TOD 041 Patternmaster: The Legacy of Octavia E. Butler Panel from BlacktastiCon 2018

In this podcast The Outer Dark presents ‘Patternmaster: The Legacy of Octavia Butler’, a panel from Blacktasticon 2018 moderated by Sheree Renée Thomas and featuring Valjeanne Jeffers, Kenesha Williams, Linda D Addison, John Jennings, and Troy L. Wiggins, plus a The Outer Dark Symposium 2019 update. The panel was recorded live at Georgia Tech Student Center in Atlanta, Ga., on Saturday June 16, 2018.

The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird is a unique immersive one-day event featuring more than 40 program participants and approximately 16 hours of panels, readings, signings and social activities centered around contemporary Weird and speculative fiction. The third annual event will be held March 22-23, 2019 at Silver Scream FX Lab and Hotel Indigo-College Park in Atlanta, GA. Limited to 75 attendees. Buy your memberships here.

Show Notes

First, Scott updates listeners on the latest news about The Outer Dark Symposium 2019 including this year’s Indiegogo campaign set to launch soon. (00:04:00) Then The Outer Dark presents ‘Patternmaster: The Legacy of Octavia Butler’, a panel from Blacktasticon 2018 moderated by Sheree Renée Thomas and featuring Valjeanne Jeffers, Kenesha Williams, Linda D Addison, John Jennings, and Troy L. Wiggins. The panelists introduce themselves and their work, and then discuss and celebrate the life and legacy of this amazing author, including their personal responses to Butler’s work and first experiences encountering her fiction, Butler’s own writing struggles, and how Butler would feel about her deification today. Addison recalls how she met Butler in a kitchen, and Thomas talks about Butler’s ‘generosity of spirit’, and how she met Butler at a New York literary event and asked her for a story for her groundbreaking Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora anthology series. The conversation turns to how Butler’s work and Dark Matter seeded future projects such as the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Sycorax’s Daughters, other black speculative writers such as Samuel R. Delany and Charles R. Saunders, Clarion West and Harlan Ellison as her first champion, her ‘centered balanced focused energy’ in Addison’s words, her fundamental belief in her own work, her essential role as ‘gatekeeper’ for other authors, Jennings’ powerful experience with Damian Duffy adapting the Stoker and Eisner Award-winning Kindred graphic novel, things he learned from Butler’s Kindred files, her personal struggle with writers’ block, her legacy in the hundreds of black women writers in speculative fiction today, progress and work still to be done in their road to recognition and respect, comments from the audience by Dr. Susana Morris (Georgia Tech) on teaching Butler, and much more.