Sunday, June 21, 2026

On a Monday Evening in Altadena, a Conversation About How Octavia Butler Became Octavia Butler

[photo credit: Los Angeles County]

Author Lynell George joins Fin Lee at the Altadena Community Center to trace the science-fiction visionary’s path to the page

The science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler imagined entire worlds, but the harder act of creation, as she told it, was making herself into a writer. On Monday evening, the journalist and author Lynell George sits down at the Altadena Community Center to consider that long, deliberate becoming.

George, who wrote “A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler,” will be in conversation with Fin Lee from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Built from years inside Butler’s archive at the Huntington Library — her notebooks, her to-do lists, the hand-lettered affirmations she taped where her eye would catch them — George’s book reads less like a conventional biography than like a field guide to building a creative life from almost nothing.

The setting carries its own weight. Butler was born in Pasadena in 1947 and made her home in Altadena, coming of age in a Southern California whose heat, drought and uneasy horizons would later surface in fiction such as “Parable of the Sower.” “My teachers always did claim that I seemed in another world,” she once said — a line that reads now less as a complaint than as a map of where her imagination lived.

The evening is presented by the Altadena Library District, whose main branch on Mariposa Street remains closed for renovation; the talk shifts the conversation to the community center on Altadena Drive instead. For a town still rebuilding after the Eaton Fire, Butler’s example — patient, stubborn, rooted in this exact stretch of the San Gabriel Valley — carries particular resonance.

The conversation with Lynell George and Fin Lee will take place Monday, June 22 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Altadena Community Center, 730 E. Altadena Drive, Altadena. For more information, call (626) 798-0833.