Conversations with Tyler - Margaret Atwood on Canada, Writing, and Invention (Live at Mason)

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

Margaret Atwood defines the Canadian sense of humor as "a bit Scottish," and in this live conversation with Tyler, she loves to let her own comedic sensibilities shine. In addition to many other thoughts about Canada — it's big after all — she and Tyler discuss Twitter, biotechnology, Biblical history, her families of patents, poetry, literature, movies, and feminism. Is it coincidence that Atwood started The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin during 1984? Does she believe in ghosts? Is the Western commitment to free speech waning? How does she stay so productive? Why is she against picking favorites? Atwood provides insight to these questions and much more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded April 9th, 2019 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Margaret on Twitter Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercadis.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit Conversationswithtyler.com. We're very honored to have Margaret Atwood with us here tonight. And just to be clear, this is the conversation with Margaret Atwood. I want to have, not the one you want to have.

Just to start with some basic questions about Canada, which you've written on for decades. What defines the Canadian sense of humor? What defines the Canadian sense of humor? I think it's a bit Scottish. How so? Well, it's kind of ironic. It depends what part of Canada you're in. I think the further west you go, the less of a sense of humor they have, but that's just...

My own personal opinion. My family's from Nova Scotia. So that's as far east as you can get. And they go in for deadpan lying. In 1974, you wrote, the Canadian sense of humor was often obsessed with the issue of being provincial versus being cosmopolitan. Do you think that's still true? It depends again. You know, Canada's really big. In fact, there's a song called Canada's Really Big. You can find it on the Internet.

by a group called the arrogant worms. And that kind of sums up Canada right there for you. The burden of the song is that all of these other countries have got all of these other things. But what Canada has is it's really big. And it is, in fact, very big. And therefore, it's very hard to say what is particularly Canadian. It's a bit like the U.S. So which part of the U.S. is the U.S.?

What is the most U. thing. Maybe it's Knoxville, Tennessee right now, right? The South East. But it used to be Cleveland, Ohio. Did it. Center of Manufacturing. When was that? When was that? If you look at where the baseball teams are, you see what the U.S. used to be. Is that what it is? I think so. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, we're not able to do that in Canada because... You have one. We have one, yeah. Used to be two. Yeah, I know. Well, things come and go. So we've got hockey, though.

We have that, yes. You can't take that away from just a minute now. You did. Yeah, so what is the most Canadian thing about Canada? The most Canadian thing about Canada is that when they ran a contest that went, finished this sentence, as American as apple pie, as Canadian as blank, and the winning answer was as Canadian as possible under the circumstances. I think Canada, these days,

is where you, when you think things are going to go pear-shaped in the states, when you think they might. Canada is a beckoning refuge, as it has been in the past. So I just want you to know if things go too pear-shaped here, we have a lovely church basement waiting for you and a nice hot cup of tea. What is funny about Saskatchelon? What? Why do Canadians read so much poetry? Where are you getting these funny questions? Yes, Saskatchewan isn't very funny.

Canadians used to read a lot of poetry because we didn't have a viable novel publishing business or a film industry or a music industry, but we've got all of those things now, so they're reading less poetry. In 1972, in your famous book survival, you wrote, The Canadian Way of Death is Death by Accident.

Is this still true? In fiction or in real life? In real life. I think it's more likely to be true in Canada than it is in the States, where the U.S. way of life is by gun violence, whereas we tend to go in for falling into the lake. Is survival still the central theme of Canadian literature today? I think it's the central theme of the entire planet.

I think we were just a bit ahead of our time. So, yeah, you want to know about it, which increasingly you will need to. come to us. If we look back to the 19th century, the United States is Melville and Poe and Hawthorne, and the Canadian tradition seems to be slower to develop. That's because Canada was slower to develop. So what you have in Canadian history is 1760 Quebec Falls.

There it is right there. And if that had not happened, there wouldn't have been an American Revolution. But Canada took quite a while to get a population that was far enough away from the frontier to bother itself with literature. Is it fair to say that Canada was founded in debt? It had high levels of debt. The province is unified to pay their debts. They wanted to take out more debt, build more railways. So you're talking about 1867 around that time. Confederation, I haven't happened, I think, for a couple of reasons, not being one of them, but the other one was

there was quite a lot of pressure from incoming people south of the border. And they... Too many of us. They confederated partly just to keep from being annexed. Now, you're active on Twitter. Is Twitter good for literacy? On average. Okay, on average, you have to be able to read to do it.

The quality of literacy. Oh, that's different. Yeah, by literacy, I mean just the ability to read. So all of these things where you have to read something and then push a button, you actually have to be able to read to do that. So people are working around it in all kinds of ways, such as YouTube and what have you, but you still have to be able to go to the website and push something. Is it making North Americans better writers?

Oh, I wouldn't go that far at all. But it's made quite a few of them writers who probably weren't writing much before they had the social media option. You once wrote, gardening is not. irrational act. Would you care to elaborate? I think you've slipped over into the silly side. Okay, it's not a rational act. Why did I say that? I don't know. When did I say that? I don't remember offhand. Yeah, well, I mean, you plant things and you spend quite a lot of time doing it, and then you get, well, I did have a very successful garden once, but that was because I had a lot of

excellent rotted cow manure, which was just close to hand. So gardening is like anything else. If you want to succeed, read the instructions, and you need sunlight, good soil, and water. Those are the things you need. Now, as you know, you've written a work for the future library called Scribler Moon, and it won't be read by anyone else until 2114, correct? That's correct. How did you write differently for the far or off future? I'm not allowed to tell you what I wrote. No, you don't have to tell us what, but how did you mentally approach the problem differently? Or did you just write what you would write for an audience today?

