With Afro-Futurism, Octavia Butler created her own reality: Larry Wilson – The Daily Breeze

Lotta good writers out there.

Lotta good novelists.

Few craft an entirely new genre, though. One who did, Octavia Butler, who thousands of acolytes credit with creating Afro-Futurism, left her papers to the Huntington Library, which in a new show celebrates her amazing writing and wonderfully American life story of self-creation after a childhood of poverty in the Northwest Pasadena ghetto.

Telling My Stories, which runs through Aug. 7, is one of those roomful-of-arcana museum biopics that I suppose you have to come to with at least a little interest beforehand in the subject. But once visitors wander past the West Hall of the main library exhibit space at the Huntington, many who otherwise just wanted to get a gander at the Gutenberg will be pulled into Butlers room, first by the oversized black and white portrait of the formidable, 6-foot-tall author staring out, and then by all thats contained on the walls and in the display cases.

This isnt like a visit with the papers of some Ivy League tweedster. Octavia Butlers widowed mother was a maid in a wealthy Pasadena household. Octavias exposure to books but for the Bible was not going to happen at home. But, thanks to the childrens section then known as the Peter Pan Room of the Pasadena Library, she discovered reading for pleasure. She began to scrawl little escapist stories about horses and romance. And then, according to Natalie Russell, the Huntingtons assistant curator of literary collections, Butler saw the 1954 B movie Devil Girl from Mars, and had a simple inspiration in reaction to the dumbed-down tale: I can write better than that.

Once she graduated from Muir High and Pasadena City College, and began hanging out at the Los Angeles Library downtown, reading more science fiction, Russell says Butler grew tired of stories featuring only white male heroes. I can write my own stories and I can write myself in, Butler often said after that.

It almost looks easy, or at least inevitable, a writers life in hindsight. But a shy, gangly girl such as Butler had zero role models for her craft. This exhibit shows the Benjamin Franklin-esque manner in which Butler created herself through the national pastime of over-the-top motivational imagineering. I am a bestselling writer, she wrote in ballpoint on lined three-hole-punched papers in the show. I write bestselling books and excellent short stories. Both books and short stories win prizes and awards.

And so she did. Eventually, because she willed it, she was mentored by Harlan Ellison, the Sherman Oaks sci fi giant, and gained entry to the Open Door Program for minority writers of the Writers Guild of America, West. Not that it was easy. No MFA programs or scholarships for her. In a Dear Mama letter Butler typed but never sent from a workshop, she wrote, Im afraid I cant write and I know I cant do anything else. Im blocked. ... Im alone here. I mean, Im the only Negro. That shouldnt mean anything. It means a lot.

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She unblocked, and, working menial L.A. office jobs by day, she wrote at night. She was 28 when she sold her first novel, Patternmaster, to Doubleday in 1975. As she gave me a preview of the show on Thursday, curator Russell noted of Butlers astounding Kindred, in which an African-American woman of today time travels back to a slave plantation, that only a woman protagonist such as the novels Dana had a chance of flying under the radar of the antebellum South and and making it home.

Butler won the Hugo, Nebula and a MacArthur genius grant. The big one. Like a salary, leaving her free to write. The only thing she ever wanted to do.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

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With Afro-Futurism, Octavia Butler created her own reality: Larry Wilson - The Daily Breeze