The Carrier Bag

Welcome to the Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm your host, Stentor Danielson (they/them). Today we'll be looking at Le Guin's first professional publication, the short story "April in Paris," published in 1962 in the magazine Fantastic . She was paid $30, which is the equivalent of $280 today. That's not too far off the current rate of $.08 per word paid today by Amazing Stories, which absorbed Fantastic in the 80s. It was the first "genre" piece, that is, a work of science fiction or fantasy, that she had written since age 12. It was republished along with her other early genre short stories in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters in 1975. This is a story about two men living in the same apartment in Paris five centuries apart. Barry Pennywither is a professor in 1961 who has gotten a leave from teaching to come to Paris to do archival research. Jehan Lenoir is an alchemist in 1482, work...

 Welcome to the Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm your host, Stentor Danielson (they/them). In this episode I'll be talking about Le Guin's first two published works. "Folk Song from the Montayna Province" is a short poem published in the Fall 1959 issue of the Prairie Poet , and "An die Musik" is a short story published in 1961 in the Western Humanities Review . She was not paid for either of them, so they predate her career as a professional writer. They were both republished in the Library of America collection The Complete Orsinia , which is the easiest place to find them today. Both of these works are set in the first major fictional world that Le Guin created, the central European country of Orsinia. I'll have a lot more to say about Orsinia when we get to the publication of her story collection Orsinian Tales and her novel Malafrena . For now, we can say that Orsinia is a quasi-realist setti...

 Welcome to the Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm your host, Stentor Danielson (they/them). For this introductory episode, I want to introduce the goals of this podcast, say a little about myself, and talk about the essay the podcast takes its name from: "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction." Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the most influential writers of science fiction and fantasy of the second half of the twentieth century. She also wrote a large body of poems, literary essays, children's books, and realist fiction. The core of this podcast will be a series of examinations of each of Le Guin's notable works, moving in generally but not strictly chronological order. Sprinkled in with it will be consideration of other authors inspired or influenced by her work, reader reactions and fan works, and scholarly analyses. Right now this podcast is just me, but if it becomes a big enough enterprise I may also bring on some ...

 Welcome to The Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin, hosted by Stentor Danielson. Stay tuned for our first episode!