Ursula K. Le Guin's home will become a writers residency

Theo Downes-Le Guin, son of the late author Ursula K. Le Guin, remembers well the second-floor room where his mother worked on some of her most famous novels.

Or at least how it seemed from the outside.

“She was very present and accessible as a parent,” he says. "She was very intent on not burdening her children with her career. ... But the times when she was in there to do her writing, we knew that we needed to let her have her privacy.”

Downes-Le Guin, who also serves as his mother's literary executor, now hopes to give contemporary authors access to her old writing space. Literary Arts, a community nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, announced Monday that Le Guin's family had donated their three-story house for what will become the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency.