Kinfolk, Kinship, Kindred

THIS HAS been a big week for Octavia E. Butler fans and stans, with the launch of “Kindred,” the limited series, on Hulu. I’ve only been able to see two episodes thus far and so there will be no spoilers here, no fear.

This week, my essay for Sierra magazine about Butler’s circuitous path toward publishing Kindred went live. Her manuscript was rejected 15 times by publishers, until Doubleday made a home for it in 1979. It became her breakthrough book.

In my piece, I reach back to the seeds of the novel, a story Butler told many times over the course of her life: While in college, she’d overheard a conversation in which another student claimed that if he were alive in the antebellum south and enslaved that he would have fought back. That declaration haunted with her. Would he have? Could he have? How would he know?

Bravery and survival looked like something different back then.

She started to investigate. To puzzle those “what ifs” out on the page. Drafts and drafts of pages in which characters, stakes, plot points and scenarios changed again and again.

From my piece:

When she was done, Butler had written a gripping, spectral, and genre-defying novel she called Kindred—the story of Dana, a 26-year-old Black woman setting up a household with her new husband, a white man, in 1970s Southern California. Dana, inexplicably, becomes unstuck in time. In an instant, she is transported back to a marshy riverside on a plantation in antebellum Maryland and must blindly feel her way around the territory to root out the extraordinary circumstances that not only landed her there but also continue to pull her across time and space.

I know many people who are meeting for watch-parties and post-screening book groups. I already knew that I was not going to be able to “binge” something like this, that it would have to be something I explored in chapters and so, it will take me a bit to get through. That’s okay. It took Butler years to distill and write and publish. I will honor that process.

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Catching Up With Octavia’s Prescience

Octavia E. Butler: Mural detail by Roberto Quintana

OCTAVIA IS everywhere.

Last Saturday, I was driving back across town after a book group conversation in Venice with the writer Dana Johnson. Our topic was Butler’s writing life. Minutes after I said my goodbyes and pulled away, I stopped at red light I looked up to see aa huge billboard advertising the new Kindred limited series, based on her 1979 novel, which premieres 12/13/2022 on Hulu.

Really, she is everywhere.

This has been a big year for Butler and her vision. I’ve been back in the archives at the Huntington Library researching and crafting new pieces. It’s been good to be immersed again. Even better to hear about people learning more about the writer, her work and her importance.

I”m often asked what is the most interesting or surprising thing I found in the Octavia E. Butler archive. That’s tough to answer. There is so much there that reveals, surprises or amuses—down to the briefest grocery list or research marginalia. Every time I open a notebook or open an old letter, she points me toward something new.

I loved the questions that came up about her during our book group conversation. So many engaged readers. We spoke a lot about how she worked so hard to keep her dreams in focus and dug deep inside to find her strength to persevere when the signals she received offered only contrary messages.

She kept going. Crafting her narratives while at the same time crafting her life.

I wish she were here to see all that her work continues to inspire.

Here’s a little roundup of links to some of the pieces I put together this year about Butler’s world, that help to illuminate the early years and the inspiration she found to keep going:

At the beginning of the year, I worked on this walking map of Butler’s Altadena/Pasadena for the Huntington Library.

In May, for L.A. Parent magazine, I wrote an essay and put together a bullet-point tour of Butler’s life here in Southern California, called, Octavia’s Footsteps.

And, last month, The New York Times‘ published a package, The Visions of Octavia Butler, that I’d been working on along with their Narrative Projects Team for many months. A wonderful experience, working collaboratively with this team—he early brainstorming so very essential to creating an experience—a world. The artist Ainslee Alem Robson not only ushered readers through Butler’s past, but also allowed us to travel through her imagination and into her imagined futures.

I hope you enjoy wandering through these portals into Octavia’s worlds.

fall into winter

BEST LAID plans have taken to the wind.

I’d meant to try to do a once-a-week update post here but have been juggling writing and deadlines and such.

The path is clearing some.

I’ll be updating here.

My book After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame, published by Angel City Press, will be available in January. Stay tuned to this page for details and some peeks behind the process.

Until then, enjoy the fall light and rich shadows.

