Writer’s Voice with Francesca Rheannon
Guest: Susana Morris Book: Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler

Francesca Rheannon:
Susana Morris, welcome to Writer’s Voice.
Susana Morris:
Thank you for having me.

Francesca:
I just loved this book. It made me so eager to read all of Octavia Butler’s work — and I’ve only read Parable of the Sower. You begin your biography with a story about how reading Butler as a teenager changed your life. What about her vision spoke to you so personally?
Susana:
I start the book that way because, although this is a biography, it’s also rooted in the experiences so many readers have when they first encounter Octavia Butler.
I was a high-schooler about 30 years ago. I went to the library every week and read a lot of fantasy and science fiction. But I was also coming into a racial consciousness — and I wasn’t seeing myself represented in those books. I was starting to drift away from the genre.
Then one day, I saw a mass market paperback in the sci-fi section with a Black girl on the cover. I picked it up and saw it was about a sixteen-year-old girl — my age — with big ideas, trying to save the world. I thought: I want to read this immediately.
Reading Parable of the Sower set me on a lifelong path as an Octavia Butler fan. I saw myself reflected in Lauren Olamina. Even though it was 1993 and I was in high school in 1996, the themes — global warming, climate crisis, designer drugs — all felt real. That book opened the door to the expansiveness of speculative fiction for me.

Francesca:
Your title, Positive Obsession, is such a compelling phrase. Why did you choose it?
Susana:
It’s actually the only title this book ever had. I pitched it as Positive Obsession from the very beginning. The title comes from an autobiographical essay Butler wrote called “Positive Obsession,” first published in Essence in 1989 and later included in her collection Bloodchild.
In the essay, she describes how writing became an obsession — the kind you can’t stop, but one that’s ultimately good for you. A “positive” obsession. She felt called to write, even though society sent her very different messages: get married, have children, get a stable job. She came from humble roots — her mother and grandmother were domestics; her father was a shoeshiner. Writing didn’t make “sense” for her life, but she pursued it anyway, working physical jobs while seeking time to write.
Because the book focuses so much on her intellectual trajectory — her reading, research, and craft — the title felt true to her life and legacy.

Francesca:
You write that Octavia Butler was neurodivergent — and also divergent in other ways. She was very tall, somewhat androgynous, shy, introverted. Can you describe her?
Susana:
Butler was a complicated woman. “Neurodivergent” wasn’t a word available to her in the 50s and 60s, but she self-diagnosed as dyslexic. By neurodivergent, I mean someone whose learning patterns fall outside what society considers “typical.” I often tell my students: maybe the so-called neurotypical is actually the exception, not the rule.
She was a very slow reader and writer. She was grateful she learned to read and write at home, because her school report cards said things like “Estelle is a daydreamer,” “Estelle is lazy,” when in reality she was capable of deep hyperfocus. If she loved something, she researched it meticulously.
And yes — she diverged in other ways. She was six feet tall by middle school. She didn’t care for traditional femininity. She kept her hair in a short Afro long after it went out of style. She was extremely shy. Early in her career, public speaking terrified her. She took classes and even used hypnosis to overcome it. The poised, regal figure we see in 1990s interviews was hard-won.

Francesca:
A powerful scene in your book describes a moment when Butler, as a child, accompanied her mother — a domestic worker — to a job, and witnessed her mother’s mistreatment. Tell us about that moment.
Susana:
Yes — this moment was formative for her. She would often accompany her mother to cleaning jobs. One day she witnessed a white employer speaking to her mother with deep condescension. Young Octavia was furious. She couldn’t direct her anger at the employer, so she directed it at her mother on the ride home. She said, “I will never be like you.”
Her mother didn’t react with anger — she was deeply hurt.
Later, Octavia came to understand that the woman’s cruelty made her feel ashamed, and she took it out on the only person she safely could: her mother. She also came to understand that her mother endured humiliations so that Octavia could have a stable life — lights on, food on the table, clothes, safety.
That insight shaped her empathy — and later shaped Kindred, which grapples with the shame, denial, and inherited trauma surrounding slavery.

