![]() So, when I said I wanted to sell books, she said of course you should do that, of course, you’ll be successful, of course, people will want to buy books from you.”Īfter her grandmother passed, High said she thought about all the things her elders might have wanted to do but didn’t have the access or opportunity. “It wasn’t that she wanted me to be the CEO of a company it was that she wanted me to be happy. “My grandmother believed in my dreams without any sort of hesitation or reluctance,” High said. ![]() We all have an Octavia in our lives.”Īnother Octavia in High’s life was her grandmother, who passed away unexpectedly in May 2022. “As I started to go deeper into this venture, I thought about Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison and all these amazing women that I read repeatedly, the women who gave me such hope. So, in opening up a shop, I had to give a nod to her,” said High, the founder of Octavia’s Bookshelf. “Being from Pasadena, Octavia Butler is a writer that I’ve been interested in since I was a teenager. Now that High is opening a bookstore of her own, she wanted to acknowledge the writer who inspired her and so many others. “I felt safest around books, because they gave me a chance to fantasize about realities that weren’t mine,” she said. Nikki High grew up in Pasadena too, and like Butler, she had a childhood that involved libraries and bookstores. Though Butler would have been a writer no matter where she lived, “there’s something undeniable about the contrasts of the urban/wild component in this part of Southern California,” George added. So, when climate change pops up in Parable of the Sower, you know this was her inspiration.” “She could see with her own eyes how climate change was affecting Pasadena and extrapolated what that meant for others. I know it influenced her work,” George said. “I think about the notes she took on her walks and how she moved through these neighborhoods, going up into the hills and looking down at the city and this majestic perspective she had. ![]() This was an essential part of her writing process, a time to watch, process, and imagine. Since she never learned to drive, Butler often rode the bus or took long, looping walks around Pasadena’s lefty neighborhoods beneath the rugged San Gabriel Mountains. Published in 1979, it’s the story of a Black woman in modern Los Angeles who is pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland.ġ & 2. Gaining a Broader Readershipįirst, there was the TV adaptation of her speculative novel Kindred, which debuted on Hulu in December 2022. She’s also considered to be the mother of literary Afrofuturism, with writing that looks toward the future through a Black cultural lens.īutler spent most of her life in Southern California, the daughter of a maid and a shoeshine man, finding solace in the local libraries, shopping at Vroman’s Bookstore, and winning her first writing prize at Pasadena City College.īut if you don’t already make the association between her and the City of Roses, you likely will soon, thanks to Octavia’s Bookshelf, a new bookstore that’s scheduled to be opening this month, the people Butler has inspired within Pasadena and beyond, and the enduring power of her work. The late Butler was a visionary Black novelist, winning every major award for science fiction and a prestigious Macarthur genius grant, the first science fiction writer to ever do so. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.Ome writers are inseparable from the places that inspired their work. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. Favorite Quote “Better to stay alive," I said. It includes numerous time-defying episodes that have Dana going back and forth between different events in history and being changed by all of them. The story is part historical fiction, part slave memoir, and part fantasy. Kindred tells the story of Dana, an African-American woman in California in 1976. Butler got her start writing novels with this debut novel, and remains one of her most popular works.
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