#findingestella

Stop by TheRoot.com to check out my review article about the two new Octavia Butler stories released this week! 

Woke up this morning thinking about Octavia Butler. Today is her birthday. I was thinking about how at every opportunity to speak to aspiring writers, Butler would remind them of her own admonition to herself:

“USE EVERYTHING.” And that is exactly what she herself did. I remember coming across some notes she'd made for when she lectured on the two Parable novels. She tells her audience that Parable of the Talents was inspired by one of Gwendolyn Brooks' poems in A Street in Bronzeville, and she quotes this line, "I think it must be lonely to be God."

She didn't write the title of the poem she reads in her notes, so I went looking. It's a vignette, "The Preacher: Ruminates Behind the Sermon."

Reading through the poem, I realized I had seen it before, in a school assignment Butler had completed thirty years before!

Use everything. This poem stuck with Butler for decades. Perhaps, after completing Parable of the Sower, she realized that the Olamina she had written resonated with the profound loneliness of godhead that she recognized many decades ago in Brooks' poem. This is in keeping with another assertion that she liked to share with audiences (Oh to have gotten to be in her audience!) 

So, for her birthday, here is that poem that stayed with her for so many years, in honor of Octavia Butler's love for Gwendolyn Brooks, her love for reading, and her intense power of introspection, even in relation to her own  acts of creativity: