Bookwild - Empathy, Research, and Resistance: Interview with Susana M. Morris about Positive Obsession

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

This week, I talk with Susana M. Morris about her Octavia E. Butler cultural biography Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler. Listen to hear about: Octavia Butler’s journey from a shy, self-diagnosed dyslexic student to a groundbreaking sci-fi author, and how her relentless “positive obsession” with writing shaped her career.   How Butler’s work reflects deep research, historical pattern recognition, and sharp social insight—explaining why her stories feel prophetic even though she chaffed at that comparison.   The personal costs and creative rewards of dedicating your life to meaningful work, and how Butler’s example encourages artists and writers to pursue their own Positive Obsessions.   Check Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackGet Bookwild MerchFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrianMacKenzie Green @missusa2mba 

This week I got to talk with Susanna W. Morris about her book Positive Obsession, The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler. And I became such an Octavia E. Butler fan in 2025. I'm still working my way through her books because she has so many of them. But I really loved this biography of her life. Here's what it's about. As the first black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer.

With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American Empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity. Our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American Project, the nation's transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut, made possible by chattel slavery, to a bloated imperialist superpower on the version. of implosion. In this outstanding work, Susanna and Morris places Butler's story firmly within the cultural, social and historical context that shaped her, the civil rights movement, black power, women's

liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler's personal and intellectual trajectory and shapes the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos, while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs. They are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated. A reflection of Butler's stories. Morris explains what drove Butler.

She wrote because she felt like she must. Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy for God's sake. At that time, nearly all professional sci-fi writers were white men. As much as I loved sci-fi and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn't stop.

Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you are afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It's about not being able to stop at all. This is a fantastic biography. I just loved it. I really do think most bookish people and writers as well would really enjoy it too. It just really dives into what was inspiring her, why she felt like she had to write, and like that quote at the end, why she thought obsession could be such a good thing when it was a positive obsession. So that being said, let's hear from Susanna Morris.

I am super excited to talk about positive obsession, but I also am always interested in getting to know a little bit about you, too. So I know you're in academia. I know you've written close kin and distant relatives was another one you wrote back in 2014, I think. But what was your journey to writing or even like the academia that you do now? Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm talking to be here. I was a student from the beginning of going to school. I wanted to be a teacher.

You know, first grade, I just, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a teacher. So that desire persisted all throughout K through 12. I went to college. I thought, I'm going to be a high school English teacher. And when I got to college, I saw professors and I saw what they were doing. and I thought, no, I want to do this. So that's what I ended up doing.

Yeah. No regrets. Very happy to be an educator. It is definitely a education for me. And I also always wrote, you know, wrote stories and, you know, the literary magazine and the, you know, all the things, you know. So I think that's why being a professor is perfect for me because, you know, you are a professional writer. And then, you know, you get to teach, get to interact with students, get to be part of their educational journey. So that's how I got started in academia.

Yeah, that's awesome. And it seems like with both your first one, close skin and distant relatives, was about the paradox of respectability in black women's literature. And then obviously you wrote a biography of a very prominent and fast. fascinating black woman. Did you always want to be kind of like researching and talking about like black women's experiences? I mean, yes and no. I've been fascinated with different things.

I was an English major. I got my PhD in English and also study gender studies and African American studies. Yeah. And perhaps in another version of my life, I am a Jane Austen scholar. I love Jane Austen. And right now I'm reading some kind of remix of. of, you know, some Jane Austen kind of mash up where all the characters are in the universe together.

Oh, that's cool. Yes. But no, I felt early on I want to devote my life to thinking about questions that are to black women's cultural production. So that's what I studied particularly in grad school. And that's particularly what I write about is how do black women understand themselves, whether it's through these characters and the text they create or in the case of, you know, thinking about Octavia E. Butler through life. Yeah. The other thing, like I even connected

with you about this in your intro, you kind of talk about how like you grew up in church, but even like earth seed to you made more sense. Like it wasn't such a graceless, angry version of God. And that was how I read Parable of the Sewer. And I was like, oh my gosh, it could be different. Maybe I wasn't taught the loving version of it. So was that kind of your beginning interest in Octavia? And then like kind of what was your moment where you're like, I'm going to write a biography about her? Yeah.

So I first encountered her work about 30 years ago when I was a teenager. And I had never heard of her. We did not read any science fiction in my high school. And we definitely didn't read very many works by black authors, period. So I can recall reading maybe two books, one in the ninth grade, one in the 12th grade. And so when I discovered Octavia's work, I think it was summer before 11th grade, maybe. And so I read a lot and I read promiscuously, but I really loved science fiction and fantasy. And I just was like, oh, I'm not seeing myself representatives kind of whack.

You know, I want to read, you know, different kinds of stories. and then there she was. So that was the beginning. I read Wildseed in undergrad. That kept it going when I got to grad school. You know, everyone's like, oh, we're waiting for her next book because I went to grad school between 2002 and 2007. And so during that time, she published fledgling and then also passed away.

