Octavia E. Butler, 1947-2006 (A Black Creative Worlds Prequel)
No activity, no reading list, no paywall this week
Black Creative Worlds is a community offering of notes, readings, and curriculum from my convening of Black World Seminar in Spring 2025. Newsletters come out on Mondays from now through April with material for free and paid subscribers under the paywall jump.
For more on the Black World, including past seminar schedules and an essay about the Black World Seminar by Dr. Nathan Connolly visit: bit.ly/JHUBlackWorld.
Today’s community offering is both very late and completely off topic. Forgive me.
Tomorrow, we will be joined by Dr. Brittney Cooper, in person, in seminar, discussing an unpublished work-in-progress. But works in progress are wild creatures easily spooked by too much public comment. So I won’t mention much on it here except that it is brilliant and I’m honored it will make its debut with us.
Instead, this community offering is on creating Black worlds, on world-building, and on reflecting on the nature of the day: the anniversary of the death of Octavia Estelle Butler.
Born Octavia Estelle Butler, the author died on this day in 2006 at the age of 58. We will read the Parables later in the semester, both Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. But I haven’t been able to shake her from my thoughts the last few days.
World-building is not easy work and she did it by facing the ugliness of what we are. I picked up Gerry Caravan’s biography of her, for no reason except that she has been on my mind. I’m struck by what he described as her NO stories—not the stories themselves, but their existence and importance for her—her pessimism about human beings’ ability to survive ourselves, a pessimism that she read and reframed as optimism. An optimism that others, like those practitioners of emergent strategy, have picked up on and regenerated in principles that can guide antiracist, pro-human, pro-planet organizing.
In 2016, ten years after she passed, I wrote on Facebook: “God is change. Resting in power still and laughing at us from afar. I chose you as kinfolk, long ago, long ago, Octavia Butler. And now you're an ancestor. I'm positive you've saved my life countless times. I hope you're enjoying the stars.”
For years and years, this is the image that lit Nuñez Daughter’s about page (IYKYK), alongside the quote:
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit is persistence in practice.”
She is haunting me now, this week. She is haunting all of us. So I am going to give her space to breathe, and myself to inhale and exhale around her. If you haven’t read Parable of the Sower or Parable of the Talents or Emergent Strategy, this is a good week to do so. That is your suggested reading and your activity, my thoughts are above. No paywall this week.
Building a habit of growing with you all through Black Creative Worlds is bringing me to the table with you all, again and again, despite the circumstances, exhaustion and overwhelm. The practice is working, at least for me. I hope for you too. But even if it is not, consider this week a lunch break. Or a prequel of what is to come as we enter the second half of the term: Build even your most pessimistic world. Build Black creative worlds. Create new worlds. The future is not written.
Your discussion question is what will you do when your wall falls? (If you’ve read the Parables, you know)
Rest in peace also to Roberta Flack and Danielle Legros Georges. This one leapt into my hands today, a poem about exile and the eye of Sauron and the pain of unsteady waters that wash up on all our sources.
