Voices for Truth: Imagining the Future

Join an intimate discussion of literature in one of Cincinnati's most iconic literary destinations--the Harriet Beecher Stowe House. Carry forward its legacy of social change and be part of its future.

As 2025 draws to a close, we look to writers of fantasy and science fiction, not for stories of bug-eyed monsters, dazzling special effects, or predictions of the future, but for alternative visions of how our world might be--for better or worse. These stories are sometimes called speculative fiction or even parables because they raise thought-provoking moral questions. Both authors are women in a field formerly dominated by men. Ursula Le Guin is probably the best known of the New Wave of speculative fiction authors who came to prominence in the 1970s and ‘80s, and N. K. Jemison is a widely honored contemporary author whose work is often discussed in connection with Afrofuturism.

Suggested Reading:

• Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973)
• N. K. Jemisin, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” (2018)
• Ursula K. Le Guin, “She Unnames Them” (1983)
• N. K. Jemisin, “Valedictorian” (2012) lightspeedmagazine.com

About the Facilitators:

• Dr. John Getz is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Xavier University and has been volunteering for the Friends of Harriet Beecher Stowe House for many years.
• Dr. Jodi Wyett is Professor of English at Xavier University.

We’ll study the writings of many authors from the 19th and 20th centuries to determine

• how they discovered their voices,
• the forms they chose for expressing their voices,
• the needs both personal and societal to which they put those expressions,
• the effects their work had,
• how we can develop and enlist our own voices in service of our own values.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is our exemplar voice for truth. During her eighteen years in Cincinnati as a young adult (1832-1850), she discovered her voice as a writer, and in 1851, she decided to devote it to the anti-slavery cause. Horrified by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, she wrote to editor Gamaliel Bailey: "Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject [slavery], and I dreaded to expose even my own mind to the full force of its exciting power. But now I feel that the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak."The result, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the blockbuster novel that awakened many Northerners to the horrors of slavery and helped create the change of heart that would allow the Union to stand firm when the South ceded over slavery.

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