Ursula Le Guin revient sur ses débuts dans une interview sur le web. Toute l'interview est ici.

Petit extrait :
"Vice: First off, I’m curious about the motivation of an 11-year-old girl in 1940 to submit stories to science-fiction magazines. What led you to that point?
Ursula K. Le Guin: Well, I’m not sure how much I can tell you about the motivations of that girl. It’s been a long time since I knew her. But as I recall, she sent her story to a science-fiction magazine because it was a science-fiction story. My brother and I had been pooling our vast monetary resources to buy an occasional magazine, Astounding or Amazing or Thrilling Wonder. Twenty-five cents each. Some of the stories were good, some were pure pulp hackery. I thought, I write better than some of this stuff. So I wrote a modest story involving a time machine and the origin of life, and submitted it. It came back with a polite rejection letter, of which I was rightly proud. If I waited ten years or so before I tried to go pro again it wasn’t because my first attempt was a failure but because I was getting a sense of what I had to learn in order to write the way I wanted to write."