The Pacific West is a great place to explore the expanse of imagination. I was reminded of that reality on a bright spring Sabbath when I walked from my bookshop to the Cannon Beach Library to listen to Ursula K. Le Guin.

Le Guin is a creative force of deep reckoning. At age 80 her body of work includes 50-plus books – novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and translations. Many have garnered awards and broad acclaim from the world’s great wordsmiths.

Commenting on the Portland resident’s creative outpouring, Oregonian columnist Steve Duin observed, “If she’s inspired by the view of Mount St. Helens, I’m sure the feeling is mutual.”

She certainly packed the children’s room of the library with adults on Mother’s Day weekend. Some traveled from as far away as Seattle to hear her talk titled “Writing about Place.” Le Guin is a local hero in the mythic sense. Her stories can stir something deep inside, a cellular inkling of what it meant to be alive when the Earth was Eden.

“Place can give you a book,” she said to the room, citing special examples in her work. One collection of short stories titled Searoad: the Chronicles of Klatsand, came to her while at the little Cannon Beach cottage she owns (the same one she stayed at while teaching workshops with the Haystack Summer Program in the Arts). My favorite story in that book, a tiny piece titled “Texts,” features a woman immersed in the strange unceasing messages of her surroundings.

“Do I want to know what the sea writes? she thought, but at the same time she was already reading the foam, which though in vaguely cuneiform blobs rather than letters of any alphabet was perfectly legible as she walked along beside it.”

Soft-spoken and unpretentious, Le Guin makes it easy to forget when she’s sitting in front you that she also stands in the company of master mythmakers. Her name is often listed along with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the professorial duo from across the pond who cracked open Christendom’s heart.

Loving these authors as much as I do, it’s tempting to imagine them all together at the same locus on the time-space continuum. I’d especially like to see those Atlantic men meet Le Guin on her own Pacific ground. Since Tolkien and Lewis were keen on pubs, perhaps they might be enticed into one of our local taverns.

Oh to watch them hoist the frothy brew of King James spiced with European folklore. Methinks Le Guin could match those Oxford gents pint for pint with respect to her knowledge of canonical Literature. Yet she could also show them how to sip the spirits of Native American tradition distilled with Taoist spring-water.

After a round or two the three could toast the Gospels and the Tao Te Ching – classic scriptures Le Guin translated in collaboration with J.P. Seaton (professor of Chinese at the University of North Carolina). They could discuss some dualities: child and parent, oral and written, the sword of self and the uncut gem of the soul.

Then perhaps the Profs could be lured outside, take a stroll beside the sea stacks with a local guide who groks a bit of their ancient language. A couple of wizards might even stretch their horizons – watch the green flash at sunset with a fiery gentle archmage of the West.

They used to burn her kind

There was a time, back East, when the establishment burned her kind. Yet Le Guin’s recent talk at the Cannon Beach Library reaffirmed the truth that legends dwell among us. Not merely as individuals, but as stories that play a superorganic role in shaping society.

It’s fallacious to think such stories can’t be real if they’re filled with fantastical elements – the stuff that’s often called “fantasy.” Once upon a time, folks thought faeries were as factual as angels. It was as common to imagine a fire-breathing dragon as it was to envision the transfiguration of Jesus on the mount.

Part of me believes in all those things that many people abandon in childhood or see as purely symbolic. Who knows what life looked like in those elder days when the world was young, when holy tales were shared as gifts of creation rather than marketed as the canons of empire?

Maybe we all do, at a deep level that taps both primal human experience and our formative personal development.

Le Guin conveys that potential as exquisitely as any writer I’ve read. She’s conveyed it to me in her imaginative novels and short stories. She also discusses it in her book Cheek by Jowl: Talks and Essays on How and Why Fantasy Matters.

“Fearful and suspicious as it is, the human mind yet yearns for a greater belonging, a vaster identification.”

Imagining what could be, human beings might be moved to restore our place within creation. Tend the proverbial garden; keep a common Sabbath, as it were.

Given the pace at which our creeds of greed consume and pollute the planet, let’s hope we find and share those imaginings very soon. Our chances are enchanted because Ursula K. Le Guin found a way to this mythic place.

Magic comes where there’s room for an uncut view.

Watt Childress is a Cannon Beach bookstore owner whose columns appear in The Daily Astorian’s sister paper, the North Coast Citizen.