Walking with Octavia

Cost: $80

Dates

• Thurs., Oct. 2-23, 9-11:30 a.m.

Location: In person: Arcata

With Renee Byrd, Associate Professor

Explore author Octavia Butler’s novel, Parable of the Sower. In this stunning example of Black feminist science fiction and Afrofuturism, main character Lauren Oya Olamina is the daughter of a Baptist minister who grows up in a small walled-in community in Southern California.

They are living in a dystopian future and she does not trust “her father’s god,” so Olamina builds her own religion, Earthseed, finding brief moments to write short, poetic passages on whatever paper she can find.

She makes space for this spiritual and intellectual work in the midst of scarcity, violence, and transformation, from the burning and looting of her walled-in community, to an epic journey where she leads others on a trek to Northern California. The central idea of Earthseed is that "God is Change." How do we move into right relationship with change?

This prescient novel is set between July 2024 and October 2027, and it is feeling less and less like science fiction.

This course includes lectures, discussion of the novel with guiding questions, and a series of ecosomatic walking practices.

Octavia Butler walked everyday. Throughout her notebooks, she tracked the plants she saw on her walks -- whether they were blooming, producing fruit, or losing their leaves. This course will incorporate walking methodologies with this attention to plants as a way of engaging with the ecological themes of the novel.

We will take an approach inspired by Springgay and Truman’s Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, where we will ‘walk-with’ Octavia, the novel, and what her work offers us for meeting the challenges of our times.

A wider ‘community read’ of the novel, sponsored by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, will be happening concurrently with this course, and will offer a slate of optional events and opportunities for engagement.

Class #: 44072

Register by 12 p.m., September 29.

Renee Byrd

Dr. Renée Byrd is an Associate Professor of English and Program Lead for CPH’s new major in Critical Agriculture Studies & Agroecology (launching Fall 2026). Her work is situated at the nexus of abolition feminisms, Black ecologies, and healing justice. She asks questions about how violence and the State are reproduced, how we heal and how we meet the challenges of our times. She is the Founder & Director of Earthseed Laboratories, an organization curating ecological healing spaces with formerly incarcerated people and their movement co-conspirators. Byrd is co-author (with Janelle Adsit) of Writing Intersectional Identities: Keywords for Creative Writers. She is a poet, farmer, altar artist, and mom to a precocious 8 year old.