She saw me writing and I told her I was writing a story and she said ‘Well, maybe you’ll be a writer.’ And at that point I had not realized that there were such things as writers and it had not occurred to me how books and stories got written somehow. Once I discovered it, I found that I enjoyed it and my mother just made a remark accidentally when I was about ten. Writing is all I really ever wanted to do. By 13, she was sending her stories out to publishers. She had a little notebook and would write in it with a no. At 10, she began writing them down because she was afraid she would forget them. She had been telling herself stories since she was 4 years old. Moreover, she created a place for herself in her own mind. Since she didn’t have that, she found solace in reading and books. Butler often wondered what it would have been like for her, had her siblings survived. She had four older brothers, but they all passed away before she was born. Her mother, surprised but happy, gladly agreed.īutler was the last of five children, and the only one who survived. At 6 years old, Butler asked her mother for a library card after an inspiring school trip. She would bring home armloads and boxes of discarded books from the houses she cleaned, all for Butler to read. Her mother was passionate about her daughter’s education. Her mother would often read to Butler from the Bible, and after Butler turned 5, she would read to her mother. Years later, Butler came to regret her words, “I carried that look for a number of years before I understood it…I didn’t have to leave school when I was ten, I never missed a meal, always had a roof over my head, because my mother was willing to do demeaning work and accept humiliation.” Later, it would be people like her mother who Butler saw as heroes and who would inspire her to write her most famous novel, Kindred. “I will never do what you do,” Butler recounts telling her mother in an interview with Daniel Burton-Rose, “What you do is terrible.” At the time, her mother hadn’t said anything, but looked hurt. She went by Estelle to everyone except her mother, who lovingly called her “Junie.” Her father passed away when she was still a toddler and young Butler was raised primarily by her mother and grandmother. Butler (née Guy) in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947. Octavia Estelle Butler was born to Laurice and Octavia M. As her many interviews and novels show, there was a lot more to her than a simple by-line. Her legacy as the first Black woman science fiction writer precedes her, but she was never too fond of labels. This famous description is catchy, but it barely scratches the surface of who Butler was. 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.” I am also comfortably asocial, a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, “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. “Who am I?” reads an old jacket cover of Octavia E. When not reading or talking about books, she can be found hiking in the woods or dancing alone in her room. As a recent college graduate who studied English just so she could read more books, Sarah spends most of her time devouring whatever catches her fancy, from classics to young adult reads.
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