Tag: black women

My new novel, Women of the Post

It is with great joy and pride that I share the exciting news that my debut novel, Women of the Post, will be published this summer, in July.

Women of the Post follows Judy Washington from the demeaning work of the Bronx Slave Market to the Women’s Army Corps’ 6888th Central Postal Battalion.

The novel is about Black women’s unvalued labor in the workforce that enabled us to overcome fascism and build morale in order to win one of the most significant wars in American history. It is about how Black women’s love for one another and for our country has been both sanctuary and salvation. It is my love letter to the courage it takes to be unique and also be in sisterhood as you evolve.

I will have much more to say about the book and the process of writing it in the weeks and months and years to come. in the meantime, I hope that you’ll pre-order the book — pre-orders are really important for the success of a book! — which is available everywhere books are sold, including Bookshop or directly from your favorite independent bookstore.

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Remembering bell hooks

One of things I’ve been doing lately is thinking about my legacy as a writer, as a person. It feels a little abstract to think about what your influence will be when you’re gone. And then someone you love dies. And it doesn’t feel so abstract.

My heart is still heavy thinking about bell hooks’ transition. I was honored, as someone who was profoundly shaped by her passion, her courage, her clear-sighted articulation of the things that keep Black women from soaring — and how to overcome them — were balm for me. She was really an iconic trailblazer. I tried to do her work and life and impact some justice for Oprah Daily. An excerpt is below. You can read it here, or here. I hope she is resting well.

Mourning bell hooks—who died on December 15, 2021, at age 69 after giving us four decades of trailblazing feminist scholarship—means celebrating everything she taught us about what it means to be a Black woman in love with herself and the world, and with the life of the mind. With her passing, there will be one fewer pair of hands holding up Black women—all women—as inherently valuable. For decades she has helped me in my journey to become myself; her legacy will live in my bones, and in the minds and hearts of all she awakened and inspired.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952, hooks honored her matrilineal line by taking her maternal great-grandmother’s name as her nom de plume in a lowercase version to emphasize “the substance of books, not who I am.” She influenced several well-known luminaries and writers to adopt the same practice. Let us defer to the work of our hands and pay tribute to our elders instead of bowing to tradition and capitalizing ourselves.

Maybe honoring her elders and ancestors played a role in enabling her to speak and write her fame into existence, to hear her family tell it. Like most Southern towns, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, was stratified by race and class; hooks’s father was a janitor, and her mother a maid. “Gloria learned to read and write at an early age and even proclaimed she would be famous one day,” her family said in a statement. “Growing up, the girls shared an upstairs bedroom, and she would always keep the light on well into the night. Every night we would try to sleep, but the sounds of her writing or page turning caused us to yell down to Mom to make her turn the light off.”

Her family went on to say that Gloria always had at least 10 serious books she was reading simultaneously, whether Shakespeare, Little Women, or other classics, which quenched her “great thirst for knowledge, which she incorporated into her life’s work.” Against the backdrop of the great civil rights struggles, she graduated from a newly integrated high school. Her intellectual acumen and writer’s gifts were apparent early, and she majored in English literature at Stanford University, then earned her MA from the University of Wisconsin and her PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she wrote her dissertation on Toni Morrison.

bell hooks
Karjean Levine, Getty Images

She thrived in the classroom, and her criticism and charisma quickly acquired a following both in and beyond academic circles. I first encountered her during one of my many trips to my local New York library at age 13 and was instantly in awe. Hooks wrote with confident wisdom and ease about topics I had never read from a Black woman’s perspective; she seemed so like me, even if she was from a different part of the country and a different generation. We were kindred spirits.

My dog-eared copy of Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery was the gateway to reprogramming myself. The microaggressions, the confusing pauses and rudeness that came my way because of my dark skin and natural hair—bell hooks helped me understand that these were the manifestations of social constructs she interrogated, not figments of my imagination. Her writing about writing, the way she mined the role of self-love and self-care: All these things and more marked her as a visionary. Radical, yes, for her positions on racism and patriarchy and capitalism. Radical, too, for attending to the hearts of Black women. For saying that we were not just our work, but we deserved, as much as anyone, our own affection and tenderness. The world would not give it to us, not without a fight.

Considering Toni Morrison at 90

A photograph of author Toni Morrison by Michael Lionstar
Photo Credit: Michael Lionstar

I had the somewhat frightening (intimidating?) experience of receiving Toni Morrison’s collection of essays and lectures, The Source of Self-Regard before its publication in 2019. [Here is the review I wrote for the smart folks at Bitch Media].

