AN EVENING AND A MORNING AND A NIGHT WITH OCTAVIA BUTLER
How I Met and How I Missed My Favorite Writer
I was teaching at Syracuse University, mid-way through that lonely frozen five year stretch. My first book Drown was behind me, but the novel that would become The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao had not yet arrived. I wrote endless first chapters, none of them great, but I had hopeful youthful energy and that drove me on. Plus, the tenure clock, the tick-tock of those days.
I remember that fall semester well, for the reason I’m about to describe. Every morning I left my apartment at 5am to hit the gym, no matter the weather. A sanity ritual as much as a fitness routine. It snowed quite a lot that semester and I often had to struggle through knee-high snows. I still have dreams about that insatiable cold and the vast star-strewn skies above Syracuse.
Right before Thanksgiving the faculty of African descent had a get-together and about a dozen of us showed up. A nice party, lots of conversation, the windows beaded with condensation, and towards the end of the night I was asked who I thought everyone should be reading. I answered without hesitation: Octavia Butler. Then, like now, I was a full-time Butler proselytizer, pushed her books on everyone I could, and just to show you how much has changed in 25 years: among the assembled only one other person had read Butler and just a single book — Kindred.
I had discovered Butler relatively early, in high school, when I was cutting classes for months at a time and often hung out at the Old Bridge Public Library. Couldn’t stick around the neighborhood, my mom had way too many spies. I didn’t have a car but in those days I didn’t think anything about walking four miles to the library (four miles almost to the foot) just to pick up some books. I could have gone without school, but not without reading. Plus, libraries were awesome hide-outs for a truant. Perhaps because I was brown, or just anonymous enough, or perhaps the librarians assumed I was there for a project or just didn’t care — but no one ever asked me why I was in the library during a school day.
What did I read? Almost exclusively genre, made it a habit of always prowling the SF / Fantasy / Horror sections, and that was how I found Butler. Clay’s Ark actually, which along with King’s The Stand is one of my absolute favorite virus / contagion novels.
Wild fact: at the time I didn’t know Butler was Black. Didn’t discover her Blackness until I was in college. One of those revelations that make your life, and it certainly helped to make mine.
But that’s a story for another time. Just know that Butler was very much on my mind in those days and it wasn’t only because I kept trying to write stories in the Butler mode and failing. A week before the Syracuse faculty gathering I had taught Clay’s Ark, my favorite (as I already mentioned) of what I call Butler’s early period, and I had received an invitation to the book release party for Butler’s latest novel, the exceptionally prophetic Parable of the Sower.