So we were for the sequel to Parable of the Talons. So when I became a professor 19 years ago, which was even crazy to say, but. you know, I studied folks like Tony Morrison, Alice Walker, folks like that. And I wasn't necessarily science fiction focused. But as I evolved in my career, I thought this is really what I want to talk about. I want to talk about Butler and N.K. Jemison and people like that. So from, you know, the early 2010s on, I've been teaching classes about Butler and teaching her works in many of my classes. And so I started working on the biography in 2020 right before the world shut down.

I was like, I'm going to write a biography. And then everything completely shut. Oh, man. It is crazy. I mean, obviously that happened to plenty of writers just because there's always people writing. But that would be wild kind of starting it there. So I know that you mentioned throughout the stuff from her journal entries. And then every now and then I will see like posts where people have pulled stuff from them.

So were you able to like basically read like years of her journal entries? Yes. So Butler's archives are at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. And it's a public library. Do you have to create, get a library card and go through a process because it's not quite like your local library. Right. It's a medieval manuscripts. and Butler's all kind of really serious things in there.

So, you get vetted and so on. But even if you look online, it's open to the public. So it's really wonderful. So there's that. So I was able to read hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands of pages of journal entries and other things. And others and notes and drafts of novels and things. And the thing about Octavia is that she kept everything. So she kept every grocery list.

she would, this is the era of the typewriter, so she would sometimes write her letters in longhand, right, beforehand, and then she would type them so she would have fewer errors, right? She could get her ideas and be like, dear such and such. There were lots of drafts of letters where she's like, I got to ask this person for money or what's going on with this situation, you know? Yeah. And there are diary entries from the time she's about in high school to the end of her life. letters between her and family and friends, just lots of different things.

So I call this book a cultural biography. I'm really looking at her intellectual development and how that sort of mapped alongside key historical and political moments. I really put on her development as an intellectual. Yeah, yeah. It was so cool getting to see, like, those. different stages and the subjects that were like really important to her at different points in her life. And it was making me think back on, because I'm also really enjoying reading books that talk about

either like other books or other movies. Like I enjoy even like the cultural kind of what you're saying, conversations that happen around different art. But then with reading positive obsession, it was also reminding me like, I think it's really easy with celebrities or in this case like deceased but revered authors it's really easy to think like they were this person their entire lifelong but like i would not who i was 10 years ago and i think it kind of helped to remind me of that like people are like never one version of themselves the whole time yeah and you know i tried to show octavia from elementary school and so her uh-huh untimely

death at age 58, you know, she was about 10 different people, you know. Yeah. And she was 15. She was chronically shy and deeply introverted, which she would remain deeply introverted throughout her life. That was just a characteristic of personality trait. But she was able to move in some ways beyond what she called like a debilitating shyness, right? Correct. Yeah. Considering herself like comfortably asocial, like I don't need to be around people every day. day. She would, I think, find if she was a 25-year-old today, if I could be so bold to think, you know, I feel you have a nice little following on TikTok. She would be talking to the folk there, but not necessarily going out and doing all the things, right? Because that was just not her personality,

but she also cultivated a persona as a writer. So she took her intellectual work in her research really seriously, but she also was recognized by her peers and larger public. So she enjoys getting awards. Yes. Whether it's a Hugo or a Nebula or the MacArthur Fellowship, she enjoyed getting awards, she enjoyed recognized for her work and her artistry. So that person who was crying in class because she had to do a presentation was not the person at age 45 who could, you know, talk down a heckler, you know, and on her own, be chauffered

around the world and so on. And then she was still that girl who was like, okay, I just need a moment. I know. Myself. I want to be in my house alone. I want to read my books. I loved that about her. I connect with that a lot.

I'm definitely, like, love to just be home reading books in my, but especially in the bookish community, that's what ended up helping me kind of become more extroverted or at least find the people who don't just like drain my energy all the way down. And so I really, I, yeah, I really connected with that part of her. I think you even mentioned like when she starts doing book tours, like she even knew they were kind of taxing for her, but she had her little things like, oh, I can go to the bathroom for a little bit, which I've done too. But yeah, yeah, it's like that part can stick with you and you can also kind of like you're saying learn to still feel confident around other people too, even if you love being at home.

The other thing you kind of point out is she, I know neurodivergent in general wasn't really diagnosed at that point, but I don't know if she was diagnosed as dyslexic. I can't remember which part there. She felt diagnosed as that dyslexic. This was something. Okay. When she learned what the term was like, oh, I think that this applies to, you know, I interact with her struggles with.

Exactly. But, you know, again, I'm not that kind of doctor. I'm just an English professor. Right. I can't diagnose anybody. But as an educator, I'm just seeing, you know, my decade teaching and I've taught many neurodivergent, you know, student. And myself, I'm like, I haven't had any official diagnosis. I think ADD is real within me, you know. Yes. I think it's more common than not. Yeah. Some ways the term neurodivergence, divergent from what? I know. But the idealized neurotypical standard that I don't think necessarily exists. I know. I know. I know. I know. But because she was born in 1947, her own class, humble beginnings, black woman, we already know that we're just really kind of coming into an arrow where there is increasing awareness around neurodivergence

and understanding how it may manifest in women or non-binary people. Black folk. How people mask might matter culturally, right? It might be exhibited in different ways and so on. And so the way she describes her childhood, her struggles with social cues, right? She's very clear about I don't understand how people are talking to one another. Like I physically understand the words, but I don't understand how glance is they're exchanging or why they think me saying this thing is weird or, you know, she was very as a young person at least before she kind of got to the thing that we almost all get into, which is I respect and love myself and I may or may not be the same like my peers, but I'm deserving of respect and care.

