About Me
Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, California. Since her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, Butler was raised by her grandmother and her mother (Octavia M. Butler) who worked as a maid in order to support the family. Butler grew up in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Butler was "an introspective only child in a strict Baptist household" and "was drawn early to magazines such as Amazing, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy and soon began reading all the science fiction classics." Octavia Jr., nicknamed Junie, was paralytically shy and a daydreamer, and was later diagnosed as being dyslexic. She began writing at the age of 10 "to escape loneliness and boredom"; she was 12 when she began a lifelong interest in science fiction."I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars", she told the journal Black Scholar, "and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I've been writing science fiction ever since." After getting an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1968 , she next enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles. She eventually left CalState and took writing classes through UCLA extension. Butler would later credit two writing workshops for giving her "the most valuable help I received with my writing" : 1969–1970: The Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters' Guild of America, West, a program "designed to mentor Latino and African-American writers". Through Open Door she met the noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. 1970: The Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, (introduced to her by Ellison), where she first met Samuel R. Delany. Butler moved to Seattle, Washington, in November 1999. She described herself as "comfortably asocial—a hermit in the middle of Seattle—a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive." Themes of both racial and sexual ambiguity are apparent throughout her work.
