I Need to Read Octavia Butler

These past twelve years I have become more and more aware of Octavia Butler, a Black female science fiction writer. I have to make time to read her.

Why?

From THE WORLD CONTINUES TO NEED OCTAVIA E. BUTLER:

The more I read of Butler’s essays and speeches, the more I could not help but be awestruck by her utter conviction to be a writer (“Writing is all I really ever wanted to do”1) and her equally adamant belief that one did not need inspiration, talent, or even imagination to be a successful author but only a determined will to persist (“Habit is persistence in practice”2). Perhaps, most of all, I respected the great lengths Butler went to, working as a dishwasher, warehouse worker, and potato-chip inspector, all so that she might support herself financially and carve out time in her days to put pen to paper.

From OCTAVIA E. BUTLER: THE NEXT 75 YEARS:

There’s something more than a bit therapeutic in this work. As truly nightmarish as her stories very often are, there is something about them that is healing, centering, that cracks us open and lets us see ourselves in a new way. If most of her stories aren’t politically utopian, exactly, they are nonetheless a literature of grief and of consolation. They teach us about hope: hope and how to live in struggle, if not the hope to fully end struggle. They teach us about communities that don’t throw people away. Her stories about disability have given me new tools for processing the place of disability in my own life; her work on climate and the environment, on animals and on resource extraction and cruel systems of human exploitation, has inspired and terrified me in roughly equal measure.

Her characters, all of them, are survivors—and not just that, they are also healers. And though I never met her—and our backgrounds and our struggles are in many ways very different—she taught me how to survive too....

How can such descriptions not rouse your curiosity?

sch 7/1/22