Cross-posted from laurieopal
..
I was talking to a friend on the phone yesterday and I mentioned that I was on deadline to get the Octavia Butler Scholarship Awards in the mail very soon. And I realized I’d never talked about making them on the blogs.
The owl was her totem. Octavia had asked me to make the owl for her years ago when she was very much alive. When she died, much too young, in her late 50’s, I was asked to make her owl as a Carl Brandon Society’s Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship award for the Clarion Writers Work Shop. And I was, of course very happy to do it. I didn’t realize until I read the article below that I had been making them since 2007 and that I had made more than 21 of them. I’m _very_ grateful to be able to do this in her memory.
Octavia Butler was a magnificent writer and was, among other things, the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
Octavia E. Butler (1947 – 2006) was a brilliant African American writer who broke barriers with her courageous and profoundly truthful books and stories. Winner of many awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, and speculative fiction’s highest honors, the Hugo and the Nebula, Octavia was greatly loved during her lifetime and will be greatly missed. – Carl Brandon Society
The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship enables writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Octavia got her start. It furthers Octavia’s legacy by providing the same experience/opportunity that Octavia had to future generations of new writers of color. In addition to her stint as a student at the original Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970, Octavia taught several times for Clarion West in Seattle, Washington, and Clarion in East Lansing, Michigan, giving generously of her time to a cause she believed in.
The first Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarships were awarded in the summer of 2007, and they have been awarded annually each subsequent year at the conclusion of the Clarion and Clarion West Workshops. As of the summer of 2018, 21 Butler Scholarships have been awarded. – Carl Brandon Society
And I’ve been very happy by how appreciative the winning writers have been to have this token of Octavia.
======================
Follow Debbie on Twitter.
Follow Laurie’s Pandemic Shadows photos on Instagram.
======================