"You don't have to be an oracle. Just go to the library."

Talking to Susana M. Morris about Octavia Butler, and more.

Author

Bobbie Johnson
August 12, 2026

It was a genuine joy to speak with Susana M. Morris last week, not only the author of July’s book of the month, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler, but a leading scholar of Black literature and science fiction and associate professor of English at Georgia Tech.

I met Susana extremely briefly in Berkeley in the spring (I’d already picked the book back then) so it was fantastic to actually get the chance to dig in and meet her properly, to find out what was so interesting about the book, and to better understand the work of Octavia Butler.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

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Bobbie Johnson: Thanks for writing Positive Obsession. I thought it was a light touch on a complicated person, and combined biography and literary study in a way that I thought was really engaging. And I liked the fact that you did not have to be a super fan of Octavia Butler—or even really to have read much of her work—in order to get a lot from the book. I've read some Butler, not all of it. I know a little bit about her, but not a lot. I thought you treated all of that really well, and brought people in. But what drew you to Octavia Butler? Where did you start on this journey? 

Susana Morris: I discovered her work when I was in high school about 30 years ago. I was an avid science fiction and fantasy reader, I went to my local libraries like every week, and would go to the shelf, take an armful, put it into a bag, go on my merry way, read those books, then the next week come back. I was just reading all the time, super voracious. And in 1996 or so, I go to my local library and I see Parable of the Sower. It's on display and I can see that there is a black woman on the cover, and I'm like: I've never seen a black person in this section. And [at that point] I had started to think do black people not write this stuff, or do people not write about black people? I was starting to come into more of a racial consciousness at that point. 

It [Parable] blew my mind. Lauren Olamina… we were the same age. She was so serious; I was a pretty serious teenager, very nerdy and thinking about big questions and journaling and all of that. So it just spoke directly to me and all of my interests.

Then fast forward. I went on and became a professor, got a PhD, the whole thing, and my focus has been Black feminism and looking at more contemporary Black women's literature: For a long time I've been a Morrisonian and a critic of literary fiction. I always taught Butler. But then as time evolved, I've become more of a science fiction scholar, period. I teach other stuff, I teach media studies, but I'm a Butlerian, I guess. I'd written articles about her, and I just thought it's time for there to be a trade book, a public-facing book that did all the things that you described. 

Maybe you're not a super-fan, maybe you are. I've had super-fans come up to me and say, "I really appreciated this book” and I've had folks who are like, "I've never heard of this lady before ever, and you have introduced me to her.” So that’s very gratifying, because I wanted to write something that was going to fill a gap. 

Last year, when my book came out, another wonderful biography came out by Kendra Parker called Understanding Octavia Butler. She looks at Butler as a romance novelist, and it's an academic book. Another colleague, Gerry Canavan, has written an extensive literary biography: It is like the bible, basically, of biographical studies of Octavia Butler, and that's really written for scholars. And Ibi Zoboi has written a wonderful middle grade biography of Octavia. So I felt like there was a place for a particular kind of book. You described it as a light touch: what I wanted the book to do was to kind of hook people, and then afterwards they're like, "Hmm, I want to read more Butler, and I want to read more things that other people have said about her.” So this is not like Highlander— “there can only be one” —we are in conversation. In fact, Gerry and Kendra and I are editing a collection for Routledge Press where we're asking scholars to submit articles to a companion to Octavia Butler. So I think that there are lots of points of entry, and Positive Obsession is one particular kind.

When did the seed of this first get planted? How long did it take for you to get to the end?

I started working on the book in 2020, right before the pandemic. In February, the pandemic was happening in other parts of the world, but I didn't know it; I was just here in Atlanta, and I was like, I think I should write this book, and then I started working on it, and it took five years. 

When I announced the book to the club, I said that Parable of the Sower was a pandemic re-read for me, as I think it probably was for quite a lot of people, because of the timing. “The world's gone crazy” sort of fitted in there. So let’s talk about that pandemic prophetic moment: when you read Butler, yes some of it is alien vampire sex, but she also does seem to have what feels like a remarkable prophetic talent. She sees things and sees through things. But what you explain in the book is that it was really not that prophetic at all in lots of ways, it was just that she's an interesting chronicler of now in a way that we can relate to. How does that sit with you? How have people responded to that view of Butler?