Unlike Ms. Morrison’s fiction, which I sometimes just did not understand (A Mercy, Paradise) or which I loved without really being able to explain why (Song of Solomon, Beloved) or which humored me the way a good friend does (Sula !), her nonfiction was a true education. It educated me by her example, in terms of her biography, and it educated me the way all reading does — through its structure, the way it had been nurtured and considered and through what was not there. 

February 18th would have been Toni Morrison’s 90th birthday, and I’ve been thinking about her a lot, celebrating and commemorating her gifts to me and to all of us through her rigorous writing and creativity. For many Black writers, it is not only her discipline and vision that we admire, it is how she earned the nickname Mother Toni, which is a nod to her guidance to each of us as we have sought to make our way on the perilous journey that is writing and editing and revising and publishing.

Her wisdom is so much a part of my practice that I don’t even remember when I started telling others. Whenever I speak to young writers, I use her example. I remind them that Mother Toni had a day job into her 40s, that she woke up at 4 a.m. before said day job to write while her babies were asleep. I have admired this level of discipline all my life, and while I have different reasons for engaging it, it has been essential to my writing practice all the same. And at the same time, she let us know that we are the people that we are, we are not the work we do, which is essential.

She is also known for giving entire generations of Black writers permission to write the stories that do not yet exist, saying if there is a book you want to read that does not yet exist, you must be the one to write it (this is a paraphrase). I can’t imagine how many books we would not have were it not for this advice, for her presence, for her work and her inspiration.

I rarely have occasion to do such deep research when I plan to write about a writer anymore, but I sensed that Ms. Morrison would not be with us much longer. So, in the before times, I took the liberty of luxuriating in the reference room at the Schomburg. I’ve aggregated below my notes on Ms. Morrison’s life, because these were the thoughts I had that didn’t make it into publication anywhere, and didn’t really fit in any kind of linear place; they also sum up why, aside from her talent, discipline and brilliance, I never felt anything I wrote about Ms. Morrison could really do her justice. I think it was important for me to put this here in celebration of her birthday in part because of how valuable looking at the contours of her life has been for my confidence as a writer. In a collection of her quotes, The Measure of Our Lives, she is quoted as having said: “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” One of her many talents was showing us all that writing could do and be if we were brave and persistent enough to meet it.

Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and About Women of Color, Toni Morrison entry, pages 636 – 640

Born 1931 in Lorain, Ohio

Chloe Anthony Wofford

Shortened her name to an abbreviation of her middle name purportedly (and with regret) because no one could pronounce Chloe. The theme of claiming one’s name emerged –noted in entry – in her fiction – from third novel, Song of Solomon (1977) to Tar Baby, her fourth ( 1981)

Graduated from Howard in 1953, English Major, classics minor

Master’s from Cornell in 1955 – her thesis was on suicide in the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

She taught for two years at Texas Southern University in Houston, then returned to Howard as a faculty member.

She married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison in 1958

They had two sons together, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. They divorced in 1964.

She moved w/sons to Syracuse where she worked as Random House textbook editor. Began writing at night as therapy for her loneliness when her sons were in bed.

Transferred to NYC in 1967 to headquarters for Random House editing acclaimed black women writers like Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara.

She kept teaching – at SUNY Purchase 1971-72, Yale, 1976-77. She left Random House in 1983; Appointed Albert Schweitzer chair at SUNY Albany in 1984. Stayed until 1989, when Princeton appointed her Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.  (Note from me: That means 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of Toni Morrison becoming the first Black woman to hold a chair at an ivy league university.)

She’s taught at a number of  prestigious colleges and universities including Bard, Rutgers & Princeton, she delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard University. She’s also received a number of honorary degrees including from Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, and Yale. “Although Morrison is perhaps best known for her fiction, she has written successfully in several other genres as well, including drama, children’s and YA, short stories and criticism.”

Won the Pulitzer in 1988, the Nobel in 1993 – the first African American and only the 8th woman to ever receive the prize. Her body of work began with the short story that grew into the novel that became The Bluest Eye, work that “established her recurrent concern with the meaning and place of black female identity.”

