Welcome

 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!

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Folk Song from the Montayna Province, and An die Musik

 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
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Rocannon's World, Part III

  Today we'll be looking at chapters five and six of Le Guin's first published novel, Rocannon's World , from 1966. We begin with Yahan finding Rocannon being burned at the stake in Zgama's fortress. Yahan loosens the chains holding Rocannon and gives him a drink, but there are too many of Zgama's people around, and Rocannon is too weak, for them to make a break for it yet. Rocannon spends the following day preparing himself, then just as Zgama is about to escalate his torture, Rocannon breaks free. He intimidates his captors with his technological superiority and they allow him to walk out. Rocannon is rejoined by Yahan, who explains that after leaving Mogien, he had tried to join Zgama's people, believing them to be a free Olgiyor society. However, he was quickly disillusioned. But having abandoned his master Mogien, he has no way to reintegrate into the Angyar-ruled world either. So Rocannon offers to accept Yahan's pledge of service, giving him a place i
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Rocannon's World, part 1

Today we'll be looking at the first two chapters of Le Guin's first published novel, Rocannon's World . It was published in 1966 as an Ace Double with Avram Davidson's The Kar-Chee Reign . This is a format in which two short novels are arranged back-to-back and upside down, so that you can flip the book around and read the other novel starting from the other cover. The Ace Doubles format is known more generally in the book-binding world as dos-à-dos or tête-bêche. It became a signature style for the publisher Ace Books, which was founded in 1952 as a publisher of mysteries and Westerns, but quickly took up science fiction as well. The format allowed them to easily publish shorter works, as well as leveraging an established author to advertise a newer one. That's what we see with Le Guin, whose first novel was packaged alongside one from Avram Davidson, who was more well-known at the time. Fans of Davidson would buy the Double for his work, and then discover Le Guin
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