But when she was a kid, she just wanted to be like everybody else, right? Yeah. And so this was a struggle. The other thing where her neurodivergence manifested was how she did in school. So he was a very bright young lady. Her mother and grandmother taught her how to read. She was a voracious reader, spent a lot of time in the library. But at school, he was characterized as a daydreamer, as lazy, those kinds of things.

Whereas she wasn't necessarily getting the kind of pedagogical instruction that would have taken her out of her shell in some ways, right? But when she had a niche topic she was really interested in, was she could go all the way. with that. And so I told my students she, you know, received like the equivalent of 10 PhDs because of the way that she would research things for the fiction that she was writing. So the Xenogenesis trilogy, she goes to the Amazon with a UCLA program, research program, with documents, with professors, and so on. And she took her junior college degree, right? And she came with those folks because she had already been doing independent research. She'd already looking at the various sources, the etymology of words, reading period articles and books, scholarly monographs.

She called herself a news junkie. She was very plugged into the news, the newspaper, the nightly news. She wrote many letters to the editor. So this is someone who really lived a life of the mind. She had to live it on her own terms because going to college, beyond her. degree was so difficult. She tried for many years, but it would be like, is math tripping me up? Is this class tripping me up? And then she has to work, right?

This is not someone who was independent healthy. And then it's not like she could lean on her mother who had done very, you know, well by her, who was a domestic group. Again, she wasn't making lots of money, right? Right. And she came from a family where folks chipped in and took care of one another.

So are going to patrol somebody who, you know, know, they want to be at home writing. It's like everyone has to work. So she worked physical jobs, right? And so how are you doing this extremely physical job for the time that she did work? Yeah. Doing the intellectual work to write these books, these short stories. And also going to UCLA at night and taking the class. Right. Yeah. It also kind of feels like that example of like even if you're introverted, if it's stuff you're like really interested in, like that can get you to like want to fill your day that busy and necessity. I think that's like she, she was like you're saying she was going to have to work,

which is reminding me too of like she eventually is trying, not trying. She does break into sci-fi. But at a time when like it truly was like old white men. So it was like she had she had that going against her to break into it and what you're saying, there's a good chance. there was a little more generational wealth for some of these like white men who could just write. Right. And who were

writing about topics that people thought were, you know, all these are the topics you should be writing. Commercial. Why are you bringing race, for example, into it? And so she had a college instructor that said, you know, you shouldn't really include black characters and science fiction because it's just a distraction.

So we can have marketing, green people, people, whoever, but black folk, right? So these were some of the messages that she was getting as she was writing. And not all of her books were about race or racism supremacy. However,

many, not all, many of her stories featured black characters who were, whenever they appear, they're never sidekicks. They're never flat characters. In some of the novels, like Kindred or Walsy, their race is

important. And in some of the works, they happen to be black. Right. It just depends. But so many of her heroines are very tall, dark skin, sometimes androgynous folk, which basically is what she look like. And you get to write yourself onto the page, right? And so another thing that she was bumping up against is like, well, her white male counterparts were doing the same thing. They were writing versions of themselves onto the page. But she encountered this.

Ursula Le Guin, there are so many of her contemporary, you know, women authors in science and fantasy were like coming up with it. And of course she had the extra burden of not being white, right? Yeah. Yeah. She had the massage noir. She had it from both sections, essentially. And yeah, it's like her, the only way she's going to see someone like herself on a page is going to be to write it, especially in that scenario. And then so when you were talking about Kindred, it was reminding me, well, kindred and when you were saying like the UCLA,

like how she would immerse herself and stuff. And I thought it was so fascinating and also a little bit neurodivergent in the chapter where you say, like she wants to go to where kindred is going to take place. And that she was like, I want to know the country, feel the country,

feel the people. And then I just like connected with this line. a lot. She was like, I don't have to. I could finish the novel without it, but it would be a proper, but it would be a proper novel. Scope, depth, strength would be sacrificed. I have the gift and the talent of making a little information go a long way. And I just like, is that like a journal entry to from her? I'm assuming this is so cool. I just, I love that, I love that idea that she knew about herself. Like, if I'm around the data and around the stuff, I will like know what to write about. And that she understood that she had a particular gift and talent.

She was very hard on herself. So I wanted to include that entry because that was a moment of her being like, I know what I do well. But if I want a novel to be even better, I figure out how I can get to the Eastern Shore, Maryland, so I can put my hands on the artifacts so I can see. I mean, she was from Pasadena and she was born in 1937. So enslavement was not a reality for her, right? She understood her not so distant ancestors had experienced it.

