The Futures We Gather Around: Reflections from Parable of the Trickster: An Octavia E. Butler Celebration at LAPL
On a Saturday morning in downtown Los Angeles, hundreds of people gathered not around the release of a new book, but around one that was never written.
At the Los Angeles Public Library's Parable of the Trickster: An Octavia E. Butler Celebration, scholars, artists, designers, theologians, gamers, and community members assembled to explore the enduring influence of Octavia E. Butler's unfinished third Earthseed novel. It is a remarkable premise when you stop to consider it: an unfinished manuscript has become a catalyst for public imagination.
Before the conversation began, our panel gathered at The Huntington to spend time with the Octavia E. Butler Archive. Surrounded by Butler's handwritten notes, manuscripts, correspondence, research files, and unfinished drafts, we encountered something deeper than source material—we encountered process. We met Octavia Butler at work.
The archive reminded us that imagination is not spontaneous. It is disciplined. It is researched. It is revised. Long before Butler imagined new worlds, she carefully observed this one.
That experience fundamentally shaped the conversation we would later have inside the Taper Auditorium. Alongside Schessa Garbutt, Dr. Tamisha Tyler, and Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, we reflected on Butler's unfinished work not as something lacking but as something generative. Parable of the Trickster remains unwritten, yet its absence continues to invite new questions about community, adaptation, spirituality, ecology, and the futures we are responsible for building together.
What made the day especially meaningful, however, extended beyond the panel itself.
Throughout the Central Library, Butler's legacy came alive through screen-printing workshops with Color Compton, tabletop role-playing inside the Octavia Lab, and interactive art-making inspired by her life and imagination. Rather than positioning Butler as an author to be remembered, the celebration invited participants to inhabit her ideas—to imagine, create, and speculate alongside one another.
This was more than a literary celebration.
It was an exercise in civic imagination.
At NOMMO, we believe this is one of the most important roles cultural institutions can play. Museums, libraries, and archives are not simply repositories of knowledge; they are spaces where communities gather to make meaning together. The archive is not the end of a story, but the beginning of a conversation.
Every public program begins long before the audience arrives. It begins with careful research, thoughtful interpretation, and a willingness to listen before speaking. Research, then, becomes more than preparation.
It becomes a form of respect.
As cultural strategists, curators, and public historians, our responsibility is not only to preserve Black intellectual traditions, but to activate them—to create opportunities for communities to encounter these ideas in ways that are participatory, interdisciplinary, and alive.
Because every archive holds more than memory.
It holds possibility.
Witness and Repair: NOMMO’s Reflections on Greenwood and the Passing of Viola Fletcher
Photo: Gioncarlo Valentine for The Washington Post.
The passing of Viola Fletcher — the eldest known survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — marks a profound moment in our collective memory. Ms. Fletcher carried nearly a century of witness, offering the world an unyielding account of both the devastation she lived through and the justice denied to generations of survivors and descendants. Her transition reminds us that the work of truth-telling and repair remains urgent.
During a recent research trip, NOMMO visited the historic Greenwood District and toured Greenwood Rising, the site committed to preserving and interpreting the legacy of Black Wall Street. Standing on the sacred ground where brilliance, entrepreneurship, and community once flourished — and where racial violence attempted to extinguish it — brought renewed clarity to the stakes of our work.
Learning this history again in place underscores what the exhibitions at Greenwood Rising powerfully assert: the demands issued by 1921 are still with us. Repair is not symbolic; it is material, continuous, and anchored in accountability. The charge carried by Greenwood’s descendants, scholars, and culture-bearers mirrors a lineage of stewardship that NOMMO proudly aligns with.
Like Ms. Fletcher, NOMMO is dedicated to making sure that the memories of those who perished, survived, resisted, and rebuilt are not pushed to the edges. Their stories teach vital lessons about democracy, freedom, and the ongoing fight for justice in the United States.
In continuing these histories, NOMMO emphasizes that memory is active, serving as a practice of restoring lost or hidden stories. Our approach involves revisiting archives, land, and community testimonies to uncover what has been purposefully concealed. Greenwood highlights that the stories we carry demand guardianship, and that the cultural effort of truth-telling is deeply linked to ongoing struggles for justice, healing, and clear understanding of history. Through research, interpretation, and storytelling, we aim to present a more complete and truthful account of the past as a step toward building a fairer future.
As we celebrate Ms. Fletcher’s life and legacy, we also recognize the responsibility she leaves for us all: to preserve memory, confront erasure, and envision Black futures deserving of the ancestors who shaped this nation.