Science Fiction: Mining the Past Shaping the Future RARE OCTAVIA BUTLER LIVE AUDIO CASSETTE RECORDING
Hollywood, CA: Professional Programs, Inc., 1992.
Audio Tape Cassette. Butler, Octavia. Science Fiction: Mining the Past Shaping the Future: AWP’s 1992 National Feminist Psychology Conference. Audio Cassette. Runtime 54 minutes and 31 seconds. Recorded live at the conference, Long Beach, CA, February 27–March 1, 1992. A digitized copy of the recording on USB drive is included.
The 1992 National Feminist Psychology Conference occurred at a pivotal time for the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP), as they distanced themselves from the mainstream American Psychological Association and actively developed a more radical voice - addressing intersectional identities, increasing visibility of lesbian psychologists, coping with violence against women, championing diversity, and developing feminist therapy methods. Their inclusion of Octavia Butler as a keynote speaker resonates with this more radical framework.
Butler begins the recording by reading an excerpt from her essay “Positive Obsession” published in Essence Magazine in May, 1990. Through it she explores her own positive obsession, an unwavering desire to write despite the many obstacles life and society threw her way. She touches on her relationship with her mother, her upbringing, and her gradual success as a Black woman science fiction author.
She then expands more broadly upon how her life has shaped her writing and vice versa. She discusses how she came to write Kindred, calling it "the most personal of my novels," and describes how her lived experiences served as the inception for Wild Seed and later the Xenogenesis series. Through personal anecdotes Butler impresses how much her love for science and botany inspired many key themes in her work (including how a terrifying encounter traveling in the Amazon Basin became the foundation for her novel “Bloodchild”) and how her impressions of power, powerlessness, and individual responsibility shape the heroines in her novels.
This recording provides a powerful opportunity to hear Butler discuss her childhood and the many stages of her literary career in her own words, with her own voice, with a live audience of women scholars. We have not been able to identify any other copies of this recording in institutional holdings or commerce. Near fine. Item #17646
Price: $5,000.00