Francesca:
Let’s talk about Kindred. It brings a modern Black woman face-to-face with slavery. What were some of the difficult decisions Butler had to make as she wrote it?
Susana:
Kindred was her fourth novel, though many readers assume it was her first because it’s her masterpiece. She wanted the book to be as realistic as possible, even though it’s a fantasy with unexplained time travel.
So she took a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles to Maryland and did intensive field research — visiting plantations, archives, historical societies, libraries. She talked with elders who had known formerly enslaved people. She wanted tactile, emotional, historical accuracy.
She actually sanitized aspects of slavery because the reality is nearly unbearable. But she showed truth in the daily lives, relationships, and structures of enslavement.
She also made major character decisions. Dana is a Black woman because Butler believed a Black man would be killed almost immediately in 1800s Maryland once his manhood was challenged. She considered making Dana’s partner a Black man — or a Black man who could pass — but she chose a white man because she wanted to explore liberal complicity. Kevin represents the white liberal who claims not to see color but still carries internalized racism.

Francesca:
She also seemed eerily prescient about the rise of fascism and climate collapse. How did Reagan’s election shape her work?
Susana:
She didn’t think of herself as prophetic — she believed in pattern recognition. Because she lived in California under Reagan’s governorship, she had a deep dislike for him. His policies — nuclear brinksmanship, cutting social programs, racist dog whistles — are all over her work.
Parable of the Sower, written in the early 1990s but set in the 2020s, reflects her fear that climate change and authoritarianism would arrive quickly. People asked her, “Why set it only 30 years in the future?” She believed it would take no more than that for these crises to come to pass.
And here we are.

Francesca:
Talk about her view that humans suffer from a “hierarchical impulse,” which she called “the human contradiction.”
Susana:
In the Xenogenesis trilogy, she imagines aliens who describe humans as simultaneously intelligent and deeply hierarchical — and the hierarchy controls the intelligence, rather than the other way around. Racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, environmental destruction — all stem from that contradiction.
She believed hierarchy was killing us, and that our intelligence was too often deployed to maintain oppressive systems rather than dismantle them.

Francesca:
What about her place among the Black feminist writers of her era — Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara?
Susana:
She was absolutely part of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance of the 1970s and 80s. She was in community with Morrison, Bambara, Walker, Angelou — sometimes literally, as in the 1989 Essence Women’s Writers Retreat in the Bahamas.
Her trajectory was different — she didn’t have a university degree beyond an associate’s degree and worked physical jobs for years — but she shared with them a concern with history, identity, patriarchy, white supremacy, and literary experimentation.
She also paved the way for authors like N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and many others.

Francesca:
Speculative fiction has been influential in my own life. What do you think its unique power is?
Susana:
Speculative fiction is forward-looking but also a mirror for the present. Ursula Le Guin said science fiction is descriptive, not prescriptive — it’s about who we are now.
Octavia used everyday experiences — like witnessing a fight on a bus — to imagine worlds that reveal our contradictions. Her story “Speech Sounds,” for example, imagines a pandemic that destroys all forms of shared language. That came from seeing men fight over something trivial because they couldn’t communicate.
Speculative fiction lets us test new ideas, new futures, new ways of living.

Francesca:
She died very suddenly. What would you have loved to see her do had she lived longer?
Susana:
I would have loved to see her finish the Parable series. She planned several books beyond Sower and Talents, including novels exploring Earthseed ideas of “God as Trickster,” “God as Chaos,” “God as Teacher.”
I would also have loved to see where she took Fledgling. There are partial drafts in her archives. She struggled with writer’s block and depression after her mother died in 1996, so those late works were hard for her.
Had she not died at 58, we’d have many more masterpieces. But we still have twelve books — a remarkable treasure.

Francesca:
Susana Morris, thank you so much for talking with us. Your biography Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler is extraordinary.
Susana:
Thank you for having me.