Octavia Butler: I got on a Greyhound bus and took a Greyhound Ameripass tour, which means that for a month I could go wherever I wanted to on Greyhound.
Ashley Bryan: Yeah. The motion of it. It goes from seventy to about four or five hundred when the cottages around the shore are all occupied.
Butler: Some of them are worth something.
Bryan: Good. But that wide, deep depth is also very holding.
Butler: We’d encourage each other back and forth going to the top.
•••
Bryan: And you're found washed up, your boat on the shore, frozen against the motor that you've huddled over for warmth.
Butler: Oh, I’m doing okay. It could have been very bad.
Bryan: What I already know is wonderful.
Butler: Because no matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.
Bryan: It is an urgency that is fundamental, and the essence is the same.
•••
Butler: Someone said it in Essence and it stuck.
Bryan: And it is considered something that's an addition for Black History Month, something which can be forgotten because it will not be on the test.
Butler: No. I imagine when I’m dead someone will have a huge yard sale or estate sale and I don’t care!
Bryan: And at that time I would go snorkeling. I would be looking at all these different corridors of fish below, and I would suddenly forget that I'm in water.
Butler: If you get seriously out of line, they will kill you because they fear you.