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August 2022
Thank you for joining the Mary Ann Key Book Club in a collective effort to read, learn, discuss, and foster the change we need to see in our community.
This fall we are reading "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia E. Butler.
(Video Duration: 02:20)
If Octavia E. Butler, the award-winning sci-fi writer and novelist, were alive today, I would ask her to sit down for a moment and watch one of the 24/7 cable news networks with me. There are reports of rising polio cases. An ex-president is at the center of an FBI investigation. The CDC just threw its hands in the air and told us to do whatever we want to do with regard to Covid-related restrictions. There are rumors of a pending recession, and weather disasters have caused historic flooding in Kentucky and fire tornadoes in California.
While I’d like to believe she’d be startled by what her novel, "Parable of the Sower", accurately predicted, I also assume she’d ask a question: “Why didn’t anyone listen?” We’ve selected this work for our fourth season of the Mary Ann Key Book Club because it feels more relevant now than when it was released in 1993. Set in 2025, Butler could see the future. But through the eyes of Lauren, a 15-year-old Black protagonist in the book, we find out that there is still hope as the world is ravaged by disease, global warming and violence.
And that’s why we picked this book. We still have time to encourage real change. That was Butler’s message nearly 30 years ago. It still matters today. We look forward to exploring this book with you and our distinguished panel that will include Shannon Gibney, Maya Washington and JaNaé Bates – three incredible women with strong attachments to the Twin Cities community – in the weeks ahead.
When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions.
Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith...and a startling vision of human destiny.
Octavia E. Butler was a renowned African American author who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. She was the author of several award-winning novels including “Parable of the Sower” (1993), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and “Parable of the Talents” (1995) winner of the Nebula Award for the best science fiction novel published that year. She passed away on February 24, 2006. Her work is now taught in over 200 colleges and universities nationwide.
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The Mary Ann Key Book Club is intended to allow you to engage in ways that best fit your time and interests. You can participate in several different ways:
Share your feedback and questions
Tell us your thoughts as you read “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler. Share your feedback, reflections or questions. Responses and questions may be shared with Myron Medcalf and library staff, and quotes may be shared with readers through our newsletter.
A podcast where hosts Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown examine each of Octavia E. Butler’s published works, chapter by chapter. https://www.readingoctavia.com/
Writer to Writer: Marcie Rendon and Leya Hale
Tuesday, September 13, 6:30-8 p.m.
Join author and playwright, Marcie Rendon (White Earth Nation) and documentary producer Leya Hale (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Diné Nations) in a conversation on their writing and their lives. They will also discuss issues that affect their Indigenous communities such as generational trauma, reclaiming Indigenous cultures and languages, murdered and missing Native people and more. Collaborator: More Than a Single Story. This program is funded by money from Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
Registration required.
Club Book with Boyah J. Farah
Tuesday, September 13, 7-8 p.m.
Essayist and poet Boyah J. Farah emigrated to the United States in the mid-1990s as part of the Somali diaspora. His anticipated memoir, "America Made Me a Black Man", is one of the first-ever book-length examinations of American racism written from an African outsider’s perspective. Collaborator: MELSA (Metropolitan Library Service Agency). Funded by Minnesota's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
Join the live event via facebook.com/clubbook/live.
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