Throughout my Senior Project, I have known the source material for my project but what I am doing with that material has changed and evolved during the last six weeks. I think my essential question was a very good frame for my project; it encapsulated the main question that I wanted to explore. Of course, when I started examining the series in my re-read, many more questions came to mind and I found myself wondering where to start. The analytical essays I read about the series helped me see what aspects of the book were interesting to others and how they had interpreted some parts of the stories. I wrote a lot during my read-through and I recorded many quotes demonstrating things I thought were interesting or things I could write about. When I finished reading, I had so much material I had written and quotes I had chosen; going through the document with my thoughts was the moment that I really had to narrow down what I wanted to say about Earthsea. My expectations were very loose at the beginning; I knew I wanted to look at the role of women in Earthsea, as stated in my essential question, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say and how I wanted to demonstrate it. What I found after re-reading the series and reading some other scholars’ thoughts was that I wanted to say something very different about Earthsea than what I thought I had wanted to.

Originally, I saw the absence of women in power in Earthsea and didn’t look much deeper into it. I wondered why Ursula Le Guin wrote it that way, but I thought I would have to infer a lot and come to conclusions on my own. On my re-read, however, I found that Le Guin had answered many of my questions within the books. Much of the stories are written with flowery, metaphorical language and ambiguous switches between thoughts, dreams, and actions. In my first read through I was more interested in the stories than I was in the meaning behind them and in the mechanics of the world. I missed a lot of details that were hiding behind the stories. Having read other scholars’ essays and having a topic in mind, I knew what I was looking for the second time around. I was reading it as a writer, as a student, rather than as a consumer of fantasy books. With this new lens, I found that many of the decisions Le Guin made were much more intentional than I originally thought. 

At first, I was somewhat reluctant to let go of the ideas that I thought would be the foundation of my essay. However, as I continued to read and ruminate on what I was reading, I realized that I had been wrong, and it is much more important to write accurately than it is to stick to a plan. Despite changing how I presented my topic and how I interpreted and analyzed the information, I still think my final project is very close to how I envisioned it from the start. The content is a little different, but the essay itself is the same length and format that I imagined it to be.

I think this senior project helped me bring a new perspective and skill into an activity I love: reading, specifically reading fantasy books. In the future, when I inevitably read another long fantasy series, I now have the skills to help me analyze and better understand the world, the author’s choices, and the evolution throughout different installments of a series. 

Reflecting on the process as a whole, I am proud of how I kept with my plan and came out with a product just as I had wanted to. I am proud of how I followed through and finished what I started. However, if I could go back and change anything, I think I would have liked to finish the reading faster so I had more time to work on the essay. 

I want my audience to understand my deep connection to the fantasy genre, and now, to the Earthsea series. I can now definitely say that Earthsea is my favorite fantasy series; this is saying a lot, as I’ve read hundreds of fantasy books. Earthsea is, to me, a parallel and perpendicular to our world; it has hidden meanings and it has meaningless details; it has good and evil and the balance in the world. I think it has everything a good fantasy world needs, spread out over six magical installments. I hope that my essay and presentation demonstrate how much I love Earthsea, its characters, its stories, its creatures, and its author, Ursula Le Guin. I have not read any other Ursula Le Guin books, but I plan on reading them this summer. I am so excited to expand my knowledge of fantasy, of books, and of reading, and to continue learning along the way as I do what I love.