So she for sure talked to like her grandmother and older relatives to be like, y'all weren't enslaved. But when you were small children, you knew older people who were. So what did they tell you about enslavement? So she talked to her people. She did her like field research and that way she read tons of books. and then she found her money, took a great way across the country

so that she could go look at Mount Vernon, right? George Washington. She'd never been to a plantation, right? She's from California. So she went to the plantation. She walked around. She went to the Maryland Historical Society and she looked at the artifacts,

the kinds of clothing people would have worn during the time period, not to just read it in a book but to physically set eyes and look at the scale and the scope. We're so much taller than people. are in the past. If you go to any kind of car because of older homes, people were teeny tiny, right? So she's looking at any clothes.

She herself was six feet tall, so she was a large lady, you know. Yeah. She's looking at these small outfits. She's looking at the shackles that people would have been forced to wear or the other elements of torture. You know, what a spinning wheel would have looked like, what other kinds of

instruments for, you know, the field or the home, you know, silver, all of that. So that when she describes the plantation as vivid as her describing 1976, which was the time she lived through, and it's not that different from our time,

right? When we read 1976, it's like, you know, I just taught Kendra last week in my class the last couple of weeks. And, you know, there's some point where Dana is like, I can't leave, you know, and her husband says, well, I'll call out for dinner. I mean, the difference is we would go on Uber

eats or, you know, whatever, right? But it's a similar thing versus obviously that was not the case in the 19th century. You basically had to make everything that you ate, you know, everything very much from scratch. So she wanted to get all those tiny details from the past very redolent. And then a novel like that, the one speculative element is a time travel, but everything else is pretty realistic. Yes.

And so she didn't have to do that. She could have been like, I'm riffing off of the past. this is not realistic, but I'm just trying to know. Disbelief for this one thing, but the other things are going to be pretty on point, as much as she could, because she said she did write a sanitized version of slavery. It would be very difficult. It is still. Yeah.

Give you the real deal that we wouldn't be able to read it, right? But that no historian could come to her and say, well, actually, it's like, no, no, because I read your book. And I'm taking the information into account. when I'm creating this fictional world. So, yeah. Right. Yeah, like, it's still a heavy read. There's still some stuff.

But, yeah, I actually just started a burned-down master's house by Clay Cain. And that one is pretty desanitized, I think. I could be wrong. And I'm only in, I don't know if you know the structure of it, but it's like four separate stories of enslaved people who rebelled. And it's loosely based off of real people. and it is. I was like, oh,

Kindred was like PG compared to the stuff he's doing there. So I get it. And I know her goal was, because some of her goal was you said, like she had a friend who was like, a black friend even who was like, well, why didn't our ancestors like do more?

Essentially. And I did not realize that was like even a held belief among black people in the 60s. like feeling that way. I'm a minority, but I think the thing that's important to think about is like the boomers back then were the Gen Z years of

today, right? They were young people and they were, which is every, you know, generation does this. I'm an elder millennial. We were looking at boomers like, guys, what's going on? So this is very common, right? But so for generation,

you know, those coming up the civil rights movement, the black power movement are looking around at their elders is like, y'all are a bunch of door mats, you know, a bunch of pushmen, not all the young people, but it doesn't amount to where this was a conversation topic that was being had. This was a topic of the things that folks were like, wait, I don't agree with that at all, you know. And then some people who may have fallen in the middle, like, well, I think maybe they could have done more, but also it was really difficult. And then also not the actual history, right?

So that people felt, not everybody was Nat Turner, but people were. rebelled in big and medium and small ways. And sometimes the wrong was staying alive. Sometimes the right was you tried to break my spirit, but I still remain. You sold my children. I took care of the children that were left behind. I still have a family. You tried to break my manhood, my womanhood, what have you, through these acts of degradation,

but I remain here, right? Sometimes that's the biggest thing that people could do. And that's pretty impressive considering. the system of oppression that they were under. But yeah, she had a friend in undergrad and he knew a lot. He'd read a lot of things, which she very much expected

because she was also, you know, kind of a scholar at that point. Yeah. But he didn't understand emotionally what it meant to be someone living during that time period. And that's really one of the main reasons why she wrote Kendred so that folks could have that

emotional connection. What happens if you're in your society, middle-class life, you just bought a house with your spouse, you're a writer, and then all of a sudden you're brought back to the past. Mm-hmm. Act. Yeah. Would you be immediately trying to burn everything down, or would you do other things, right?

Yes. That's how we get to, you know, the Underground Railroad, like Colson Whitehead, or the book you just mentioned, which, you know, are more graphic depictions. But Butler is part of. of a cohort of people that helped to invent the emancipatory narrative or the neo-slave narrative, which is like modern retellings of slavery, you know? Yep. And so that genre has evolved over time.

And I like even the ones, and I mean, there is a scene from the Underground Railroad that, I mean, it's in. That is, I am so close to reading that one. I just got it. You should read it. It is beautifully written. It is so devastating. I love his writing. Right.

