A four-book children’s series illustrated by S. D. Schindler. The basic concept is a family of cats who have wings. Why and how is never explained, and it’s not important. Some humans they encounter can understand and accept cats with wings. Others can’t, and they put the cats at risk because they keep othering them. In my experience, every kid can see something about themselves in these books, in the same way that they inevitably project themselves into A Wizard of Earthsea—as they are intended to, as we are intended to.

I think Ursula felt like, if you want to understand how another writer writes, read their writing, not necessarily what they wrote about their writing. But as she started teaching more, and refined her pedagogical life and skills, that led her to the notion that it might be a good idea to codify some of that. Chapter headings are “The Sound of Your Writing,” “Punctuation and Grammar,” “Sentence Length and Complex Syntax.” There are also examples of texts she admires—Jane Austen, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf.

Her last novel. She said it was the book that best contained and represented everything that was important to her, which is not surprising given where it came in her career, in her life. It’s about a minor character in Virgil’s Aeneid. Lavinia gets such short shrift as a woman—she’s pivotal, but only has a few lines. Ursula gives Virgil a legitimately tough time for how he kind of disappears her. In some ways, the project is about breathing a full character into this woman who was mostly ignored. But Ursula was someone who identified first as a poet and second as a prose writer, and who loved Virgil. So this is a love letter to Virgil as well.

A selection of her blog writings. She did 130 posts, starting in 2010, inspired by José Saramago’s blog, which he started when he was 85. People who knew Ursula, or who know her work well, know humor and silliness are big components of her writing. Most people don’t think of her that way, though. So it’s nice to point to places where the humor is right there on the surface. We get occasional complaints that the audiobook was not read by Ursula, which I completely sympathize with…it’s so much her voice. So we are actually working on a podcast version—with a different reader for each post (friends, acquaintances, peers).

Her most posthumous book, if you will. She sent in the revised manuscript on January 15 and died on January 22. You would think, given the timing and the titles of the poems, that it would be very elegiac, but it’s not especially. It’s the work of an older artist, and there is some sense of transition, but not necessarily of ending. Poetry was how she found her way into writing, and it was how she found her way through the difficulty of no longer having the energy for a novel. The last published piece she wrote was for a poetry collection benefiting an animal rights charity. It’s a short, funny little poem about a cat. So many poems. I’m still finding them.