I am so grateful for bookslut, which is I will admit the only blog I seem to read regularly--grateful not just to the blog but to the girl. So somehow it was better to hear the sad news that Octavia Butler has died through Michael and Jessa, but I'm still kind of bowled over by sadness. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Butler's most popular work is "Kindred," a time-travel novel in which a black woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. The 1979 novel became a popular staple of school and college courses and now has more than a quarter million copies in print, but its birth was agonizing, like so much in Butler's solitary life.
"Kindred" was repeatedly rejected by publishers, many of whom could not understand how a science fiction novel could be set on a plantation in the antebellum South. Butler stuck to her social justice vision - "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you" - and finally found a publisher who paid her a $5,000 advance for "Kindred."
"I was living on my writing," Butler said, "and you could live on $5,000 back then. You could live, but not well. I got along by buying food I didn't really like but was nourishing: beans, potatoes. A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time."
Buying sacks of fucking potatoes to get those books written! The profanity of the publishing industry is something that I am mostly inured to at this point--I have tricks up my sleeve to get through it and not be furious and to make my own life happy and try to boost writing that I believe in, whether it is the writing of these gorgeous beings who are my students or of all the other women writers who are doing something substantive, courageous, ancient, forward-moving while dealing with the sacks-of-potatoes difficulties of just having a basic normal life while this art you can't quite get away from has you by the throat and demands that you deal with it.
I have my tricks, I have my solaces, I have my well of determination and hope, I have my people, I have my little pleasures and my little everyday moments to make sense of it and keep going. Usually, this works okay.
But some days it does get to you. Anyway, all I'm saying, is when a reporter called me last year to get me to talk shit about Jonathan Safran Foer's six million dollar mansion in Park Slope I told her, what do you want him to spend it on? Accessories at Claire's Boutiques? A binge in Vegas?
But the profanity of that imbalance between the Brooklyn mansion and the sacks of potatoes is getting through to me today. What are you gonna do. How much good can you will into the world? How long can you keep pushing, and when do you rest?