The true writer is always a student

....That's the lesson I repeatedly get from cruising the writers of WordPress - there's a community here aimed at exchanging ideas, not self-promotion.

It's also a lesson glaringly obvious on every page of the latest book by Ursula K. Le Guin, "Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which was published in September. Did you know that she was a poet in addition to so many other things - essayist, book reviewer, acclaimed author of science fiction and fantasy?

This is a substantial collection that spans 50 years and reminds us how writers are different from the rest: Most people are intellectually curious, sure, but not everyone can take that curiosity and transform it into an assured art form, which is what Le Guin does in every poem contained in this book:

I feel so foolish sitting translating Vergil,

the voices of ancient imaginary shepherds,

in a silent house in Georgia, listening

for that human sweetness

That comes from "Learning Latin in Old Age," a poem written not very long ago - perhaps even around the time she wrote her novel "Lavinia," her retelling of  the "Aeneid" from the perspective of the woman at the center of the duel between Aeneas and Turnus.

I love the image of Le Guin, seated at a table with a basic Latin reader in front of her. (In my previous life at the L.A. Times, I had several opportunities to work with her on book reviews, and when I approached her to ask if she would consider writing one, what was her reaction? Almost always it was: Sure! Send it to me!)

This lovely volume is a reminder of the reason why we should commit to learning anything: for the love of it, for the greater understanding it gives us of our place in the world. (There are far too many people who simply want to impress us with how smart they are.)

And, one more thing: All knowledge helps us wrestle with our fate, our mortality. Le Guin's collection is undeniably about that as well, which shouldn't be a surprise (she is in her 80s). In the title poem, she writes poignantly about the costs of knowledge, about a painful kind of knowledge that comes only with the passing of many years as loved ones die and you remain:

I can't find you where I've been looking for you,

my elegy. There's all too many graveyards handy

these days, too many names to read through tears

on long black walls...

Beautiful. Painful. Beautiful.

New in bookstores: bite-sized epics

The curse of contemporary life: Not enough time.

It is a real challenge to find a few moments for yourself just to be still, to meditate, to inhale deeply.  But what if you're a reader of epic fantasy? How do you fit a thousand-pager into your week? (I remember managing to do it with George R.R. Martin's "Storm of Swords," but it nearly killed me.)

You can't simply give them up, can you?  They're a necessity to life: The worlds constructed by Martin, or Patrick Rothfuss, or Jay Lake, or Neil Gaiman, or Carrie Vaughn, or Kelly Link are wonderfully interesting when our own lives aren't. But they also require big, fat commitments of time. So what do you do?

Editor John Joseph Adams has hit on the solution in his latest anthology, "Epic: Legends of Fantasy," published by Bay Area-based Tachyon Publications. If you haven't heard of Tachyon, you need to check them out. They're a great publishing unit doing an invaluable service -- like Link and husband Gavin Grant's Small Beer Press -- to keep the work of some very fine writers in circulation.

In "Epic," Adams gives us tales from contemporary practitioners of epic fantasy. Some of the names mentioned above are included -- like Martin (his contribution, "The Mystery Knight," is a story of Westeros that's a good supporting piece to "A Song of Ice and Fire"); and Rothfuss ("The Road to Levinshir" plunges its narrator down in an uneasy, murky landscape).  But there are others here are well -- like Robin Hobb (whose dragon series is worth picking up) and Ursula Le Guin and Vaughn and Brian Sanderson (who took on the project of finishing the late Robert Jordan's "Wheels" saga).

It's an excellent selection that gets us back to the point mentioned at the top of this post. How do you manage to squeeze in epic tales when you don't have enough time in your life?  The answer is, you do the best that you can when you can. Or else you can turn to this anthology by Adams which, in a phrase I've used before, gives readers evocative stories delivering the full caloric load of a novel in half the time. You'll come away from this fine edition feeling very satisfied.

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