Shelia Liming |

The biggest writer I ever knew was, in all likelihood, the biggest and most important writer I’ll ever know. But I didn’t realize this at the time. I was sixteen, and all I understood was that the woman who had bought the place across the street from my parents’ in Lake Forest Park, Washington (a suburb of Seattle) called herself a writer. At sixteen, that detail meant everything and nothing to me—everything because I was an aspiring writer myself at that age, and nothing because I lacked the maturity to understand what it meant to be one, or even to distinguish between those who did it for a living and those who maybe only pretended to.

I started reading my neighbor Octavia’s books in high school, because I wanted to figure out what she—and her life as a writer—was about. In them, I encountered aliens and vampires and time-travelers and pregnant men. But I also encountered allegories for our modern world born out of an understanding of the historical one that had come before. For instance, there’s a scene toward the end of Parable of the Sower, one of her more celebrated novels, in which two characters who are part of a group migrating north away from a ravaged, futuristic California talk about what it means to be part of something that has already happened before. These characters, Lauren and Bankole, sense their precarious position as yet another link on a chain of past calamities and future, prophesized crises. “None of this is new,” the character Bankole tells Lauren. To this, Lauren responds with her characteristic tagline in the novel, the mantra that forms the foundation of her fledgling belief system: “God is change.”

I’m writing this today from the vantage point of history—out of the knowledge that “there’s nothing new under the sun, though there are new suns” as Octavia Butler herself once wrote, and also in the midst of change. The street where I grew up, known throughout most of its life in rather nondescript terms as 37th Ave NE, will, as of this Saturday, July 29th, 2023, henceforth be changed as the result of its history. It will now be known as Octavia Butler Avenue.

It happened like this: several years ago, I wrote an essay for Public Books detailing my relationship with the woman who is, today, one of the best-known American science fiction writers, and certainly the best-known Black science fiction writer. What’s unfortunate is that Butler achieved much of that legacy posthumously, following her tragic death in 2006, at her home in Lake Forest Park. In my essay, I focused on the experience of what I had missed out on in losing my neighbor so young and, crucially, before I really got to know her better. But I also tried to highlight everything that I got from her, through reading her books. The essay caught the attention of a Lake Forest Park City Council member, Phillippa Kassova, who reached out to me through email. She and I started talking about the idea of renaming Butler’s old street, where my parents still live today, in her honor. And now that’s happening.

Butler’s history on 37th Avenue was, as some might argue, quite short: indeed, my dad, when he was canvasing neighbors on his street in favor of garnering support for the name change, encountered a few dismissive comments to that effect. Butler lived there for only seven years, after all. But rather than building boundaries or roadblocks to the preservation of history, and rather than creating standards to test who gets to be judged deserving for inclusion in it, I think it’s important that we focus on the fact of historical presence. To exist is enough; to exist as part of a community, no matter under what terms or how long, is enough to be rightfully acknowledged as part of its history, because stasis and stability are, after all, their own kinds of privilege.

I argue this, in part, with reference to Butler’s own body of work, much of which is infused with narratives of migration and displacement. For instance, in her classic novelette “Bloodchild” (which I get to teach every fall to freshman college students now that it has been canonized via its inclusion in the Norton Introduction to Literature textbook), she writes of a population of humans known as Terrans who have been displaced from their original home on earth and forced to settle on a reservation-like allotment of land located on an alien planet. There, they are treated as outsiders, banned from participation in local politics and even from owning property. The Terrans’ circumstances in Bloodchild are a reminder of the ways in which stasis and stability are their own kinds of privilege, and perhaps also a harbinger of deepening conditions of human precariousness. We live in an increasingly unstable world where the privileges of stasis—of standing to still and thus claiming a right to the sort of inclusion that is built over a long, as opposed to a short, history—may be enjoyed by fewer and fewer people. But the right to inclusion in any version of history should not be a privileged one.

God is change. You do not have to believe in god to know what this means, to feel it. Our natural world is changing, in ways we may feel helpless to control or prevent. But our social world, the one that we build out of our relationships and connections with each other, our business and our homes, our lives and livelihoods, is changing, too, and in ways that we have the power to acknowledge, to honor, and to fight for.

This change that my old hometown of Lake Forest Park is making is, in a very small way, a contribution to the fight for good change, for the kind that we want and the kind that we would choose. A person lived here, right alongside us; many of us knew her, some of us never had the chance or privilege; that person left an immense and enduring legacy in the world—changed it, in other words. So we now we change a small corner of it in her honor and her name.

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Sheila Liming is the non-fiction editor for North Dakota Quarterly and is Associate Professor of Professional Writing, Champlain College. She is the author of What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books (2020) and Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time (2023).