Dream Maps: A Birthday Party for Ursula K Le Guin
Dream Maps: A Birthday Party for Ursula K Le Guin
21 October 2025
Time
6.30–8.30pm
Location
AA Lecture Hall, 36 Bedford Square
An evening of reading, writing and food to celebrate what would have been Ursula K Le Guin’s 96th Birthday.
Guided by Sarah Shin and So Mayer, explore the continuity and imbrication of physical and imaginary worlds, using the tools of creative writing and creative geographies. This workshop will include readings and explorations from The Word for World and Space Crone, as well as writing exercises from Steering the Craft.
Rain Wu, artist and member of Standard Deviation extends their exhibition design for The Word for World with the creation of an edible landscape inspired by the food terrains found in the novels of Ursula K Le Guin. Guests are invited to wander through a cake valley, taste edible pebbles and uncover edible memories in the form of talismanic maps. A communal pickle barrel offers slow transformations to share, while energy balls are gifted to both humans and birds. Conceived for a birthday party for Le Guin, the work is a convivial act: an invitation to playfully inhabit and enact the worlds held within Le Guin’s words.
Biographies
So Mayer is a writer, bookseller, editor and organiser. Bad Language (2025) is a memoir and manifesto on language and power (and dragons) published by Peninsula Press. They are the coeditor with Sarah Shin, of Space Crone (2023) and The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin (2025) for Silver Press, and editor of catflap #5 for Outburst Queer Arts Festival.
Sarah Shin explores dreams, myth, cosmic speculation and transformation through writing, research, publishing and curation. A serial collaborator, her current partnerships include: The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin exhibition at the AA and book edited with So Mayer; with Irene Revell, the Bodies of Sound book and curatorial project; with Sammy Lee, Mirror, a polymorphous journey through a mythical world of correspondences; and with Mark Lowe, Concrete Poetry, encompassing writing and architecture. She is among the founders of Silver Press; feminist publisher Spiral House, a new imprint for art, poetry and ways of knowing; Ignota, the creative publishing and curatorial house that closed in 2024; New Suns literary festival at the Barbican Centre; and Standard Deviation, a multidisciplinary collective exploring the coincidence of psychic, geometric and inhabited spaces.
Rain Wu is a Taiwanese artist and architect based in London. Her work is conceptually driven and materialises in different forms and scales from drawing, sculpture, food performance to architectural installation. She works with the temporality of perishable materials to instigate discussions around our manifold relationships with nature. Following the geographic, political, cosmological and microbial traces of living materials, her work investigates the interconnection between the consumption of food, the digestion of cultures, the charting of lands and the recall of their myths.
Accessibility
Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these by emailing publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk.
