God is Change: Octavia Butler Immersion

God is Change

What if Octavia Butler was your life coach? This course offers unpublished writing exercises, archival insights, and multimedia portals into Octavia Butler's practice of shaping change to support you and us as we process through this time of individual and collective adaptation.

Course Highlights

This course includes seven multi-media modules that engage Octavia Butler's work including:

*Writing exercises Octavia Butler created in the 1980s to encourage more people to write science fiction

*Activities based on Butler's novel Survivor which she published and then suppressed

*Insights from Octavia Butler's friendship and correspondence with fellow Black feminist writer Toni Cade Bambara

*A meditation on your deep past and infinite future based on "Evidence" a visionary fiction short story by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in the anthology Octavia's Brood

*Marine Mammal meditations based on Butler's interspecies explorations in Wildseed

*And so much more!

Recommendation #1: Set an Intention

Octavia Butler shaped change in her own life by setting intentions. We recommend that you identify an area of transformation in your own life that you want to engage through this course. Your creative practice? Your relationships? Your role in community? What is an area of your life where you are in active transformation?

*Intentions from Octavia's notebook

Recommendation #2: Dedicate a Journal

This course is a space to track what change is teaching you on a personal level and on the species scale. We recommend dedicating a specific journal to this practice so that you can come back to your reflections. There are journal prompts for each section of the immersion.

*image from Octavia Butler's journal

Shape Change

FAQs

How long will I have access to this course once I sign up?

You will have access to the course for a full year after you sign up. You can engage the course all at once, one module a day, one module a week, a month or any other timeline that works for you.

What is the difference between the God is Change: Octavia Butler Immersion and the Earthseed: Adaptation Practice Space?

The Earthseed: Adaptation Practice Space gives you access to 35 poems and 18 videos by Alexis Pauline Gumbs with prompts based on the principles of Earthseed: Book of the Living, the sacred text created by the protagonist of Octavia Butler's Parable Novels.

The God is Change: Octavia Butler Immersion draws on Octavia Butler's larger body of work and archive to provide a curriculum through which you can examine, acknowledge and reclaim your relationship to personal and political change.

What if I want to do both?

You can! Since the course and the practice space work so well together, if you sign up for one you can get the other for 50% off. It doesn't matter which one you sign up for first, just follow the prompt to buy the other one at a 50% discount. Enjoy!