Wow! When I tracked down a Google Doodle marking what would have been science fiction author Octavia E. Butler’s 71st birthday today, June 22, I was gobsmacked. What an amazing writer! Born in Pasadena, California, in 1947, Butler knew early on she wanted to be a writer and refused to let her dyslexia overcome that dream. Her father, who was a shoe shiner, died when she was very young; her mother was a maid. Patternmaster was published before she was 30 but she’s best known for her fourth novel, Kindred:

“I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.”

“The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn’t exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.”

[Of her book, Kindred]: “I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.”

“I don’t write about good and evil with enormous dichotomy. I writer about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things people do.”

“My characters hope for better lives.”

“I had novels to write, so I wrote them.”

“The big talent is persistence.”

“Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we’re as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.”

“Most of us, if we’re not careful, tend to dehumanize the enemy.”

“I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.”

“Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.”

What a wonder: a new writer to read and enjoy. Write on!