I think people have been open to it. And I'm not saying anything that she didn't say herself, right? Interviewers would ask her “do you have a kind of prophetic vision,” and she'd say, “No, I'm a student of history. I can recognize patterns.” Her pattern recognition was off the chain. 

So today, for example, we're dealing with the climate catastrophe. She was an environmentalist while she was alive. She would just go back and be like, "OK, well, five years ago, what were the laws? What was the EPA doing? How does that connect with what was happening in Europe? What was happening in the continent of Africa? What's going on here?” And she was reading Nature magazine. She was going to the library. She was doing field work. 

Novelists don't always do field work! Especially if you're doing speculative fiction, you might think, “Well, I'm imagining another planet, I don't know how I'm going to do field work for that.” But when Butler was imagining other planets or other kinds of domains, she just did lots of research. In one of the sex alien books, Dawn, to prepare for that trilogy, she went down to Peru and she walked all around, and she studied things, and she talked to people, and she took lots of pictures, and she noted how the dew felt on her skin early in the morning, and how that might feel to a character. 

So for a person like that, a true intellectual, someone who is living the life of the mind in that way—I don't want to say it was easy for her, because Octavia Butler was a one of one talent—but what she made clear, and what I try to make clear in the book, is that while she may have been gifted, she worked really hard at putting the pieces together of how we got to where we are now, and to imagine and say “let's game out possible futures.” 

So that's why in 1993, we get her thinking about 2024, the near future, and being like, “Hmm, if we stay on this path, I imagine fascism could be in this country. I can imagine water shortages, wildfires.” She's a native Californian. The racial disparities, the issues around addiction, company towns coming back, debt peonage… these are things that she thought “if we don't pivot, if we don't shift, this could happen.” 

So I really like to emphasize that she was a thinker, and she invites us to think rigorously and recognize the patterns in our own world, rather than kind of abdicating that responsibility and being like, “Well, they had a prophetic vision, and I don't have that. I'm not an oracle.” You don't have to be an oracle. You just got to go to the library, stuff to read, be a part of a nonfiction book club, talk with other people.

She seems to have really been a student of everything around her. All of this was very deliberate. It seems like she never did anything by accident. 

No, there was no happenstance. She was very clear about her career. She was a starving artist for a good chunk of her career, but she was very much plugged into the economics of being a writer: what it means to have a particular kind of reputation, which cons to go to, who to speak with. So everything she was doing was I have a larger project for humanity and also I have a project for Octavia Butler, the writer. And she was very clear about that. It was all deliberate.

She came up through genre fiction, and stayed in it whereas a lot of other writers would have chosen to shift away. Was that deliberate too?

Although she also wrote fantasy and, one could argue, horror as well, she primarily wrote science fiction—but she felt pigeonholed by that label. Even though she herself was very clear that she was using speculative elements to tell stories, and that was purposeful, she often told her publishers and her agents “I want to be shelved in a different place. Why can't I be shelved with literary fiction?” 

Her one book that would be shelved or promoted among the literary fiction novels was Kindred. That was her fifth novel: not her first, her fifth. People usually think it's her first. She loved the science fiction community, she continued to go to cons, especially when she started winning awards. She went to different conventions, sometimes as the guest of honor, sometimes just on a panel, and that was from the beginning of her career to the end. So community was very important to her, but she was not necessarily only identifying as a speculative fiction writer. She understood that that's how people would market her. 

But then she also understood that a lot of her audience were feminists—gender studies professors were always assigning her work from the beginning—and Black folk, right? And so she wanted as many people as possible to look at her work. She didn't want to only be defined by speculative fiction or science fiction because she felt like there was a particular kind of connotation with that kind of fiction. Like: “this is not really serious” or “it's only white men who do this” or “it's just about aliens and androids” and things like that. She was obviously interested in those things, but in larger things too. So there was a little bit of ambivalence there for her.

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In Positive Obsession you get into a lot about her work and her process and her dedication; but it also made it feel like there was a little less biography in the book than I expected going in. But my feeling on it changed as I read the book—what I feel like now is that there was less biography because she was really just living this writerly life. The life of the mind was the number one thing, to the detriment of her personal life or relationships. So is this why there's less biography, because she was just so dedicated? Does that ring true or not?

In many ways. I mean, I for sure have a focus in this book, and I imagine that there will be future biographies that might focus more on her family, because she was very close to her family of origin: her mother, her grandmother, her aunts, her estate right now is run by her family. So this is someone who was not without people. She had family, she had friends. 

