I'm No Octavia Butler

A look back at my old creative writing

Welcome to this week’s paid subscriber post…

I’m not proud to admit that I haven’t read any works by Octavia Butler, prophetic author and “the mother of Afrofuturism.” I blame academia’s emphasis on white and boring authors in their English departments. But I plan to fix the Butler void in my life this year, and if you’d like to do some kind of read-along with me and virtually work our way through one of her books together, shoot me a message!

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Black Women Tried to Tell Y’all

I’ve been cracking jokes about it feeling like the end of the world, since 2020, when I had to live through the COVID-19 pandemic. Grocery store shelves were bare, Lysol was 3x its normal price, we were stuck in our houses, and death was in the news every day. I’d only read about pandemics in my high school history books until the global spread of disease became a part of the present.

And now, 2025 feels like 2020 part deux — the orange clown is president again, and yet another pandemic (looking at you bird flu), could be on the horizon. This brings us back to Octavia Butler. Her book Parable of the Sower, written in 1993, but set in 2024 is an especially timely read, due to its themes of climate crisis, greed, and social injustice. I haven’t read it yet because I’m scared to read about what I’m already living. In the weeks leading up to the start of another Trump administration, as fires swallowed up homes in Los Angeles, I saw countless Instagram posts talking about how Butler was a seer who tried to warn us.

Whether or not Butler could predict the future, one thing is true, this country needs to listen to Black women. And maybe if it did, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

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In the spirit of Butler and all the dystopian novels I devoured as a young adult, here’s a story I wrote in my undergraduate creative short-fiction class. I wrote this in 2014, and in the era of TikTok bans and oligarchs, I felt called to share it here. Maybe I’ll finish writing it someday.