It also has a speculative element because he does, you know, write speculatively and all of that. But some of the stuff that happens, the level of brutality is, I mean, I had to put the book down and be like, okay, so yeah, no, I'm not. Yeah. You know? So she's part of the evolution that got people to be able to be like,

all right, actually, we're going to do an even more. stark depiction of enslaved. Right. And I mean, she still, I'm sure not many people were writing about it in general back then. So it's like still having it be palatable is a weird word, but not as extreme as it could have been. I understand where she was coming from with it too. And even Clay Kane who wrote Burnedown Master's House in his introduction, he talks about it. He's like, I know this is tricky and I don't want anyone to think I'm writing like trauma porn or like fetish out. the trauma of it. And I totally understand why some black readers and writers feel like,

feel like it can veer that way, because obviously it can, especially if it's white people writing it. But he talks in his introduction about how he's like, but this is, this is a story to, like, to remember the people who did say, like, you can't, kind of what you're saying. Like, you can't take, you can't actually break who I am. Like, I'm, I still have agency. So that's kind of where he was coming from with it. But yeah. I'm reading it very slowly. So that was kind of her, yeah, with Kindred. Like she, I remember before I read it, kind of hearing some of it too.

Like she, she wanted to be like, okay, here is slavery. And then like the fact that it was at like the 200 year birthday of America, like that all kind of worked so well together for Kindred as well. But then the other thing with her is there are a lot of people nowadays. who like call her an oracle or someone who saw stuff way into the future. And there's, I had so many highlights. Like her commentary on Reagan was amazing. Her ability to see that education was going to start taking hits and like,

we were going to build more prisons than schools. There's so many things she predicts, even the Make America Great again in the parable, parable series or duology. And I think, you even talk about how she didn't really love when people called her that my understanding of it would be that like she kind of like she was just paying attention and do you do you have any I can't remember if you explain it in the book but for me I'm like I would be annoyed too if people are like oh it's

your magical powers and she's like no I have to be hypervigilant and I'm paying attention to things and you could do this too was do you think some of that was there that's 100% it or most of it. I think when she was a scholar, right? And she was a student of history. She was a master at pattern recognition.

So she had a really deep understanding of history of what had happened before. So she's looking at the rise of Christian nationalism. She's looking at the rise of conservatism. She's going back to World War II. She's a baby boomer. She's, you know, born just a couple

years after the end of the war. right. She's looking at Nazi Germany. She's looking at how Nazi Germany their cues from the United States, right? She's looking at the sort of Jim Crow in general. She's looking at apartheid in South Africa. She's looking at so she's looking at the wildfires near her hometown of Pasadena. The hole in the ozone. There's so many different things that she's looking at and she's like, well, there are a couple different paths we could take. It looks like if we stay in these kinds of behaviors, these things may very well happen.

They could happen soon. If we do this, this could happen. So it's just, okay, I'm going to write about the kind of worst case scenario. And I'm great. You said it in the near future. So Parable of the Sewer comes out in 1993, and it's set in 2024. So about 30 years in the future. So folks would be like, why would you set it in the near?

It's so close to $2,100 or something like that. And I remember when I read it in 1996 thinking like, oh my gosh, that's like, I mean, I was a teenager. So I thought, oh, yeah. Far from now, you know, I'll be in my 40s. Right. So funny. But in the scheme of things, it is not that long of a time. And she was pretty right.

Right. And that wasn't because she said these things are going to happen. I like to hope her contemporary Ursula K. Le Guinne. and McGuwen lets us know that science fiction is descriptive. It's not descriptive. It's describing what is happening now. It might exaggerate, embellish what's most logical or illogical conclusion or what have you. But the story is about us.

The play is about us. We are at the center, right? Yeah. And so, again, 1993, there are wildfires and environmental. disasters and we have already coined global warming. We hadn't done the shift to climate change everywhere on terms of branding language, right? But that's already a concern. This is someone who has read Silent Spring is plugged into the organizations and paying attention and like this seems scary. She's looking at the rise of designer drugs, which was a big conversation in the 80s and 90s.

And she's thinking about how that shows up. She's thinking about droughts, right? wildfires. She's thinking about Christian nationalism and white nationalism. She was raised in the church, but was largely agnostic as an adult. And so obviously she named two of her books after Bible, biblical parables. So she was very familiar with the church. And she saw how it could be solace for people, right? Which is why we get earth. There is like, some. God has changed. could feel better. Right. Yeah. People need like a spiritual message. Not all people, but many people thrive by having that. So is it possible to have a religious message or spiritual message that's not rooted in

oppression? That's a question of exploring. And at the same time, we just sort of seeing like this is a, it's possible. It's not probable. It doesn't have to happen. But I can give a warning. I can write a cautionary tale. While there's still time to make.

Pivot issue is we didn't make the pivots. So now it sounds like she's like, oh, yeah, you know, down to the letter, let's make America great again. Well, that was Reagan's slogan, right? Yes. She hated. Of course, she thought it might stick around, yeah. So she thought, okay, there's going to be someone even worse than him.

And he's going to be signifying on Reagan because Reagan symbolizes a particular thing for many people, not just conservatives. He had a lot of who's very popular, right? In terms that he, both elections that he won, he won in landslides, particularly his election.