But she remained unpartnered throughout most of her life and she did not have children, so some of the traditional markers and the things that would take up a person's life—in particular, a woman's life—she did not have. I think it did help her to be prolific in the ways that she was. 

But she was really focused on writing. I was talking with her agent, who's still the agent of her estate, but was also her agent when she was alive, and she said “Octavia was at home writing books.” Yes, she was also hiking; she was very outdoorsy. She had homegirls. She liked to go to the movies. She did different things. But she was at home writing books.

Can you talk about  the material? What did you get access to? What did you have to sift through? How complicated was it? Where does it all live? 

Butler's papers are at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. They are all there. There are a few bits and pieces of other people's correspondence to her or her correspondence to other people that shows up in other archives, but for the most part, Butler has a voluminous archive. It is an embarrassment of riches.

The Huntington is open to anybody who is a scholar, independent scholar, you don't have to be connected to a university or anything like that. You could be a student. You can go there and obviously physically touch the things, but you can also engage with an archivist over Zoom, and they can show you papers, and then you can say, “I want that page scanned.” So they have lots of really wonderful resources. 

I accessed some things online because I started writing the book during the pandemic when the Huntington was closed to the public. But once it opened up, I was able to go and make several trips and put my hands on everything. Her childhood papers, pictures that she took, research notes. She was a very regular journaler, and she had hundreds—I mean, hundreds—of commonplace books. In one book, it might be like “today, my budget is this amount of dollars.” It might be a draft to a friend of a letter that she's going to type up later. Then it would be several pages of notes towards a novel or a short story. So it's the kind of archive where you have to look at everything, which is not a bad thing. And then she also was a very committed rewriter, so there's lots of different versions of her books. So Kindred, imagining Doro from Wild Seed in Kindred. There's all kinds of really weird, fabulous stuff: manuscripts that didn't get published, just tons of things. 

So I just spent my time looking at everything, and then very quickly being like, OK I'm going to look at this manuscript a little later… because I'm going to focus on these letters that she's sending between her and her publisher, or between her and other writers, or the letters that she would write back to fans. 

I was at the archive recently—because I'm always working on Butler—and I was re-reading some things where people were asking her advice: “How should I be a writer?” And she would just be like, “First of all, the letter that you wrote me was riddled with grammatical errors, so let's start there.” Oh my gosh! If I wrote Octavia Butler a letter and her response was “your letter to me was riddled with grammatical errors” I would expire on the spot. She wasn’t mean, she was just like: if you want to be a writer, get control of your grammar. [She would say] “I’m a terrible speller, but I have control of my grammar, I do these things, and I make multiple drafts” so she exposed what she felt like were her failings. 

Because I was really interested in the positive obsession of it all—that's always been the title of this book, I never pitched another title: it's based on her essay “Positive Obsession”—that's what I wanted to look at. 

The other thing I should say is the archive is voluminous because she kept everything. She was low key a hoarder. You know when you go to the pharmacist and they staple the receipt to your bag that says what the side effects are? She kept that. So I was able to read those. You know the printout that you get from your doctor when they say “OK this is a summary of your visit”? She kept that. So I have a situation that's very different from some other biographers, where they have a very fragmentary archive, and they're having to do this critical fabulation, and they have to piece things together. My task was more like what am I going to focus on? Because I could write a book of the recipes that she clipped; I could write a book about her research methodology. I really want somebody to write a book about all of her travels and her travel journals because she wrote very detailed summaries. “I'm here in Denali, and this is what I'm experiencing; the temperature was like this at 6 a.m, it's like this at noon, it's like this at 3 p.m.” I mean, detailed notes. “This is what the flora looks like in my neighborhood.” She didn't drive, so she took the bus everywhere and she walked. In the archive, I was like OK, focus. You can spend your life there wonderfully.

There aren't many better ways to get to know her, right? If her brain is pouring out onto the page constantly, and you're there following along in her wake, catching all this stuff. It's a version of how she is thinking.

I did make the choice to focus on the journals and the letters and so on, because yes, she had a very interior kind of existence. She called herself comfortably asocial. Now, she had a lot of correspondence with people, but it was on the phone later, and then also just you know through letters. Butler was deeply introverted, and she was energized by her solitary time thinking, her time in the library. She spent a lot of time in libraries, even when she became famous. The librarians at the LA Public Library, the LA Central Library, would be like, "There she is; nobody bother her. She's there working on her stuff.” She was a person that enjoyed her own company.

