There is no blueprint. Only breath and belief.
That’s the message that stayed with me as I recorded the first episode of this new podcast series on Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (2025), the newly released cultural biography by Dr. Susana Morris. Yes, it’s about Butler, but in many ways, it’s about us. It’s about what it means to keep showing up to life, to work, to the page, even when you’re not sure where you belong anymore.
Before I pressed record, I was wrestling with a recent memory of my mother calling me stubborn. I denied it at first, as many of us do, but as I got dressed for the day and her words lingered, I realized… she was right. I am stubborn. I’ve had to be.
Butler was stubborn, too, though. Not in the way of pride, but in the way of survival. She had to be in order to become the first Black woman science fiction writer to win both a Hugo and a Nebula, to write worlds before we saw ourselves in them, to believe in her own voice long before the literary world caught up. The title of her essay—and now Morris’s biography—says it all: Positive Obsession. The kind of stubbornness that births books. The kind that births you.
