Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

INTRODUCTION

SAMUEL R. DELANY

The first I heard of Octavia Butler was when West Coast writer Harlan Ellison phoned me in New York to tell me there was going to be a student in Clarion he wanted me to pay special attention to. Her name was Octavia Butler, and at that point, it was a Clarion tradition that the previous week’s instructor would phone the upcoming instructor and alert her or him to any particular problems among the 20-odd students that one should pay special attention to. When I got there, Butler was, first, the only black student in the class, and it was soon clear she was extremely smart but also pathologically shy. She never volunteered, but if you just called on her, she always had an intelligent answer that was right-on. A number of the other students, including two who were just a little bit younger than she was, Joe Manfradini and Jean Mark Gawron, personally I took to much more than I took to her, both of whom moved to New York where they became personal friends.

Some months later, I saw her story Crossover, in the first Clarion anthology, which seemed to be basically a slice-of-life story about a young working girl. It’s accurately observed but not memorable in any other way, and I did not see her again until 1991 when the new Schomburg building went up at 135th St and Malcolm X Boulevard, New York. As part of the first year’s program, Octavia and I were asked to read together. She had not yet won her MacArthur. I had not seen her since Clarion, and, for me, she was very much a West Coast writer.

We weren’t given an auditorium, but there was a reception connected with the event, and the woman who did the catering, Norma Jean Darden, was a kissing cousin of mine on my Aunt Virginia’s side, whom I’d known since I was a child, visiting in Montclair, New Jersey. Toward the end of the reading, we got a black heckler, who had just come in off the street, and I was really astonished when Octavia stood up to him quite articulately and told him to keep quiet and not interrupt till, finally, he got up and left. This was not the pathologically shy young woman I remembered from Clarion, and I told her how much she had improved. Years later, in her essay, Positive Obsession, I would read:

Shyness is shit.

It isn’t cute or feminine or appealing. It’s torment, and it’s shit.

I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence staring at the ground. It’s a wonder I didn’t become a geologist. I whispered. People were always saying, speak up, we can’t hear you. I memorized required reports and poems for school, then cried my way out of having to recite. Some teachers condemned me for not studying. Some forgave me for not being very bright. Only a few saw my shyness. She’s so backwards, some of my relatives said…

Octavia had conquered the shyness. Sometime later, when she realized that, like me, she was dyslexic, she ceased to do readings in public altogether and generally gave remarkably coherent and impressive talks. Decades later, in my first years at Temple University, she came to talk: it was five years beyond her MacArthur Award, and, thanks to it, she was one of the best-known writers in the country. I was asked to interview her, and in preparation, I had read her novel, Kindred, which had struck me as a very interesting novel about an interracial marriage between a black young woman and her white husband, with a time-traveling element about a white ancestor she had to keep alive in order to exist at all. The audience that had turned out to see her were largely black women students, and it was clearly an audience that she felt she had spoken to before in various parts of the country. When I brought up the interracial question, she rather sharply ignored that aspect and went back to what she was clearly used to saying for that audience. I wasn’t going to push it, certainly, if there were aspects she and her audience were not necessarily going to be interested in that day.

It’s one way to handle interviewers, but her playing so entirely to audience’s expectations did surprise me. Using her stories and novels to educate audiences during a live appearance was not what she wanted to do—or at least not that particular sort of audience.

In April 1997—I just had a birthday—in Atlanta, I joined Steve Barnes, Tananarive Due, Jewel Gomez, and Butler for the first Black Science Fiction Writers Conference, and after the opening ceremonies, for some reason, someone decided, possibly because I was gay, they would send us to a hangar-sized Atlanta gay bar and park us there for the evening. All the others had things to do except Octavia and myself, and so we found ourselves sitting together in this huge party space with some very loud music, though we asked to be moved as far back as we possibly could because, basically, we wanted to talk, and up by the stage—I suspect it was a good New York city block away—it was far too noisy.

I only remember one point of the conversation, but I think it’s important given what some people have said since then. Neither one of us was particularly a bar person, and I don’t know where the notion a gay bar would be an advisable place to park the two of us came from, but possibly because it was a gay bar, I asked her, Octavia, are you gay?

She shrugged and said, Probably, and we went on to chat about other things: largely the blooming romance that had been going on between Steve Barnes and Tananarive Due for the entire weekend.

I will say right now that probably is a pretty ambiguous answer to a straightforward question. I assume it meant it was something she had thought about enough times to return to it on several occasions but had very little experience of it. Then again, it was certainly not a no.