Another thing I thought was really interesting in the book and different from a lot of popular biography is that you didn't try to make more meaning of her death than was necessary. Lots of biography creates this narrative arc where the end gives this sort of inevitable shape to someone's life. Everything adds up. In reading Positive Obsession, I got the sense that suddenly everything was interrupted. She obviously wasn't super well, but she had plans—and so her story just stops before it was finished, so to speak. That was actually very powerful to me as a reader.

She should still be here, right? She was 58 when she passed away, which is pretty young. She was going to turn 59 that year. This year is the 20th anniversary of her passing. She passed in 2006, and a week and a half before her death she was doing interviews because she just had a book come out just months before, and so she was still actively promoting Fledgling. She was doing interviews, she was talking to people, she had plans with friends. She did not think she was going to die. She knew that she was unwell, and she was actively in the process of trying to turn that around. I don't know that one could be passively sick, but she was not just sort of accepting her illness. She was trying to get a handle on it. 

And she'd also come out of a deep writer's block, so she was like, “I have all these ideas for stories, and I want to do these particular things.” And she just didn't have a chance to do it. 

I’ve not had that explained back to me in the exact way that you just did, so I appreciate—that's good, a new insight about the book. It was a shock when she died. I was shocked. Everybody was shocked. Everyone was surprised. 

Some of the myth making that goes on in people's lives, or about their lives after they've gone is often about foreshadowing; there’s narrative drama that gives it shape. I just thought [in Positive Obsession] it left me thinking “fuck, she was just taken away.” I got the sense that she would have been publishing till she was 1,000 years old. 

Absolutely, she would have been like an Ursula Le Guin, or you know, Samuel Delaney is still around writing. He's in his 80s. She would have these biographies on the backs of her books that would say “I remember being a 10-year-old writer, and I expect to be an 80-year-old writer.” She expected that, and so I think it would be a disservice to her to say “she had this hard life, and she was poised to die young.”

What I tried to do was situate her alongside many of her peers, like June Jordan or Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, who's one of her friends. These are Black women writers who died fairly young and usually after some kind of protracted illness, so slightly different. Audre Lord died of cancer, as did June Jordan. But I try to make a connection to where it is like what's happening that's cutting these women's lives short? These are folks who lived lives of the mind. These were her peers in terms of, if not age, but in terms of stature and the kind of work that they did, and despite the fact that the all those writers that I mentioned have produced phenomenal works across genre—so we have poetry, essay, novel, creative non-fiction, and from science fiction to literary fiction to what have you—and they had the same effect, the same consequence. 

One could argue, causation / correlation. But what I'm saying is, there's a pattern of these writers, Black women, baby boomer writers, who experienced all these particular struggles, and their lives were cut short almost at the height of their powers. There's no retrofitting any of them. It's just an unfortunate fucking situation.

What's your favorite thing that she wrote?

My favorite Butler is Wild Seed. I'm really, really into that. I love the character Anyanwu. That sort of battle for supremacy between Anyanwu and Doro gets me going every time. I read it first in undergrad, and I remember reading about the shape-shifting dolphins, and my mind was just blown. So I love reading that, love teaching that. 

My favorite series of Butler’s is the Xenogenesis trilogy, which has been remarketed as “Lilith's Brood”: Dawn, Adulthood Rights, Imago. I feel like we don't read them enough. We don't talk about them enough. They are strange. They are upsetting. Whenever I teach Dawn, in particular, students are like, "What's going on here? Like the tentacles, the Oankali? What do they do? What do they look like?” [In the story, the Oankali are a race of aliens covered in sensory tentacles who have three sexes and can manipulate biochemistry.] I don't know what they look like. And I think we should talk more about that. I understand why we talk about Kindred so much. It's a phenomenal book. And I understand Parable of the Sower. We're living in it.

And where would you suggest somebody start if they haven’t read Octavia Butler before. Kindred and Parable are the big hits, I suppose? 

When people ask me that question, I bounce it back to them, and ask "What kind of reader are you? Are you into speculative fiction?” If they say no, then I say Kindred or Parable of the Sower. Both novels are speculative—I mean, all her work except for one short story is all speculative—but it's more dystopian, even though that was a word she didn't really like. 

If folks are more into science fiction and then cool with weird stuff, I say go straight for Dawn, go right into it, and buckle up. And if they like vampires (and I am a vampire lover) I say go read Fledgling and also prepare for the absolute bonkers weirdness of that one. 