“Telling My Stories”

SCENES FROM last week’s opening festivities for “Octavia E. Butler — Telling My Stories” at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. 

A special thank you to curator Natalie Russell who carefully selected 100 objects out of a vast archive of 8,000 to illustrate Butler’s life, work and struggle. It’s a beautiful survey of a singular life. We are all grateful to Butler for gifting her papers to the Huntington so that so many more people can learn about her way of looking at and being in the world. Most affecting is her depth of curiosity, her blinders-on focus. For all the sacrifice and sense of mission, her dedication at moments feels matchless.  

The exhibit is up through August. Come early. Give yourself enough time to wander through. There is much to linger over, digest and celebrate. 

State of Mind/State of Being

MY ESSAY — in words and pictures —  about what it means to be a Californian is now up at Boom California.

At the edge of it

I have been thinking more and more of late about how being both  an inheritor and a native of a place,  shapes the way you see and move through territory as well as how you  understand your place within it.

Keepsakes and Souvenirs

I want to thank especially my former SF roommate, Shelley,  for spending endless hours with me  roaming around our old spaces and chasing vanished addresses in the Bay Area. I can do that for hours and hours.  I do a fair amount of this roaming on my own when I’m here in Los Angeles but it was great to have a second set of eyes and someone with whom to bounce ideas back and forth.

California, I do love you, but I have to wonder sometimes if you’re moving faster than I am.

Boom Winter Issue 2016

All images by Lynell George

Seeing California

PLEASE JOIN us tonight at The Last Bookstore for Boom California’s Winter Reading. Details here. We will be discussing the great Golden State.

Voice (29)

“Is the train station able to gaze at itself, revive the past, double it, a double as quiet as the face, the moving lips of my reflection within a mirror. Quiet as silences within the silences of Theolnious Monk’s piano. During the Twelfth Street Station’s heyday did people’s dreams truly float above the platform upon which I pcuture myself waiting for an Illinois Central train to arrive or depart, a platform lined with cardboard suitcases, ancient steamer trunks, duffel bags, shopping bags, string-tied bundles and cartons, colored gals carrying everything they own in a warm package they cradle in their arms, all of that dreaming and waiting, waiting, every shadow and echo and breath of those lives dust and grit and somebody brooms away each morning from the station’s concrete floor.”

— John Edgar Wideman from Writing to Save A Life: The Louis Till File

Words & Worldmaking

PRESENTING TODAY about Octavia E. Butller’s life and legacy  at U.S.C. 

Patience, Survival, Mind: Inside the Octavia E. Butler Archive

IN CASE you missed it. Last week, I took over the Huntington Library’s Instagram and led their followers through science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler’s massive archive.  I wanted people to have a sense of what it was like working with her papers, which also meant being privy to her hopes and fears and drive.

I’d been commissioned by Julia Meltzer at Clockshop to write a piece for their year-long Radio Imagination project, and my starting point was full immersion into Butlers personal papers — her journals, commonplace books and busy marginalia. I’ve learned much about her in my time here. What has struck me the most however, is just how vulnerable she felt within the writing process.

You can take a look at my Huntington Takeover here.

Also,  the lovely Julia Wick at LAist interviewed me about archive and you can view that here.

Thanks so much, Kate Lain at the Huntington for inviting me to take part in this. I really did have a blast.

Stray Cards from the Octavia E. Butler archive, Courtesy  the Huntington Library. 

“So be it! See to it!”

THANKS TO everyone involved and to all of those who attended Clockshop’s “Radio Imagination” reading honoring Octavia E. Butler last Saturday night. Our goal was to pay fitting tribute, but by all accounts we conjured her. From teaching herself — “guiding her own hand,” to warring constantly with isolation, to writing herself into being, Butler steered herself through a professional universe that could be as aloof as it was alienating.

She found an opening in a seam and made a place for herself. A roadblock was something to circumvent, just another plot-pont puzzle on a page  By articulating her desires, goals and plans — for decades — she built a sure path toward them.

“So be it. See to it!”

It was an honor to be a part of keeping her personal story aloft.

There will be more Radio Imagination events to come in this year-long celebration. A podcast of Saturday’s program will be available shortly. Stay tuned.

(Photos courtesy Clockshop)