I mean, he won pretty much every electoral college vote. You can count on one hand how many he didn't win. So he was massively popular. He had an absolute mandate, right? So she just like, this is someone everybody hates. We might have a different

opinion of him now, but by in large, not necessarily in black communities, but by and large, he was pretty popular, right? So she said, okay, y'all love him so much, but these things could happen because of the things that he's enacted as president, even as governor of California, because he was her governor. So she knew him intimately

politics, right? So. Yeah. Yeah, she was around him. She saw it. even when I started reading it, the amount of times that maggots are mentioned, which is not a direct, direct anything, but it felt like, yeah, I was like, this is just insane. And I, for me, I also grew up as a pastor's kid, like the main character, Laura, Laura, Lauren, Laura. And so the idea of a pastor's kid with hyper empathy trying to make sense of that world, I was like, well, I feel that part in this story. So I really loved both of those. And just exploring the other crazy part to me was like, I think I read it in 2024.

But then I think it was 2025 where there's this rise of Christian nationalists who are saying empathy is toxic. And so I was even thinking back to that book where I'm like, but it's her empathy that like keeps her openhearted to the world and like. Yeah. I read it at a good time for me, basically. But I did like how she explored empathy because the empathy is extremely important. I don't really think there's such thing as toxic empathy in my experience. I mean, the issue was her hyper empathy. It's not toxic because she has it. It's toxic for her because other people don't. Right. So she's very vulnerable. She's living in the world where there's a lot more pain than there is pleasure, right? So we understand the few places where she's experiencing pleasure is usually around sex, right, which is also dicey because she's a teenager and she's, you know, hey, she's a preacher's kid. So it's like there is a particular kind of spotlight on her in her community. And so she's supposed to behave in a particular kind of way. So there's, right. But it's a world where she's experiencing a lot more pain than pleasure.

So her being empathetic is making her, quote, unquote, weak because the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, strong people are just indiscriminately hurting others, right? Which is not a call to say that empathy is bad. It's a call to say that cruelty is the issue, right? When it's systematized and deeply embedded into the everyday practice of life. Mm-hmm. Yes. And then later on, what you mentioned, you guys were like waiting for her next novel in Fledgling. She, uh, she's using vampires in like very creative ways.

So, you know, in fledgling, she's thinking about, okay, vampires. She was supposed to write a sequel to the parable series. And she had, I mean, writers block, her mother passed away. And so she just, um, floundering, right? In her writing, okay, I'm going to do something else. I'm going to write this vampire story. It's just like, heyday, vampire stuff is everywhere, right? Mm-hmm.

And so she says and interviews, okay, well, I thought to myself, what would a vampire need to make their life better? And the main they have, they're almost invincible, but the thing about not being able to go into the sun, if we stay with more lore, right? Which is some of the most persistent lore in terms of European vampires, right? They're a very type of beings in other cultures and countries. And the sunlight thing is not necessarily as much of an issue, right? Yeah. So if we're going to go with like the kin of Vladian paler, Dracula, then the issue was going out to the sun. So wouldn't melanin be helpful, right?

Having more than. And so she creates genetically engineered vampires, right? They are an opioid group species that are similar to how when, you know, homo sapiens and Neanderthals and so on walk the earth at the same time. that creating a world where there's more than one humanoid species and that we encounter one another regularly. And we find out that the silks are folks who would rather be distinguished as a species than black, right? Because, you know, we learn in the kind of lore of the world building of the novel that the vampires, live a long time. So they would have been around at the beginning of what would become the United States. They would have been slave owners. They would have been colonists. You know, all those things.

So even I write, even if they're not human, they are white, right? Because it's a thing that they have taken on. Physically, they look white, but they've also taken on the sort of ideology of white. Right. Right. Which not all the vampires do. They're kind of split as a community. Some of them are, oh, this is great. We do need melanin. I don't care what we look like. That's great.

At least we'll get to be day walkers. And meanwhile, the moment is allowing them to walk around sometimes in Seattle while wearing full, they're fully dressed. So it's not necessarily like they can go live in Cancun. Right. On the beach. It's still pretty basic, but at least they won't be burnt alive. is a huge issue

but they have internalized and metabolize the idea that not only do they think they're superior because they are not quite human right, they're human rights. They have these pertinatural sensibilities

and they can control people through their saliva and all that, their version of glamoring, you know, people. Mm-hmm. And they're white. It's like all these things together. It means. Yes.

It's like, It means they're great. So, you know. In their minds. In their minds. So it's definitely, I think if we had other worldly creatures, you know, who's to say that the wearable action wouldn't be tribalist or that the mummies? I don't know, you know, because we're imagining them from our own lens, right? Again, science fiction, policy, it's descriptive.

It's a way to talk about our own stuff. Yeah. making up things about somebody else. It's about us. Yeah. Yes. It really is. And that's what I tend to really enjoy with sci-fi and speculative is like it's all talking

about what we're dealing with now, no matter what, no matter if like a phone is called something different or not. Like we're talking about pretty much what we're living in right now or things that have already happened. Like that would be the other option typically. And then so the book is called Positive Obsession. And you mention a part where like Octavia thinks of her work as a positive obsession. And like how important it is for her to go after this since she finds herself so obsessed with it.

