Legend and Legerdemain Among the Lheoti: The story behind the story

I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to work with Ursula LeGuin at the Flight of the Mind writing workshop in central Oregon many years ago. She was one of the best teachers I've ever had, razor funny and deadly accurate.

The assignment that she gave us to work on in our letters of acceptance before we actually came to the workshop, was to write a ritual -- or to write about common behavior through the eyes of ritual. Many interesting pieces came out of this. When I get an assignment, I am fond of looking for "reversals" -- thinking of what's the tritest, most obvious handling of a theme, then searching for its polar opposite. What's the most obvious, most unimaginative kind of ritual that's going to come out of a women-only writing workshop? Some kind of sappy coming-together-in-peace-and-harmony politically correct claptrap. (And to do everyone in the workshop justice, nooooooobody did anything remotely like this! There was some very harrowing, very moving, very startling stuff that folks presented.)

So what's the polar opposite of that? A funny human sacrifice.

At the same time, I was on a jag of reading Victorian lady travellers (if you're interested, Wayward Women by Jane Robinson is a great starting point -- where else can you get the skinny on Annie Hore's To Lake Tanganyika by Bath Chair? This is an annotated bibliography -- she also has an anthology of juicy bits called Unsuitable for Ladies). I was engaged on Magic and Mystery in Tibet by Alexandra David-Neel when I got the assignment.

David-Neel was one of history's greatest buttinskis. At the time she was dallying around the globe, Tibet had closed itself to outsiders -- ie, Europeans. Well, of course she wasn't going to take that lying down, and dyeing her hair with ink and smearing her face with cocoa butter, she took the Forbidden City by storm. Along the way, she picked up a sidekick -- a Buddhist monk named Yongden, whom she 'adopted.'

It's for Yongden -- aka, "the faithful Thet Ling" -- that I created this story. In all of the photos of him, he looks like a deer in the headlights -- some crashing force beyond nature has come into his life that he is completely powerless against. He died in his early forties on Madame David-Neel's estate in Bordeaux, from some polite euphemism for cirrhosis of the liver.

The scale on which Alexandra David-Neel did not get it was profound. "Hey, there's a monk on the side of the mountain who has taken a vow of silence for twenty-five years. LET'S GO UP AND TALK WITH HIM ABOUT IT! I bet he's got plenty of interesting things to say about the value of silence..." Just keeping her alive and out of local hoosegows was enough to send anyone to drink.

I wanted to give Yongden a solution to his problem that didn't involve dipsomania. I wanted everyone to get what they wanted.

The actual writing of the story was a frantic, last-minute affair a few days before I trekked north, and I loathed every single word I wrote. I couldn't believe what a pathetic piece of nonsense I was going to hand over to be read by Ursula LeGuin, the principal deity in my writing heavens, to publicly ridicule among a circle of strangers. Our first session, we all handed copies of our stories, about fifteen in all, to each other to read before the actual public critique. My critique was scheduled last.

So I had plenty of time to agonize. The only thing that kept me from inventing a family emergency and creeping away in the darkness was a couple of kindly souls from the class whispering to me aside, "I loved your story!" I still spent the night before the critique praying to be taken to my reward.

And lo and behold, there was no critique at all! Nobody could find a single thing wrong with it -- the critique degenerated into people rolling around on the grass (we were meeting outside that day) shouting out their favorite lines to one another. I was astonished. "Carol must read this in front of everyone at the open reading tonight!" It would be too long for the time allowed. "Let's all sign up and then say we give our time to Carol!" I've never met such kindness. Ursula drawled, "Let me see what I can do." (A dispensation was given to me, and I was allowed to exceed the time limit to read the whole story.)

The only memorable moment of the reading was at the end -- the pun about Thet Ling sealing his lips on Hopwood's whereabouts was COMPLETELY accidental, and I hadn't realized it was there until I got to it. I had to step back from the mike for a minute -- I heard Ursula snort like a pig. It was as close to heaven as I think we get on this earth.

Many, many women writers have as much reason as I to thank Ruth Grundle and Judith Barrington, the founders and organizers of Flight of Mind for so many years -- everyone would be wandering about in such a haze of bliss, that the joke was when we returned home, all our family members would think we had joined a cult! Well, we did. When Ruth and Judith decided to hang it up (Ruth is the publisher of Eighth Mountain Press, Judith a poet, memorist and teacher), it was sad but understandable that they couldn't continue to invest that level of energy in it. Great events like that don't happen without considerable work.