Octavia e. butler dawn11/11/2023 ![]() He encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania. ![]() She enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, but switched to taking writing courses through UCLA Extension.ĭuring the Open Door Workshop of the Writers Guild of America West, a program designed to mentor minority writers, her writing impressed one of the teachers, noted science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison. She styled her stories after the white-and-male-dominated science fiction she had grown up reading. She preferred less demanding work that would allow her to get up at two or three in the morning to write. Butler, reading her description of herself included in Parable of the Sower, during a 1994 interview with Jelani CobbĪlthough Butler's mother wanted her to become a secretary in order to have a steady income, Butler continued to work at a series of temporary jobs. A pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive. Who am I? I am a forty-seven-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer. In 1968, Butler graduated from PCC with an associate of arts degree with a focus in history. As Butler explained in later interviews, the young man's remarks were a catalyst that led her to respond with a story providing historical context for the subservience, showing that it could be understood as silent but courageous survival. An African-American classmate involved in the Black Power Movement loudly criticized previous generations of African Americans for being subservient to whites. She also got the "germ of the idea" for what would become her novel Kindred. As a freshman at PCC, she won a college-wide short-story contest, earning her first income ($15) as a writer. Īfter graduating from John Muir High School in 1965, Butler worked during the day and attended Pasadena City College (PCC) at night. Negroes can't be writers." But Butler persevered in her desire to publish a story, and even asked her junior high school science teacher, William Pfaff, to type the first manuscript she submitted to a science fiction magazine. Happily ignorant of the obstacles that a black female writer could encounter, she became unsure of herself for the first time at the age of 13, when her well-intentioned aunt Hazel said: "Honey. She drafted what would later become the basis for her Patternist novels. Butler: Telling My Stories." Īt the age of 10, Butler begged her mother to buy her a Remington typewriter, on which she "pecked stories two fingered." At 12, she watched the telefilm Devil Girl from Mars (1954) and concluded that she could write a better story. Why aren't there more SF Black writers? There aren't because there aren't. ![]() Her mother was treated poorly by her employers. She accompanied her mother to her cleaning work where, as workers, the two entered white people's houses through back doors. Growing up in Pasadena, Butler experienced limited cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of de facto racial segregation in the surrounding area. She was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in what she would later recall as a strict Baptist environment. Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, the only child of Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshiner. ![]() Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library in Southern California. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public, and awards soon followed. She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author to be able to write full-time. While participating in a local writer's workshop, she was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, then held in Pennsylvania, which focused on science fiction. She attended community college during the Black Power movement. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. Extremely shy as a child, Butler found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. īorn in Pasadena, California, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Octavia Estelle Butler (J– February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction author and a multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula awards. Butler signing a copy of Fledgling in 2005 ![]()
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