Octavia Butler imagined the future on this typewriter

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Christopher Kerr** (0:19)
WBUR Podcast, Boston.

**Jennifer Sieck** (0:25)
She showed us that we can all write ourselves into American history, and that's a profoundly hopeful act.

**Ashley Lock** (0:34)
Why the words of pioneering science fiction author Octavia Butler still resonate today.
It's Friday, June 26th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR, Boston. I'm Ashley Lock. Today on the show, we continue our series to mark America's 250th anniversary with an appreciation of 25 objects that define the country's history. At a time when going analog in a digital world is so on trend, we geek out over Octavia Butler's typewriter. Also, a massive model of an extinct shark may have not been on your bingo card of most memorable objects, but we are here for the debate. A hospice doctor says visions at the end of life are common and profoundly moving.

**Christopher Kerr** (1:35)
People having these experiences grow in remarkable ways so you don't stop living because you're dying.

**Ashley Lock** (1:45)
But first, every storyteller has a tool, a notebook, a camera, a microphone. For legendary author Octavia Butler, it was a powder blue typewriter. On it, she wrote some of the most influential American science fiction novels. Her stories explored race, power, and what it means to be human.
Scott Tong speaks with Jennifer Sieck, a Smithsonian curator about Butler's influence on our country's history.

**Jennifer Sieck** (2:13)
Octavia E. Butler was interested in writing as a child, even as young as 10, and at a young age, she also begged her mother for a typewriter. So she kept very focused on this passion and developed that through the years, was very disciplined about her work.

**Scott Tong** (2:33)
Is there a work of hers you're particularly drawn to?

**Jennifer Sieck** (2:36)
I'm fascinated by Kindred where the protagonist, who's an African-American woman who's a writer, travels in between California in the mid-1970s and pre-Civil War Maryland.

**Scott Tong** (2:49)
Yes.

**Jennifer Sieck** (2:50)
And she explores what it's like to be enslaved and wrestles with that and readers can get a sense of what that might have been like.

**Scott Tong** (3:00)
And when you look at this typewriter, do you draw any clues about her habits, her routines, her famous discipline that was part of her writing?

**Jennifer Sieck** (3:11)
Well, along with the typewriter, she also gave the museum six replacement ribbons. And I think that speaks to her discipline.
She encouraged other writers to develop good habits and write every day as she did. And this typewriter, which was made around 1976, was one of several typewriters that she had. She wrote her first 10 books on typewriters. You can almost see, though, the adumbration of the personal computer coming into play with its shape.

**Scott Tong** (3:44)
We have a little bit of sound of Octavia Butler. This is from her interview back in 2000 with Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose asked her why she liked writing.

**Octavia Butler** (3:54)
You got to make your own worlds. You got to write yourself in.
Whether you were a part of the greater society or not, you got to write yourself in.

**Scott Tong** (4:03)
This African-American woman writing herself in to science fiction. How did that change the genre, you think?

**Jennifer Sieck** (4:10)
Previously, the genre was dominated by white male writers, and she brought her whole self into that genre and really changed it. She brought not only African-American protagonist, but also the beginnings of what we would now call Afrofuturism, melding science, technology, and even drawing on African folklore and mythology.

**Scott Tong** (4:39)
Now, many of her works are dystopian, but in your view, what did Butler's work reveal about America? Its past, its present, its future.

**Jennifer Sieck** (4:49)
As we heard, Octavia Butler was interested in and did bring worlds into being with her words.
In some ways, that's an American project, the Declaration of Independence brought a new world into being. And that world was visionary as Butler was. And yet, it still excluded some people such as African Americans and women. However, Butler wrote herself into American history, and she showed us that we can all write ourselves into American history. And that's a profoundly hopeful act in the same way that declaring independence and envisioning a new world in that sense was also a profoundly hopeful act.

**Scott Tong** (5:36)