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (1992)

Two collections of critical essays (this would now be three, with the Origins of others, I think)

Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992)

Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (1997)

Icons of African American Literature

266-298

“The search for love and identity runs through almost everything I write,” (Taylor-Guthrie 96) Page 269

Page 273

“For Morrison, narrative is necessary. It is a psychic process that enables humanity to conceive and satisfy its fundamental need for coherence and understanding. The model of psychoanalysis throws light on the progress of characters looking for themselves as well as on the peculiar link the narrative creates between them. Such a relationship, reflected in the reciprocal link between narrator and reader, finds its model in the relationship shared by the analyst and its patient. The narrative of the one is stimulated by the patient listening of the other. Wisdom, if it emerges from such relation, is the work of the past, thanks to the traces left by memory or dream. In both cases, the aim is to discover the power of the desire that fuels the story, its origins, in order to master the process that, by elucidating the past, will lead to maturity. For the American black community, whose past is more easily read on the mutilated bodies or in the unfathomable eyes than in libraries, whose present is most often synonymous with alienation, telling stories is above all the way to refigure and to understand, to accept and to master a dismembered history made of holes and omissions.”

Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography, David L. Middleton, 1987

From “Good, Bad, Neutral Black,” NYT Mag, 2 May, 1971, Vol. 7, p. 3 ff

“TM assesses books designed for black children…That which is truly good becomes universal: “Like so much that is meant for black folks, like so much that black people do for themselves, it ends up in the marrow of the culture at large.”

Page 26

“In time, writing became a way to ‘order my experience.’

“It’s always seemed to me that black people’s grace has been with what they do with language.”

On Belonging

I appreciate being in a period of national relief. There is something so calming, even when the world is still in a shambles, about humane leadership. It allows my creative mind, anyway, room to react to events without trying to problem solve or anticipate the next horrific thing.

One result of that has been more space in my mind to reflect and create. One aspect of my life I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past year has been my connection to The Bronx and why I am so attached to it as a site of my fiction and creative nonfiction, why it is a place that, when I lived far from New York City, pulled me back to it. I think I understand better having written this piece on Medium, but I’m not sure. It may be constantly changing like everything else.

Here’s an excerpt:

It feels like the least a Black woman can expect in the way of belonging and safety in 2021 is to not stand out from the crowd in an era of white nationalist fervor and anger. I want that sentence to mean less in the wake of this historic week but I fear it means more.The safest option, even when the world is quarantining during a pandemic, is to not make oneself more of a target for surveillance or harassment.

In the before times, I found subtle ways of trying to take up less space knowing I would be in a situation, or traveling to a place, where I would be The Only One or One of The Onlies. The stress of living in a cauldron of constant chaos and upheaval is offset by the relief of not having to navigate multiple reactions to my Blackness and my womanhood and their intersection, which seems to be the most intimidating and off-putting fact of my existence of all.

Staying in my lane, or my neighborhood, has become my safety, my insurance. My safety is that I am surrounded by others who more or less expect me to be here. That expectation is reassuring, because when white people are surprised by Black people, the Black people end up dead or in prison. It probably helps that I don’t move that quickly, since there’s a lot of me to move around. Even if I were to be one of those sudden movement types, there is, after all, a police precinct up the street. That said, I am not often made to feel like a suspect in my neighborhood, though I wonder if the Black men in my neighborhood would say the same. I bet even the famous ones would tell a different story.

I wonder: Do you feel like you belong to the place where you live? Why or why not?

The Nuances of Harriet

This was one of Harriet Tubman’s common refrains:

“If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.”

We all need to hear that message all the time, regardless of who delivers it. I wrote about my thoughts on the movie, Harriet, on Medium. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’ve seen it.

