Rage for Writing: Meeting Octavia Butler for Tea
Updated: 4 days ago
When the literary world didn’t recognize the only Black author in the room.
First forget inspiration... Habit is more dependable, habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. —Octavia Butler
On a pristine Florida morning in February 2001, the campus at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg bustled with students crossing the palm tree-lined Harborwalk, a historic concrete and hexagon-block thoroughfare that was the artery to the campus.
I was a young, naïve writer who had published several short stories in print journals (no digital journals existed then) and was there to attend the Florida Suncoast Writers Conference. I’d won a Bayboro prize for fiction from this same university where I was an alumnus in creative writing, so I felt I ‘deserved’ to attend the conference.
That notion would change forever after that weekend.
The Bayboro Café, located inside Coquina Hall just off the breezy waterfront of Bayboro Harbor, was an unpretentious college coffee hangout with primitive tables offering mugs of hesitant coffee and tea. After the opening of the conference, I wandered over to grab a cup of tea.
She sat alone in a corner, her back to the door, cradling a mug in her hands as students and conference attendees darted around the café like blind moths.
“Hello, Miss Butler,” I said, approaching her table while half turned away because I felt like I was intruding.
Her shoulders tensed, then folded forward. She lifted her head to me and sipped her tea, pausing reflectively. A flicker of surprise danced across her eyes. I felt as though she hadn’t expected anyone in that noisy room to cross the invisible boundary surrounding her table, even though she was the keynote speaker. I also sensed an intense shyness. “Call me Octavia,” she said, flashing a bashful smile, her deep, baritone voice filling the space.
I spun my body to face her squarely, feeling embraced by her timid openness. “I enjoyed your keynote speech,” I said. I extended my hand and introduced myself.
She smiled again and gently clasped my hand between her warm thumb and fingers. “Thank you. Sit if you’d like. I have to run in a few. Hopefully, I can at least finish my tea.”
I sat and thanked her. “I’m looking forward to your class tomorrow.” I had signed up for her workshop and very few were on the roster. The lack of interest in her class surprised me, and I hoped it would be full by tomorrow. I think many conference attendees viewed Butler as “just” a science fiction writer, and many probably didn’t know her work.
She sipped her tea, and we sat in a profound silence that I didn’t find incongruous. Her gentle pause was inviting, as though she was telling me, wait, settle in this moment.
As I sat across from Octavia Butler and melted into her warmth, I wondered how a writer who wrote about ruthless survival could be so calm and soft-spoken.
She tilted her head as she looked at me. “I hope my advice helps,” she said.
I sipped my coffee. “Yes. Your advice to read everything. I could go on.”
She laughed with a profound, luxurious timbre. “Yes, good.” She glanced at her watch. “I must go. I will see you tomorrow, and we will talk more.” Her six-foot height astounded me as we both stood.
I thanked her and watched her as she moved through the café. Not a single person turned their head or gave her a nod, no conference attendees or organizers. It was as though she was invisible except to me.
The blind moths were oblivious that they were sharing the room with a true prophet.
Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
The Florida Suncoast Writers Conference began in 1972, and its final year was 2006—quite a run for a local conference. For aspiring writers living on the west coast of Florida, it was a godsend: it featured a plethora of some of the most talented writers of the 20th century.
Octavia Butler was a featured keynote speaker at the 2001 event’s 29th annual gathering, along with other literary notables, including John Updike and Francine Prose.
By 2001, Butler had already won prominent awards such as the Hugo, Nebula, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant (the first science fiction writer of any demographic to accept the honor, and one that transformed Octavia Butler’s life financially).
Prior to receiving the Genius Grant, Butler had spent decades existing on minimum-wage jobs, writing short stories, and battling poor book sales. Science fiction in that era was profitable, yet Black women writers experienced widespread marginalization. Publishers didn’t know how to market Butler’s protagonists—Black women navigating themes of survival, intensity, and complex identity.
The sci-fi market, led by a white male demographic, relied on cheap mass-market “ghetto paperbacks” to turn a profit and often ignored costly hardcovers. This ensured low author advances unless the names Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke graced the covers.
While the Genius Grant changed Butler’s life, it also legitimized science fiction as serious literature. Publishers stopped treating Butler as a niche genre writer and recognized her as a leading American literary figure, ultimately giving her the leverage to require higher advances.
That year, the literary gathering I experienced was overwhelmingly white in terms of both staff and featured authors. By placing Octavia Butler on a marquee alongside white literary giants like Updike and Prose, the conference organizers achieved a superficial diversity on paper.
Butler had to navigate deeply embedded, systemic institutional isolation. It made her carry the weight of racial representation in a venue that celebrated her celebrity without masking its own fundamental whiteness.
Our brief conversation in that café—and later in her class—solidified the entire weekend and even mended the structural flaws of the event.
I sat in on lectures from Prose and Updike, yet my time with Octavia Butler left me with a profound amalgamation of a world I’d never seen, a new seeing of the world absent of ego, a way to see my craft with purpose and with wild abandon, a “rage for writing.”
In her class that day, Butler was just as soft-spoken yet imposing as she was in the café. When explaining the intense topics of her books, she never raised her voice or became contentious. Whether she was discussing the bleakest aspects of human behavior or the “necessary” faults in a student’s story, she did so with a gentle, persistent serenity.
I noticed she was fiercely vigilant of the quieter, more intimidated students (like myself), and for students who grew frustrated during writing prompts, she never criticized but gently guided them toward resilience.
When I left the workshop that day and said thank you, I’ll never forget her shy, knowing smile as I walked out the classroom door.
While aspiring writers can get all of Octavia Butler’s advice in an AI prompt, I’ll mention some of the advice she gave me (even if it sounds repetitive) because it’s what made me a better writer.
1. Walking thoughts. Cliché, of course, but yes, she reminded me to always carry my notebook. We had that conversation in the café when she noticed I was carrying one. Get one. Carry it.
2. Devour everything. What she liked to call “wild inputs,” we had a long discussion about this. I mentioned Stephen Crane and The Red Badge of Courage and told her how much that book influenced my writing. She agreed, and Crane’s use of research to write about war is an ideal example of how “wild input research” powers our writing. Use your mind as a vacuum and read everything outside the margins of your comfort zone. Don’t understand physics? Read about it.
3. Write daily and revise obsessively. Treat writing as an exercise for your brain and build a habit. Revise. Revise. Revise.
4. Rejection is part of the craft. Get used to it and learn from it. Keep going.
5. Be a quiet writer. Genius is not the loudest one in the room.
6. Savor a cup of tea.
I wish Ms. Butler could see what she is today in the Butlerverse, as the mother of Afrofuturism and an icon of the American literary canon. The gentle woman I met in 2001 is now a constant fixture on the New York Times bestseller list and celebrated as a sociological prophet who predicted the future as much as Orwell’s 1984.
And I was fortunate to share tea with her.
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