Loose Creatures (a brief appreciation for Ursula K. LeGuin)

My watercolor of an oak branch – see my art blog for more oak drawings

My nearly-ten-year-old daughter and I have been reading a lot of Ursula K. LeGuin out loud at night before going to sleep. I’ve been meaning to post something here praising her Earthsea books, her Annals of the Western Shore series, her Ekumen sci-fi books, and also The Beginning Place – which we finished reading a couple days ago.

Last night, though, we enjoyed reading LeGuin’s short story “Direction of the Road” from the collection The Unreal and the Real: the Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. LeGuin. I first heard praise of this story on the Crafting with Ursula podcast episode featuring Isaac Yuen. It’s a wildly inventive short story told from the point of view of a hundreds-of-years-old oak tree, who tells stories of interacting with those “loose creatures,” their “makings,” and the general local “Order of Things.”

One Oak Two Hands

I was happy to see that my friend Katura Reynolds visited and sketched the Los Osos Oaks (near San Luis Obispo, CA.) It’s one of my favorite places to visit and to sketch. She posted a series of oaks sketches at her site The Humble Act of Sketching.

I was happy to spot that we actually both sketched the same tree from more-or-less the same angle. Here’s Katura’s version: (I like her caption: “Remember when that oak swallowed up the hobbits in Fellowship of the Ring? Yeah.)

Katura Reynolds’ sketch of one of the great Los Osos Oaks.

and mine:

Los Osos Oak tree sketch by Joe Linton

I enjoy seeing the way everyone brings their individual style to every drawing. There are so many ways to balance tone, line, color, texture, etc. Artists are always simplifying, deciding (often unconsciously) what details tell the story… what to include, what to leave out.