Happy Pub Day to I Can Write the World

Happy publication day to us!
I’ve thought for months about how to best commemorate this day. I’ve been posting and talking and writing and talking about I Can Write the World since last year, so it’s hard to believe that the rest of the world will have access to my labor of love starting today. 
It might surprise you that I never thought I’d write a children’s book, let alone a series. Many of you know that I had a childhood that made me grown in many ways before my time, just like a lot of little Black girls who have our innocence taken or presumed to be a non-entity. But when Six Foot Press’ publisher, Chul R. Kim, asked if I had a children’s book to write, Ava Murray arrived fully formed — a curious girl with incredible storytellers and justice warriors as her namesake in the brilliant storyteller Ava DuVernay and Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, the poet, scholar and legal pioneer who broken barriers even while Murray struggled with gender dysmorphia. 
I was raised in the Bronx, an underdog borough often defined — like Black women — by lack, poverty and everything that it is not. But just like I always sought out Black women role models and lighthouses of beauty and class, I have always seen the best of the Bronx even when I struggled within it because of poverty. Some people see a place that has been neglected because of the Latinx and Black people, largely immigrants, who are stuck or striving; people for whom success would mean being able to leave for a less abandoned, more expensive, whiter place. But I missed the Bronx every single time I left, even though I was in beautiful elite spaces that were supposed to be better for me, were supposed to be indicators I was moving up. 
This is what home is: It is the place where you are most yourself, where you can feel yourself becoming more of your dreams by the minute, regardless of what you or others may see right before you. 
This is what I loved about my girl Ava as soon as she arrived: She came asking questions about the media she absorbed. She is far less shy than I was, with a parent that is more present, more receptive, more attentive, as so many Black mothers and maternal figures are.
Why, she wonders, is a little girl getting arrested for tagging outside when the murals and graffiti around the poor neighborhoods — which, by the way, have become a global force and industry — actually feel like they make it easier to see the beauty there? As adults, we can say and observe that this is heavy for little kids to encounter, but my answer to that is that we already see that they are witnessing this world of criminalizing Black and Brown children. Not just in the Bronx, but everywhere where teachers tell me 7-year-olds have to report to court monthly to talk to strangers to justify their living here in the U.S. Of course, too, at our borders, where toddlers cry unattended, may have to sleep on warehouse floors, may not be allowed to bathe. 
I had the great privilege of being at Essence Festival this weekend and hearing Michelle Obama talk about the kind of world we want our children to inherit, to live in. I am not yet a parent, but I know that I want our babies to grow up in a world where they know that their voices are important. That they can write their stories. That they can write the world. Not only can they write their world; in order for the world to be the best it can be, for the world to be hold, they must. 
I say happy publication day to us because any book’s publication day is the representation of the work of dozens of people. Thank you for being in partnership with me as I seek to tell stories for young readers. This book is for you. Thank you to Charly Palmer, the gifted illustrator who so thoughtfully crafted the beauty of Ava’s world. Thank you to Six Foot Press and Serendipity Literary Agency for all of the support. Thank you to everyone at Ingram for your encouragement. To my librarian, teacher and writer friend communities — Thank you for understanding the vision and helping me share it widely. I hope this book is as meaningful to you as it has been to me. 
I shared this on social media, but during PrideFest/KidFest, a young girl around Ava’s age with barrettes in her hair held the book and lovingly gazed at it and even in the chaotic craziness around us, I could see that small flicker of recognition that you get when you see yourself. And she said, “She looks like me.” And that to me is everything. That is the inspiration for this book, and the next, and the next.

You can buy the book on Indie Bound, Barnes and Noble or Amazon. Please review this book on Amazon and Goodreads please!

A Letter to my Nieces & Nephews on Ella Baker’s Birthday

bitstream
Photo Credit:  NAACP Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

My loves,

One of the greatest Black women poets of our time, Lucille Clifton, is not frequently taught in schools — or at least not taught enough. Her poem, song at midnight, contains a line you may have seen on the internet, in part. We like to circulate it among ourselves as a clarion call, a prayer, a balm & mantra, especially the last lines, but here is the second part of it, from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser:

born into babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

The epigraph to this poem is from a Sonia Sanchez poem: “…do not send me out among strangers.”

Black women’s lives, for so long, were shaped around survival, and it had always been so, it’s true. In The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton, in the introduction, though, I was reminded of something else.

“It is amazing,” she writes, “that the former Africans could ever smile and laugh, let alone make up riddles and songs and jokes and tell tales. As slaves, they were forced to live without citizenship, without rights, as property – like horses and cows – belonging to someone else. But no amount of hard labor and suffering could suppress their powers of imagination.”

 

Continue reading “A Letter to my Nieces & Nephews on Ella Baker’s Birthday” →

Serena & The Humanity of Black Women

It was a gift, especially as I teach the Combahee River Collective statement from 1977 and remind folks that we have been fighting for a long time on behalf of our own freedom not just for the sake of ourselves but so that everyone else can be free, too, to write this for Mic.

It’s more convenient for white sports fans, of course, to turn the healthy, justified rage of black bodies gazed upon for money-making sport into a weapon formed against us. But like Colin Kaepernick, Serena is a generosity. She won’t let anyone or anything make her flat or less complex. Like Shirley Chisholm, she is unbought and unbossed. She contains multitudes. She can be both livid and kind, distraught and sweet, within the same hour.

What audacity, what nerve, that black girl with the big hair and the strong legs and amazing body has, showing up, demanding to be seen as human. What a gift, in this time, in this void of regal reckoning for black or brown bodies anywhere but fictitious worlds, that we get to witness Serena’s humanity unfurl, unedited.

My 2004 interview with Octavia Butler

“I’m black. I’m solitary. I’ve always been an outsider.”

This is how Octavia Butler described herself, the first self-possessed Black woman writer introvert, I had the honor of writing about for publication. Actually interviewing her was one of the great honors of my life, two years before her death in 2006. I wonder what she would have made of this beautiful Google Doodle, which I was delightfully surprised to see this morning before I went to sleep.