Less well-documented, I remember a rainy night just outside Washington, D.C., in a program sponsored by the Smithsonian, where we met at the theater and shared some orange juice backstage before going on. During the program itself, I read some from my story, Atlantis: Three Tales, and Octavia simply gave a talk. One young man, during the Q&A afterwards, lining up at the microphone, asked whether she would read his film script that he had brought with him, and she simply said no, for which she got points in my book. I have no idea whether this was recorded or not, but I suspect it was either the last time or one of the last times I saw her in person.

We were separated by a continent, and, between Harlem in the ’40s and ’50s and Pasadena, Los Angeles, in the middle ’50s through the early ’60s, life was simply different enough to mean we had extremely different childhoods. (I have no idea whether Butler ever learned to drive or not; I didn’t, largely because I grew up and lived practically till I was 50 in a city that, between subways and buses, has one of the best public transportation systems in the world, which, in a word, is why neither I nor my sister—or my partner Dennis—ever bothered to learn.) It’s impossible to find out from anything published so far whether she owned a car or possibly wanted one. There is one reference to her never learning to drive, which means, for someone living on the West Coast, something very different from someone living in New York City.

On November 18, 1996, Butler’s mother died, and it was deeply disturbing to her. A year later, she wrote a letter to her agent Merrilee Heifetz, apologizing that Parable of the Talents would never be finished, and asking to return her advance. It’s my suspicion that she was never really happy with the longer form of the novel. For me, her teachable and her inspiring work are her short stories, especially Amnesty, at the tail end of her career, and Bloodchild, at the opening, which she often talked about as her male pregnancy story. She rescued one old novel (Fledgling) from her trunk, which makes up her second-longest contribution to her Library of America volume.

I am very pleased that they chose to put all eight short stories, as well as five of her essays, in that commemorative volume. I really think that is the best of Octavia Butler that we are going to find in a volume of collected works and certainly the most informative volume in terms of what she thought and what she told the various people who interviewed her from 1979 to the beginning of 2006, a month before her death at the end of February when the last of the interviews here, with Jen Chau Fontán, occurred. Ms. Fontán writes, Octavia Butler…describes herself as a fifty-eight-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer. Tragically, Octavia died a month later, on February 24, from a brain bleed associated with a fall she took, returning to her own Seattle house, which, as I understood it, she had purchased to be nearer to the city’s science fiction community.

—Philadelphia

June 12, 2023

THRUST INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW BY JEFFREY ELLIOT

THRUST

SUMMER 1979

Like her characters, Octavia Butler is a survivor, a bright new talent who describes herself as a dreamer, a loner. One who amused herself as a child by making up stories. Fortunately for science fiction readers, Ms. Butler is now writing stories for a much larger audience. In recent years, she has penned such impressive works as Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, and Survivor. She is presently completing two new novels, Keep Thee in All Thy Ways*1 and Wild Seed, both of which promise to elevate her to superstar status in the science fiction world.

The interview which follows was conducted at the author’s home in Los Angeles, California.

JEFFREY ELLIOT: Why did you become a writer?

OCTAVIA BUTLER: I stumbled into writing when I was ten and in love with horses and living in the middle of a city where no horses were available. I read horse books from the library—The Black Stallion, King of the Wind, Smokey, etc. I dreamed of owning a horse and told myself horse stories. Then at a carnival I rode a weary ancient pony that had sores on its sides and flies attacking the sores. The pony walked around a small ring with other ponies bearing other children. The children kicked the ponies’ sides urging the animals to go faster than their handlers would permit, and I understood where my pony had gotten his sores. I went home repelled (thus began my hatred of all exhibits in which living animals are treated as toys, machines, or wax dummies) and began to tell myself stories of wild horses. These were much more exciting than my earlier stories and I began writing them down so that I wouldn’t forget them. I didn’t know that writing was a profession, that people were paid for creating books I enjoyed. I learned quickly, though, that I liked to write. It was something I could do alone, and I was a naturally solitary person. It was apparently not a sin as so many pleasurable things were in the fundamentalist beliefs of my mother’s church. And it was a natural extension of my dreaming. When I did find out that there were people who earned their living as writers, I knew that was what I wanted to do. No other work interested me. No other work ever has.

ELLIOT: What encouragement did you receive from your family?

BUTLER: My family saw my writing as an unusual hobby, harmless but impractical. Get training for a real job, they told me. Write in your spare time. One of my aunts said