Proctor, Andrew
Proctor is the executive director of Literary Arts, which has been awarded a grant from the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation to promote public involvement and serves as an adviser to the Portland Monuments Project. Portland is where he resides.
Portland has started to consider our public monuments and the narrative they convey. A long-overdue conversation about our community’s ideals and the gaps in our foundation myths has been sparked by the statues that were toppled during the city’s racial justice demonstrations four years ago. The narrative of our city must shift in order for us to go ahead, addressing both the happy and sad parts of our history, such as colonization, laws that exclude people of color, and the forced relocation of communities of color by the government.
But let’s not overlook Portland’s rich cultural and artistic heritage when we think about its story. We have very few permanent public reminders of the important contributions artists have made, even though we pride ourselves on being a creative city and are proud of our local arts community. Portland is known as a book town, but aside from the sculpture garden at Grant Park dedicated to Beverly Cleary, there aren’t many monuments to our writers.
The first step the city may take to address this omission is to honor Ursula K. Le Guin, one of Portland’s most influential writers. Arguably Oregon’s most well-known author, Le Guin, has had her books translated into more than 40 languages, contributed significantly to world culture, and won several honors. Le Guin, who passed away in 2018, created worlds like Earthsea, a multicultural archipelago where naming things was magical, and pioneered a new literary genre that addressed social issues in fanciful settings. She created Gethen, a planet where gender is flexible rather than set, departing from the viewpoint of heroic males. She made what appeared to be utopias come to life before exposing their fundamental defects. With her feet firmly set in Portland, a flawed city currently looking for a route ahead, she did just that.
In 1959, Le Guin relocated to Portland. She remembers flying up from Berkeley with a toddler on her lap and expecting her second child in a 2016 New Yorkers feature. I was moved to tears by the sight of the plane as it circled the city and flew low up the Willamette Valley. “My God,” I thought, “I’m going to live there.” Far from the New York literary establishment, which did not appreciate her work and would take half a century to realize the importance of her vision, she found a haven of safety and support in Portland. She has dozens of other societies and lifestyles in mind. She writes about the majority of the social and ethical issues that confront us now with tremendous insight, compassion, moral complexity, tenderness, and open-minded honesty. These issues include political polarization, environmental degradation and migration, political violence, societal destabilization through technology, and more. Le Guin supported underrepresented groups and was involved in a wide range of causes, including feminism and the well-being of artists.
Why is it appropriate to pay tribute to authors while we are creating a new civic narrative? In the 2018 documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, directed by Arwen Curry, Le Guin stated:
People are taught through imaginative storytelling that there are alternative ways to be and accomplish things. It is good and the way we must be, and there is more than one civilization.
We are inspired to imagine, ponder, and change by public memorials to authors and artists. At any moment, but especially today when Portland rebuilds and reinvents itself, it is crucial. They have the power to transform a location’s narrative as artistic manifestations of our beliefs, motivating not just adults but also children who are growing up in their community.
By transforming the house where Le Guin lived and wrote into a residency program, my group, Literary Arts, is contributing to the preservation of her legacy. For brief stays, writers from around the nation and the world will be invited to live and write in the house while interacting with the local population. Le Guin’s legacy of ingenuity and volunteerism will endure. However, this is a rather private expression, and in order to properly honor one of Oregon’s finest artists, the city ought to present its own public complement.
Statues on a plinth are not the only type of monument. If one were built in Le Guin’s name, I believe it’s safe to assume she wouldn’t approve. Instead, like the Beverly Cleary memorial, which showcases the cherished characters from her novels, why not focus on Le Guin’s rich imagination? What if we placed a 25-foot dragon guarding Portland’s civic living room at the Leif Erikson entrance of Forest Park or encircled it by a column in Pioneer Courthouse Square? Such a memorial would engage Le Guin’s imagination in a dynamic conversation with our citizens rather than reducing her rich legacy to a statue that stops her in time and limits how we remember her contribution.
Knowing and working with Le Guin through her involvement with Literary Arts was an honor for me in my career. I can attest to her appreciation of the power of the imagination and the inclusion of the arts. She digested our nation’s injustices through her creative imagination, turning them into novels in which her characters could pursue justice and reestablish equilibrium. She felt empowered by writing, and she thought that others could too.
Le Guin stated, “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope,” when she accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. We will require authors with the ability to recall freedom, such as poets, visionaries, and realists of a broader reality.
Those authors have always been with us, sharing our values and narrating our stories. There are many significant storytellers in Portland’s past and present. In order to encourage us all to envision a better future rather than to commemorate the past, we should erect stunning and striking public reminders of their achievements.
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