And then it was funny because as I was listening, I was like, this is like me getting obsessed with her right now. But then you kind of mentioned that she almost be. became like a positive obsession for you as well. So can you kind of talk about that as a theme and as a title? Yeah, the book has only ever had one title. When I pitched it, I called it positive obsession because that is the sort of perspective that I wanted to have that, you know, it's the title of an essay that she wrote that she published in Essence magazine in the late 1980s. It was originally published as the birth of a writer. You know, if you've written for like magazines or online, they'll change your title.

They'll change it. You're, especially in the internet era, you know, you might call it. Yeah. You go look at your article a week later and it's called something else. Yeah. Something has happened. Something has shifted or the demographics are showing. Like, well, we'll have more traffic if we name it this or whatever.

Right. And there was a version of that back then, right? So we put the essay in her collection of short writing. she called it, well she wanted to call it, which was positive obsession. Because that was how she described her desire to live this life of the mind, to get up every day and get in front of her typewriter, to get in for the notebook, to get on a Greyhound, and do research to get on the plane and go to the Amazon and hike so that she can perfectly describe what it would be like to be in the Amazon.

Another thing she did not have to do. No. But was compelled to do because this was her job and her vocation. And she took it very seriously. And it cost her a lot. Now, eventually she was beloved and acclaimed and awarded and all the things. But for a good chunk of her career, she was broke. Mm-hmm.

She would have a toothache and be like, how am I going to pay? I mean, it's a question that many of us have today, right? I know. I did relate. Yeah. Right. How am I going to pay for these medical procedures? do I have to hawk my typewriter at the pawn shop and then try to get it back in a couple of weeks?

I mean, really eating beans for dinner, basically. You know, like this is very serious for her. And she could have stuck with a job in the civil service, which she tried to do for a little bit. She could have done clerical work. She could have become a nurse or a teacher or something. She could have gotten married and maybe married somebody who has. had money so that her life circumstances would have looked different, right? She wasn't a posting partnership.

But she really focused her life on the work, right, in a way that made her eligible to a lot of people. Today, because of people like her, it makes, you know, you could say, I'm a writer. Yeah. A woman, be a black woman, be a queer woman, be whomever, be neurodivergent, and be proud, like, I'm a neurodivergent writer. And other folks would be like, oh, my God. I am too. But she didn't have

that community in the same way back then. She did find her people, right? Fellow nerds, her fellow black women writers, whomever. Yeah. She kind of sacrificed everything to be able to do what she did. And it worked out in the end

in many ways, but there were many costs as well. And so I also named the book that to emphasize, like, it's positive. It wasn't like she was out here doing crack, right? No, but she was at home writing books. She was at home reading.

She was at the library checking things out. She was on the research trip. If she was out with friends, they were often writers or her family members. She had many writerly friends. She spent a lot of time writing letters to other writers. I mean, her life was focused on writing, on learning things in a time period where the expectation was you get married. You have children. And you don't devote your whole life to a vocation.

Yeah. You devote your life to a family. Yeah. Yeah. I love, I do that era of women who did choose to not do that. Like it was so much less common back than even. I'm always so inspired and kind of like you're saying, feel a little bit indebted to the women who are willing to all kinds of jobs,

whether there's writing or like even. being like, I'm going to be a lawyer. Like the women were doing it back then. I'm like, you guys knew who you were and you were going to be that person. And it's inspiring. Yeah. And there was a cost, right? It could be that alienated.

It could be that, you know, maybe you do want to have a family. You do want to have children. You do want to be partnered. But what are the options out there when you were like a feminist woman who's like, oh, my girl is really important to me? How's that going to work? you know, many folks assume that Octavia, you know, identified as queer and she did not, you know, pretty open with friends.

Like, yeah, you know, like set me up with somebody. I'm up for, you know, dating and all the things. And, you know, it just didn't really go very far for her. And she would, you know, note, you know, in her diary entries or to friends, like sometimes when she would mention, you know, you go to a dinner party, oh, what do you do? I'm a writer. Oh, that's cool. and then they ask, well, have you written any books? Well, yeah, I've written like six books.

You know, you would think that would be, oh, yes, you know, wow. Yeah. But not necessarily. That's not necessarily the case now, right? People are still having issues whether we're talking about heterosexual or queer dating. But for sure, homosexual dating 30, 40, 50 years ago. Yeah. Oh, you wrote six books?

Okay. Oh, okay. So you're going to have thoughts in our marriage. I feel inadequate because I haven't read a book. I haven't read a book in six years and you've written six books. Right. Right. Versus, oh, you could be my interlocutor. We could talk about things.

We could. Yes. Right? Yeah. So, you know, women writers weren't always able to find that in romantic partners. They could often find it in one another, right? Yeah. If they were for male romantic partners.

that wasn't always readily available. Yeah. I wish it was. If it was what she wanted, I mean, it sounds like she maybe would have been able to enjoy it, but it is the timing of it. I think it's a little bit easier now.