OctaviaButlerGoogleDoodle71

I was 26 when I interviewed her and Octavia Butler was the first person of consequence who was meaningful to the culture that I would interview. That year, I would also meet my mentor, and interview other influential Black women writers and scholars who inspired me to keep writing, even if they may not have been aware that’s what they were doing in the moment.

What I found most delightful about Octavia Butler was how unimpressed she was with herself and her habits. She had so many gifts that she shared with us, and so much wisdom. Our elders can see ahead on the path, can keep us from making mistakes we don’t need to.

I’ll always be so grateful for how generously kind she was with me, even though I was so clearly new at interviewing writers. I greatly respected how she wove stories even when she was talking about the most mundane things – we were discussing her first visit to New York, for instance, when she described the stamina you need to do something physical as akin to the writing life: “I think climbing mountains or buildings or whatever has been a really good metaphor for finishing my work. Because no matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.”

Even if our culture only values what we can see at this moment, what they offer us is information about coping with the hard things in life – in the past, in what they imagined the future to be – that can tell us much more than any anxiety might be able to.

Here’s the whole interview, as republished by In Motion Magazine from Africana.com:

Interview with Octavia Butler

“… one of the few African American women writing
in the male-dominated science fiction genre”

by Joshunda Sanders
Oakland, California

Octavia Butler is one of the few African American women writing in the male-dominated science fiction genre. The worlds she creates with her pen are groundbreaking, powerful multicultural revisions of history; sometimes frightening and complex visions of the future. The author of twelve books and an award-winning collection of short stories, Butler was also the recipient of an esteemed MacArthur Fellowship grant in 1995 — the only science fiction writer on a list of more than 600 names in the last 20 years. She’s also won the most esteemed awards in the genre: the Hugo and Nebula wards for her books and short stories.

While she has referred to herself simply by saying, “I’m black. I’m solitary. I’ve always been an outsider,” Butler, 56, manages to render the emotional lives of her characters like an insider. It is a talent that she attributes to her life’s journey — she challenges her readers to confront themselves in spite of their circumstances and often, because of them.

The only living child of a shoeshine man and a maid who grew up a bookworm and loner in Pasadena, California has crafted the universe according to Octavia Estelle Butler since she was four; though she didn’t start making a living at it until she was older. Before she embarked on a professional writing career, she took writing classes, did odd jobs — from telemarketing to sorting potato chips — before she sold her first novel, Patternmaster, in 1976. Currently, she is on tour, celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the publication of Kindred — the story of a modern day woman who is transported back to the antebellum South to save her white ancestor. Her most recent works, two short stories entitled “The Book of Martha” and “Amnesty,” are online at www.scifi.com.

Joshunda Sanders: You grew up in Pasadena, California? What made you want to move to Seattle?

Octavia Butler: I went to Seattle for the first time in 1976. My first novel was published then, and that meant that I could take my first vacation. I got on a Greyhound bus and took a Greyhound Ameripass tour, which means that for a month I could go wherever I wanted to on Greyhound. There were a lot more buses then, so it was nice. Now I’m not sure it would be, because they get into so many places in the middle of the night and they leave in the middle of the night. So, it’s kind of inconvenient. But anyway, I went to Seattle, among other places. I went first to New York, because I’d never been there and I wanted to go.

Joshunda Sanders: What’d you think of New York?

Octavia Butler: I had a great time there. I met this West Indian woman, we were both going to the Statue of Liberty. She was wearing these thick-soled sandals, really uncomfortable shoes. We were both going to go to the top of the Empire State Building. Now, with me, my only excuse is that I’m not in shape, and wasn’t then. And with her, it was her feet. We’d encourage each other back and forth going to the top. And finally made it.

I think climbing mountains or buildings or whatever has been a really good metaphor for finishing my work. Because no matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.

I hiked down not quite to the bottom of the Grand Canyon because I only had that one day, it was part of the same trip. I discovered that I didn’t really like going to cities, so I went to National Parks. And I hiked almost to the bottom and I realized that the bus was going to leave me if I didn’t get myself back up. Now it’s easy going down, but coming back up…and I did it c ompletely unprepared. So, I didn’t have any water… this is not sensible and I don’t think anyone should do it. I didn’t have anything except maybe some candies like this [she holds up a peppermint candy] because they tend to live at the bottom of my bag. And I kept thinking, “How embarrassing, and how humiliating it would be if somebody had to come get me.” I mean, it really hurts to walk that much if you’re out of shape and not used to it.

Joshunda Sanders: Why did you think you could do it?

