As a child, two Native American friends of her father’s, also spent time with the family at “Kishamish”. She had spent the summers of her childhood there, with her brother Karl and parents Alfred Louis and Theodora Kroeber, both anthropologists. This enabled the couple to settle for some months at her family ranch “Kishamish”, in the Napa Valley. Courtesy of Curtis Brown, LtdĪlways Coming Home was germinated in 1983 when Ursula’s husband Charles took sabbatical from teaching.

Some of the Places and Peoples Known to the Kesh, 1985 © Ursula K. This note is one of the few occasions where we hear Le Guin’s voice, for Always Coming Home is instead a patchwork of Kesh voices that come to life through poems, songs, storytelling, oral histories and a novel, collected or recounted by the narrator Pandora. A note at the beginning of the book makes us aware of this with a complex use of verbal tenses-“The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California”. For both us readers and Pandora, also referred to as the Editor, the Kesh exist in the future, in a post-apocalyptic California. Pandora is the archaeologist, historian and anthropologist who describes the Kesh in this ethnographic account of a non-existent civilization. Le Guin, one feels as though entering an anthropological museum filled with artefacts from a past civilization we can discover maps charting where the Kesh lived, drawings and descriptions of the plants, trees and rivers that surrounded them collections of recipes and descriptions of how they dressed detailed notes explaining their society, kinship, sexuality, medicine and funerary rites folk tales, plays, poems, stories and descriptions of rites and rituals, with detailed descriptions of what their instruments looked and sounded like. Upon reading Always Coming Home by Ursula K.

Always coming home ursula le guin