Well, it is easier now for women to want to have a career and to be able to be like, well, if you are going to be with me, like I am going to want someone who can have a conversation and has read something in their lifetime. But yeah, it would be so much harder back then. do that. And it's just so heartbeing. I know she had multiple health issues, but even when I got to the part that she died that passed, passed away so young, I was like, you gotta be kidding me. Like I knew,

I knew that's what we were working towards, but it does make me so sad. I wish we could have known her for a little bit longer. But you've done a really good job of introducing us to a lot of her at the same time. Thank you. Yeah. That was definitely my goal. My goal is to wet your appetite. If you are new to learning about her, maybe you just read one book, I hope that people will read the biography and want to read more of Octavia's work

to read the other biographies. There are other, this is, my book is kind of the first adult trade book biography. There are scholarly works. There is a middle grades biography written by E.B. Zobie. boy. It's really beautiful. It's a nice. A set of poems. There's

a wonderful kind of artist companion by Lionel George about Octavia's work. So there's all these different things. There's tons of interviews out there. That's awesome. YouTube or they're compiled into collections. So I hope people will be incited to learn more about her. And I hope that they will also be inspired to pursue their own positive

obsession. So if possibly has been your thing, and the wheel has been dry and empty, this is your time to go back up spinning, right? If you're a painter, collage artist, podcaster, whatever it is that you're doing, your work is valuable, and it's important that you do it,

whether or not you get the recognition. And it's not, right? But you have something to be there. And the act of just doing that work, that artistic work is really important, and especially for, those of us who kind of labor in the vineyard and are not necessarily going to be recognized. And now everyone's going to get a

prize or, you know, have a New York Times bestseller. But that doesn't mean that your writing isn't important or can't move or shouldn't be shared. Yeah. I think you want to be able to get recognition. I would assume, especially as a black woman. It's because you also are not seeing that happen for many black women, maybe more now. but it's like you want to feel like you deserve to be a part of it especially when she was writing so well like she deserved to be getting awards and getting noticed but i guess on the flip side she probably still would have written whether she got them or not so it's like i think it seems like she knew that like writing is my thing but it's also okay to want the rewards and it's also okay to just

create to create basically all the things because human beings are complicated you know know. So she was a professional writer and she was a professional writer for her life. And so she for sure wanted, she wanted the bestseller nods. She wanted to be paid places. She wanted to be paid well. But also, he was going to get up every day and do that work anyway because of her heart's calling. So it's an invitation for the rest of us. None of us are Octavia E. Butler. She was a one of one time. No. But we all get to be ourselves. Yeah. And we have a duty to ourselves to do the work. Yeah. Was there, my last question, was there anything in the research that, like, surprised you or kind of like, did you have any revelations, like, doing any of the research?

I think what was surprising, although shouldn't have been because, you know, I'm a writer, I've written books. I get how it is to create things and to share yourself with the world, but she was so harsh on herself. I was like, oh, my gosh, sometimes being, in the archive was really hard, read how hard she was on herself. Yeah. And then to also hear, like, well, have you said similar things about yourself, girl? Like, oh, do you know your writer friends or your artist friends who are similarly down? And I'm saying, why am I doing it this way?

And you know what I mean? And not in a life, you know, there should be a certain level of like, don't take yourself so seriously. Right. Work is important, but don't, you know, you don't have to be like so solipsistic or whatever. And then there's another thing about bashing yourself, right? Yeah. Downing yourself. Like they're not the same, right?

No. So you can get a level of like, I'm doing my best. The first draft is going to be not so great. The first draft. But I'm going to keep trying because my work is worth sharing. It's worth express and all of that. So it definitely gave me pause to be like, all right, well, you see how this looks like. because she didn't really say that she was going to give her archive to the Huntington until like the mid-90s.

So she's writing these diary entries from the 1960s for herself. Yeah. No one may ever see it. She decided to give it to us. And she could have burnt, destroyed, put aside the things that, you know, showed like, oh, wow, that girl, why did you talk to yourself that way? She included all of it. She shared all of it. And so I think it's that was that was surprising, not maybe shocking, but like, you know, and for sure invited me to reconsider my work differently.

Yeah, it is inspiration when you can see, because you see someone else saying it to themselves. And you're like, don't talk to yourself like that. And then you're like, okay, I need to be able to say that to myself. It's easier when it's someone else. Yeah. Well, at the end here, you kind of mentioned a couple other books that have been written about her, but is there any other book that you like always recommend to people or that you enjoyed recently? In terms of Octavia. It could be whatever.

Well, like I mentioned, all the other biographies, you know, check those out. I would say I just finished reading Naomi Klein's doppelganger. and I enjoyed that. And I thought it was just really smart and interesting. So I'm fully into my Libby era where I'm, you know, on the treadmill. I'm listening to the

audio books and so on. And so that's been really a provocative read. It came out pretty recently, maybe 2023. Okay. Nice. It's a recent read. And it's all about doubling and sort of politics, you know, leftist politics, or write politics and how they mirror each other in interesting kinds of ways.

And that, so that was really fascinating. Nice. I'm adding that to my list. Otherwise, or you are on Instagram. Where can people follow you? My handle is at Susie Mae, S-U-S-I-E-M-A-Y-E. And, yeah, also Susanna-M-M-Ris-O-S-A-M-Ris.com. You can find.

Awesome. Well, I will add that to the show. show notes so everybody can go check that out and thank you for talking with me about your positive obsession too. I appreciate you. Thank you for having me.