Like the young lady in the audience at the end of the video says: I love this woman. Her work is one of the key building blocks in the foundation of who I am.

Here’s her site. I can recommend anything she has written, but I’d especially like to mention:
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Earthsea Trilogy & the related books
Always Coming Home
Gifts
Voices

She is a treasure.

Enjoy:

I wrote this piece in response to a prompt in the Drawing on the Writer Within workshops given by Angela Jeffs in Tokyo. I’ve always been a writer, but I haven’t focused on poetry that much - although of course, the writers I love, like Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Samuel R. Delaney write with a subtle music that just rings with poetry, and power…it is through their work that I find I have a penchant for a bit of poetry here and there…

sex…eh

“Are there no prisons?”, quoth one bard
I sat in wonder and pondered hard
It is not only me I know
Who wonders if this thing will grow
Abandoned by all gross conceit
And languishing in sad defeat
Myself and all that went before
I fool myself and others more
There is no thing to grow, 窶?is true
And if there were, 窶?would not be you!
But then the fault is mine, you see
I am not open, am not free
I do not look along the byways
It is not lurking on the highways
Of life lived focused somewhere else
I point the finger at myself!
I place my virtues carefully
Where no one suitable will see
And half content, not wanting more
I slyly close the prison door.

Tmac 2.21.08