Vampires particularly have seasons, right? It's like they come round again. Back then [when Fledgling came out] you obviously had Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire, that whole kind of universe of stuff was happening. And it’s coming back around.

I think with Sinners and with the [TV] reboot of Interview With The Vampire, there's always an interest. And Twilight and Fledgling came out the same year, within weeks of each other. 

What about the folks who are taking Butler's mantle? Who do you think are kind of inheritors or extenders of what she was writing?

There are several people. One, I would say, her good friend Nisi Shawl. Nisi's work is great. I love Everfair, which is like a reimagining of the Belgian Congo, so alternate history. It's steampunk. And generally, I'm not into steampunk, but they do a really good job. Rivers Solomon: When I first read An Unkindness of Ghosts, their first novel, I thought, OK, Octavia is one of one—but in terms of subject matter, I thought this is getting close.

I love NK Jemisin, I mean, my goodness, who doesn't? But her Broken Earth trilogy, I think, is sort of exploring some similar questions. And she also is another fiction writer who does research. That trilogy is all about people living on a planet that's basically attacking them all the time and having earthquakes, and she went and studied with geographers: that's very Butlerian. I love that.

I would also say P Djeli Clark. I really love his work, and he is a genre hopper too. He does horror. He's done steampunk. He's done all kinds of things, and I really, really like his work. And Victor LaValle. I would also add him too.

Was there a book that influenced in the writing of Positive Obsession outside of Octavia's books? 

When I was in graduate school, I took a class that was randomly about biographies. I never thought I was going to be a biographer. I'm not a historian. In terms of academics, historians tend to write biographies in terms of academics, and I'm an English professor: I don't do that. But that training that I got in that class really helped. We read Wrapped in Rainbows by Valerie Boyd, which is about Zora Neale Hurston, and so I returned to that. 

Also, while I was writing, I read Saidiya Hartman's book Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments. I'm not going to remember the subtitle [it’s Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals], but I used the term "critical fabulation" before, and that's a term that she uses. She asks how do we understand fragmentary archives? Even though I didn't have a fragmentary archive, when you are writing a biography, you are taking leaps of faith, and you are saying, “I believe this thing happened.” That is a sort of act of critical fabulation; you are speculating to a certain degree.

Even though I interviewed people who knew her, I was all in the archive, all in her private papers, read everything more than what, I'm still making claims, and I'm writing the book, and she's not here to refute or say anything like that. So Hartman's book really invites a level of rigor and tenderness at the same time that I try to use.

Finally, what's a book that you turn to again and again?

I'm gonna give you two. One is Beloved by Toni Morrison. That's like a bible to me. I can open any page and learn something. I have one little tattoo on my arm. It's from that book. You know, it's just I'm obsessed with Beloved. That's another person who, as we were mentioning earlier, folks would not say that Morrison is a speculative writer… but that's a ghost story! That's a horror novel! Song of Solomon. There's like you know the character Cersei. Like there's all these kind of fantastical elements. People want to say magical realism or what have you, but they're speculative. So I'll say that. 

And my childhood ongoing favorite is Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown. I love that book so much. It's been a while since I've read it—you're inviting me to reread it! I read that book for the first time in the sixth grade, and it just really touches me. It’s the story of the underdog who finds herself. I mean, in many ways, it's a very basic story of believing in yourself and all these kinds of things. But it has all the elements of fantasy that I really love: Lords and ladies, dragons, a woman putting on combat armor to slay things. Just all the things. I love that book so much. That was a life-changing book to read at age 10, and I just thought I know what I’m doing with my life. I want to read more things like this, maybe write something like that. 

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Thanks again to Susana for her time, and for those who joined the conversation and sent in questions by email.

If you want to buy any of the books listed above and support Curious Reading Club along the way, these links will take you to Bookshop and throw a small portion of the price back to us and independent bookstores. There are so many this week that I decided to just make a list rather than embed the links in the text of the interview.

I certainly have a ton more to put on my reading list now!

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Positive Obsession was our pick of the month for July 2026, and part of our Explorer subscription—6 books per year that are focused on interesting ideas. You can also join our science strand (Eureka) where our current choice, Roberta Kwok’s Lost In Curiosity, is available now for anyone who signs up to Curious Reading Club before August 24. You can also join via our classic one-book-per-month package, paying either monthly or annually to get both Explorer and Eureka books together.