Via the wisdom of science fiction writer, MacArthur genius, and visionary Octavia Estelle Butler, this HIIT for the ♥ ritual will help you to create a LIFE-AFFIRMING blueprint for your life. It’s for when you’ve lost sight of your true purpose, and there is no blueprint, no guidebook. It’s for writing your own master scheme and finding your own ways to thrive when you get sideswiped by life and the question isn’t how to fix things/yourself [you won’t] but how to be well within chaos and/or urgency.
HIIT for the ♥ is a workshop format I adapted from fitness coaching; HIIT, or high intensity interval training, is a training protocol that alternates short periods of intense or explosive anaerobic exercise with brief recovery periods until the point of exhaustion. Athletes love HIIT because it boosts your metabolism during and after your workout, so you can keep burning calories—for up to 48 hours after you’ve finished exercising. The premise behind my HIIT for the ♥ workshops is similar; writing in short, intense, explosive bursts, with brief recovery periods, until the point of exhaustion, leaves the imagination firing long after the workshop. I use HIIT for the ♥ to teach creatives and “non-creatives,” writers and “non-writers” alike, to use writing to process stress and other negative feelings. Think Vitamin B shots for the soul—instant doses of creativity that help us move from reaction to response in difficult situations! HIIT can help us to process anger, grief, frustration, fear, anxiety, etc. in quick bursts. And whether you use your imagination to write poems, advise investors, or diagnose patients, it helps to WORK YOUR EMOTIONS OUT. Because the heart and mind are muscles, too!
I wrote this particular HIIT for the ♥ ritual for my students at the New College of Florida in Spring 2023—you know, THE New College of Florida, the tiny liberal arts college of “free-thinkers” that was put at the epicenter of the American Culture Wars in January 2023. That, as I write in April 2023, is still at the epicenter of the American Culture Wars. You might have read about us in the news. Whatever you’ve read: it’s worse. And mostly the journalists can’t see the trees for the forest. We might be collateral damage, but we are real, specific people, our lives have been drastically altered by circumstances far beyond our control, and we have no idea what the future holds—except it will be worse than we can imagine. Some of you know what I’m talking about.1
I was supposed to be teaching lineation and negative capability. Instead, I taught writing and resilience featuring Octavia Butler.
Octavia Butler is remembered for fleshing out heretofore unseen characters, giving them purpose, language, and agency. She has been celebrated for “predicting” humanity’s current predicaments: including climate change, pandemic, mass migration, and other consequences of wealth disparity. Janelle Monáe, adrienne maree brown, Beyoncé, Missy Elliott, Nicki Minaj, and Erykah Badu cite her as an influence—setting the stage for multidimensional black women to construct creative, compassionate, curious, collaborative ways of living on this planet, imagining worlds where we are not undone by ourselves.
Octavia faced a lot of challenges; she was born black and poor in Pasadena, California in 1947, to a single mother who worked as a domestic, at a time when legal segregation was dead, but de facto segregation was very much alive. In several interviews Butler said she wrote because she had two choices: write, or die. “If I hadn’t written, I probably would have done something stupid that would have led to my death,” she once said cheerfully.
“I had been making up stories and telling them to myself since I was five or six,” Octavia often recalled in interviews. “Because my mother, in an effort to make me read, refused to tell them to … to some interesting pornography I found in someone’s trash. But until I began writing my own stories, I never found quite what I was looking for … In desperation, I made up my own.”