Octavia Butler: It never occurred to me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I mean, it was a totally silly thing to do. And I kept trying and I would push myself. Part way down and part way back the only water was when it began to rain. And then it began to rain sideways and it plastered mud all down the front of my body. But I got back up on my on two feet, which really hurt by the time I got back up. And it’s sort of like writing.

When I went to Peru, I climbed Huayna Picchu, the taller of the two peaks you see when you see Machu Picchu. It’s an easy climb for anyone who is okay, you know. I mean, even if you’re not in very good shape. But I managed to hurt my knee hiking. I kept saying, this is high enough, this is high enough, why don’t I go back down? I got all the way to the top, crawled through the little cave and got to the top of the mountain and came back down. That’s what I mean. It’s a good metaphor for writing, because there will always come a time in writing a novel for instance, a long undertaking like that, when you don’t think you can do it. Or, you think it’s so bad you want to throw it away. I tell the students that there comes a time when you want to either burn it or flush it. But if you keep going, you know, that’s what makes you a writer instead of an “I wish I was a writer.”

I had a dentist when I was down in Pasadena and he knew I wrote and I had given him a couple of my books. And his attitude then was, “Well, writing is so easy even she can do it, so I’ll do some writing.” And he wrote the most appalling piece of…well. Truly bad. And he gave it to me to read. And I should have said, well, for legal reasons I don’t want to read your work, but I did him a favor and read his work. But what I had to say about it, as gently as I could say it, was, “Let this be an exercise, go take a class, here are some of the problems you might want to work on.” Very gently. But I never really wanted to let him at me with a drill again after that. So it cost me a dentist. But that was his attitude, you know, if I was doing it, it must be easy and anybody could do it.

Joshunda Sanders: A lot of people have that attitude about writing, but one of the things that strikes me about your work in particular is that it’s so complex that I don’t understand how people could come to you with that sort of cavalier attitude.

Octavia Butler: I don’t think they see it that way. I think their attitude has more to do with me than with the work. Just me, as a black, as a woman, or as a woman who doesn’t look as though she could do anything terribly complex.

Joshunda Sanders: That doesn’t frustrate you?

Octavia Butler: Oh, I’m doing okay.

Joshunda Sanders: What is it that fascinates you about books?

Octavia Butler: My big problem is my mother gave me this gene — there must be a gene for it, or several perhaps. It’s the pack rat gene, you know, where you just don’t throw things out. I haven’t thrown books out since I was a kid. I gave some books away when I was a little girl. My mother said I could give some to the Salvation Army. I gave some to a friend, and her brothers and sisters tore them bits. That was the last time I gave books away in large amounts. I just keep stuff. I still have books from childhood.

Joshunda Sanders: That’s a blessing.

Octavia Butler: It comforts me. I imagine when I’m dead someone will have a huge yard sale or estate sale and I don’t care! Some of them are worth something. Even my comic books — I have first editions of this and that, the first issue of the Fantastic Four. I used to collect them, not in the way that people collect things now. I didn’t put them in plastic bags and never touch them. I read them and they looked pretty bad, some of them. But they’re still worth something just because they are what they are.

Joshunda Sanders: How has your childhood affected your work?

Octavia Butler: I think writers use absolutely everything that happens to us, and surely if I had had a different sort of childhood and still come out a writer, I’d be a different kind of writer. It’s on a par with, but different from, the fact that I had four brothers who were born and died before I was born. Some of them didn’t come to term, some of them did come to term and then died. But my mother couldn’t carry a child to term, for the most part something went wrong. If they had lived, I would be a very different person. So, anything that happens in your life that is important, if it didn’t happen you would be someone different.

Joshunda Sanders: People attach a lot of titles to you –

Octavia Butler: Please don’t call me the grand dame. Someone said it in Essence and it stuck.

Joshunda Sanders: You’re annoyed by it?

Octavia Butler: Well, it’s another word for grandmother! I’m certainly old enough to be someone’s grandmother, but I’m not.

Joshunda Sanders: What about the science fiction or speculative fiction titles attached to your work?

Octavia Butler: Really, it doesn’t matter. A good story is a good story. If what I’m writing reaches you, then it reaches you no matter what title is stuck on it. The titles are mainly so that you’ll know where to look in the library, or as a marketing title, know where to put it in the bookstore so booksellers know how to sell it. It has very little to do with actual writing.

Joshunda Sanders: Have you found that it intimidates African Americans, in particular?

