation. A serial collaborator, her current partnerships include: The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin exhibition at the Architectural Association and book edited with So Mayer; with Irene Revell, the Bodies of Sound book and curatorial project; with Sammy Lee, Mirror, a polymorphous journey through a mythical world of correspondences; and with Mark Lowe, Concrete Poetry, encompassing writing and architecture. She is among the founders of Silver Press, the feminist publisher, and Spiral House, a new imprint for art, poetry and ways of knowing; Ignota, the creative publishing and curatorial house that closed in 2024; New Suns literary festival at the Barbican Centre; and Standard Deviation, a multidisciplinary collective exploring the coincidence of psychic, geometric and inhabited spaces.

Image: The Rivers That Run into the Inland Sea, published in Always Coming Home (1985) © The Ursula K Le Guin Foundation, courtesy of Theo Downes-Le Guin.

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