Octavia Butler: No. I think people have made up their minds that they don’t like science fiction because they’ve made up their minds that they know what science fiction is. And they have a very limited notion of what it is. I used to say science fiction and black people are judged by their worst elements. And it’s sadly enough still true. People think, “Oh, science fiction, Star Wars. I don’t like that.” And they don’t want to read what I’ve written because they don’t like Star Wars. Then again, you get the other kind who do want to read what I’ve written because they like Star Wars and they think that must be what I’m doing. In both cases they’re going to be disappointed. That’s the worst thing about verbal shorthand. All too often, it’s an excuse not to do something, more often than it’s a reason for doing something.

There isn’t any subject you can’t tackle by way of science fiction. And probably there isn’t any subject that somebody hasn’t tackled at one time or another. You don’t have the formulas that you might have for a mystery, or even a romance. It’s completely wide open. If you’re going to write science fiction, that means you’re using science and you’ll need to use it accurately. At least speculate in ways that make sense, you know. If you’re not using science, what you’re probably writing is fantasy, I mean if it’s still odd. Some species of fantasy…people tend to think fantasy, oh Tolkien, but Kindred is fantasy because there’s no science. With fantasy, all you have to do is follow the rules that you’ve created.

Joshunda Sanders: There are so many parts of the Parables, for instance, that seem to echo what’s happening in the world right now.

Octavia Butler: Keep in mind that when I wrote them, Bush wasn’t president. Clinton had yet to be reelected. When I wrote them the time was very different. I was trying not to prophesize. Matter of fact, I was trying to give warning.

One of the kinds of research I did was to read a lot of stuff about World War II. Not the war itself, but I wanted to know in particular how a country goes fascist. So, I have this country, in Parable of the Sower, and especially Parable of the Talents, sliding in that direction. And I really was not trying to prophesize that somehow we would do that but…

Joshunda Sanders: Is it jarring to you, with the new mission to Mars and such?

Octavia Butler: Oh, no, I don’t see any reason to pay attention to that. I don’t think Bush is any more serious about Mars than he was about getting rid of some of our emissions in the atmosphere. It’s just something he said and probably forgot it a moment later. Or will eventually. Because, after all, it’s not something that’s supposed to happen while he’s still in office. It can’t. So I don’t think we need to really pay any attention to that.

Joshunda Sanders: You came of age when there was an actual space race, but my generation is a little removed from that.

Octavia Butler: I think of the space race as a way of having a nuclear war without having one. I mean that literally. We had a competition with the USSR and from that competition came a lot of good technical fallout. We learned a lot of things we hadn’t know before, even things that apply to weapons systems and yet we didn’t wipe each other out. I mean, there were people who thought a nuclear war would be a cool idea. During the early part of the Reagan era, there were people who thought we could win a nuclear war and rid ourselves of the Soviet Empire. I thought they were nuts, but they were there. And Reagan got into office in spite of the fact that he thought a nuclear war was winnable.

Joshunda Sanders: That’s heavy stuff.

Octavia Butler: I got my idea for the Xenogenesis books (Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago) from Ronald Reagan because he was advocating this kind of thing. I thought there must be something basic, something really genetically wrong with us if we’re falling for this stuff. And I came up with these characteristics. The aliens arrive after the war and they tell us that we have these two characteristics that don’t work and play well together. They are intelligent, and they tell us we’re the most intelligent species they’ve come across. But we’re also hierarchical. And I put this after the big war because it’s kind of an example. We’ve one-upped ourselves to death, just our tendency to one-up each other as individuals and groups, large and small.

It has a greater consequence if you combine it with intelligence. If what you have is two elk fighting over who’s going to make the food, I mean, the consequences to them…but if you’re going to have somebody sending people off to war for egotistical or economic reasons, both hierarchal sorts of reasons, you end up with a lot more dead people. When you’re throwing nuclear weapons in the pie, which is what we were doing back then, you end up with more dead people than any war before. It could have been very bad.

Joshunda Sanders: Do some of your ideas disturb you or keep you up at night?

Octavia Butler: A lot of the ones in the Parables, of course, did. Like I said, they weren’t things that I wanted to happen. Kindred was a difficult book to write because of the research I had to do. The slave narratives, the histories in general — I read books written by the wives of plantation owners, at the LA Public Library. Unfortunately, a few years after that, somebody torched it. Some of the books I used to write Wild Seed and Kindred, they would have been one copy in the library and now they’re gone.

Joshunda Sanders: Why do you think Kindred has been one of your more popular works?

Octavia Butler: Because it’s accessible to a number of audience: black studies, oh, I guess I have to modify my vocabulary here — African American studies, women’s studies and science fiction. It sometimes reaches people who might not otherwise read that kind of book, who might not read a history, a historical novel even about that period unless it was a Gone With the Wind type.

[With Kindred] I chose the time I was living in. I thought it was interesting to start at the bicentennial and the country’s 200 years old and the country’s still dealing with racial problems, and here’s my character having to deal with slavery all of a sudden. If I had written the book now, it probably wouldn’t be very different. What I was trying to do is make the time real, I wanted to take them back into it. The idea was always to make that time emotionally real to people. And that’s still what it’s about. The nice thing is that it is read in schools. Every now and then I hear about younger kids reading it and I wonder how they relate to it. All too often, especially young men, will feel, “Oh, if it was me, I would just…” and they have some simple solution that wouldn’t work at all and would probably get them killed. Because they don’t really understand how serious it is when the whole society is literally arrayed against you and arrayed to really keep you in your place. If you get seriously out of line, they will kill you because they fear you.

Kindred was kind of draining and depressing, especially the research for writing it. I now have a talk that begins with the question, “How long does it take to write a novel?” and the answer is, as long as you’ve lived up to the time you sit down to write the novel and then some. I got the idea for it in college. But a lot of my reason for writing it came when I was in preschool, when my mother used to take me to work with her.

I got to see her not hearing insults and going in back doors, and even though I was a little kid, I realized it was humiliating. I knew something was wrong, it was unpleasant, it was bad. I remember saying to her a little later, at seven or eight, “I’ll never do what you do, what you do is terrible.” And she just got this sad look on her face and didn’t say anything. I think it was the look and the memory of the indignities she endured. I just remembered that and wanted to convey that people who underwent all this were not cowards, were not people who were just too pathetic to protect themselves, but were heroes because they were using what they had to help their kids get a little further. She knew what it was to be hungry, she was a young woman during the Depression; she was taken out of school when she was ten. There were times when there was no food, there were times when they were scrambling to put a roof over their heads. I never had to worry about any of that. We never went hungry, we never went homeless. I got to go to college and she didn’t even get to finish elementary school. All that because she was willing to put up with this nonsense and try to help me. I wanted to convey some of that and not have it look as though these people were deficient because they weren’t fighting. They were fighting, they just weren’t fighting with fists, which is sometimes easy and pointless. The quick and dirty solution is often the one that’s most admired until you have to live with the results.

Joshunda Sanders: So I hear you’re working on a book about a vampire?

Octavia Butler: It’s sort of like my Wild Seed for this time in my life. I wrote Wild Seed as my reward for having written Kindred. I wrote the two Parable books and I was trying to write a third, and I wasn’t getting anything worthwhile done. To me, writer’s block doesn’t mean that I can’t write — it just means that what I’m writing is not worth anything and that writing it is difficult and unpleasant. And then, for some reason I got hold of a Vampire story and it was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed it. And after awhile, I found myself writing one. It’s a novel, I’m enjoying it and I hope other people will, too.

Joshunda Sanders: Where do you get your ideas?

Octavia Butler: When I got the idea for Patternmaster, I was twelve, but I had no idea how to write a novel. I tried, but it was quite a few years before I was able to write it. When I got the idea for Mind of My Mind, I was 15. When I got the idea for Survivor, I was 19. Finally, when I got the idea forKindred, I was in college. My ideas generally come from what’s going on around me. But sometimes they come from other novels. For instance, when I wrote Patternmaster, I included these people called the Clay Arks and they were just kind of throwaway people, but I didn’t like them as throwaway people and I wanted to know more about them. So I wrote Clay’s Ark. And learned about them as I went along. Sometimes a book will seem like one book and turn into two or three, which happened with the Xenogenesis books.

Sometimes I hear from people who want to write and [they ask] what should they do? The first thing I want to know from them is, are they writing? Are they writing every day? And a remarkable number of them are not. Do they read omnivorously, because that’s not only a source of ideas, but a way to learn to write, to see what other people have been up to. I recommend that they take classes because it’s a great way to rent an audience and make sure you’re communicating what you think you’re communicating, which is not always the case, and I recommend that they forget a couple of things. Forget about talent. I recommend that they go to the bestselling lists and see who else doesn’t have talent and it hasn’t stopped them, so don’t worry. Forget about inspiration, because it’s more likely to be a reason not to write, as in, “I can’t write today because I’m not inspired.” I tell them I used to live next to my landlady and I told everybody she inspired me. And the most valuable characteristic any would-be writer can possibly have is persistence. Just keep at it, keep learning your craft and keep trying.

Published in In Motion Magazine March 14, 2004

First published in Africana.com ( February 24, 2004. Africana content © Copyright 1999-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved to media owners. Re-published with permission.