No, no, I didn't. But I can't go into detail because when you sign up for this thing, one of the things you can't do is tell what you've written. So the mandate was make an artifact out of words of any length, any kind of artifact as long as it's words, and two copies only, give it to the future library of Norway. They'll save it up. They're going to accumulate these things for 100 years.

And in 2014, they're going to open the 100 boxes, more pressure on people who put theirs in five years before. No pressure on me. I'm not going to be there unless something very strange happens. And then they're going to cut enough trees from the forest that will have grown, we think, to make the paper to print the future library of normal. R-Way anthology. So it's a beautiful project. It's very hopeful. And they're inviting writers

from all the way around the world. I think they've had a Turkish one. They've had an Icelandic one. And in the case of smaller languages, she's putting a dictionary in that box just in case. Doing it in reverse. Let's say you were writing for readers from 1890. How would you think about writing for them? Impossible. Why? Well, because I don't live in 1890. Well, but you've read plenty of Victorian fiction. I have, yes, but that's a different thing. Do you sometimes even think of yourself as a 19th century novelist? No.

No. No. So, yeah, you can write historical fiction, but it's always going to be of the time in which you're writing it because you don't have a choice. So Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, although it's about the Middle Ages, is a 19th century novel. I'm a big fan of your novel, The Hague Seed, which I believe is your late. A few questions about that in Shakespeare. How sympathetic is Shakespeare to Caliban in The Tempest? Shakespeare himself, when he was doing the Tempest,

I think saw Caliban as one of his comic figures. But as always with Shakespeare, nothing is two-dimensional. So the Tempest underwent a number of different metamorphoses and performance since Shakespeare. We have the Tempest, then we have Oliver Cromwell, the theater gets shuts down, the tradition is broken, and nobody is, when the theaters come back,

they can't actually remember how these things were done. So in the 18th century, the Tempids was an opera. And they added some people. They added a person called Dorenda, who is Miranda's sister, so that they could have an ensemble group of singers, obviously. And then they added another guy so that Durenda would have somebody to marry

and then they learned how to fly Ariel and Ariel flew around and then when they tried to bring back the original tempest nobody liked it because they wanted the opera they wanted Durinda and the flying Ariel in the 19th century when Ariel was always played by a woman

who flew around Caliban became a romantic sort of byronic hero oddly enough because by that time people had caught up with slavery in the United States and noble savages

and other things like that that were of the 19th century. And he has real charisma. Well, it depends how he's played. It really depends. And I've seen by this time a lot of performances of the tempest, including film ones, the one by Julie Tameur in which Prospero is Prospera.

She's the Duchess of Milan. Has a pretty good Caliban. But he has a lot of, of resonance. He's given the most poetic lines in the play, actually. And there's a big question about him, which is what happens to him at the end? We're not told. It's another of these open questions. We just don't know. And how sympathetic are you to Prospero? There's a line in Hagseed. He would seem to be the top jailer in this play. Do you like him? Like or dislike. It kind of doesn't matter whether I like or dislike him. I'm sympathetic to him.

in some ways, but he says himself that he got himself into this. He was the Duke. He didn't do his dukly duties. He didn't behave in a Duke-like way. He went off to study magic instead, and he let his brother usurp the kingdom. And by doing so, of course, he threw his young child into danger and ended them up on this island. And if you want to know why he wants to get off of it, look at the menus. which I did. I did a little foodie piece for a food magazine on what they were actually eating. It's not fun.

As Legs suggests in Hagseed, is there any chance that Prospero is Caliban's dad? Think about it. Somebody has to be his dad. So if we're not accepting the devil as being the progenitor of Caliban, who is? I ask you. So they're both in the magic business. why would they have not met up at a convention? Sort of one-night stand producing Caliban.

Do you think Shakespeare believed in ghosts? Did Shakespeare believe in ghosts? We kind of don't care. Do you believe in ghosts? Okay, this is another question. I believe that people have the experience of ghosts, but that's different from saying that there are objectively ghosts that can be measured. A lot of people have ghost experiences.

It's well attested. But does that mean there is a thing out there? Again, it kind of doesn't matter. This is people's experience. So in the world of Shakespeare, there are ghosts. And in the world of Margaret Atwood? There are ghosts. Yeah, there are ghosts.

People have experiences of ghosts. In the world of Tyler Cowan, I'm sorry to say no ghosts. But I bet you know people who have. Absolutely. This is Virginia. It's full of them. Handmaid's text. Is it an accident that you started it in West Berlin in I think 1984?

Wasn't that corny? Yeah, it was very corny, but I couldn't avoid it. If I had been able to do it in some other year, I would have, because inevitably this question comes up. But I just happened to be in West Berlin. I didn't go there on purpose to do that. But there I was and how handy it was, because it was the wall all around.

And being Canadian, I could go into places like East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Poland easier than German nationals could. So I did. You had had a prior trip to Afghanistan. Did that influence the book at all? A bit, yeah. I was lucky enough to see Afghanistan six weeks before the present unpleasantness started. So six weeks before they assassinated.

a Daoud. And it was clear, and it always has been a crossroads, and it's always been desirable. It's always been desired by China, by Russia, and by anybody else in the vicinity, because things went through it. And at the time we were there, there was a great big Chinese embassy, there was a great big USSR embassy, and there was a great big American embassy. And Dood was doing quite well by playing them off against each other and getting stuff out of them. They should have stuck with him. But it's been chaos ever since. But I saw it at the last minute before a lot of things just got blown up. And did reading the book of Genesis serve as an actual influence on Handmaid's Tale, or it's just a connection you noticed later? Oh, no, it's right there in the

epigraph. So the question to you is, if you're going to take the Bible literally, how literally would you like to take it? And is it the Jacob version of the story? And is it the Jacob version of the story or the Abraham Sarah Hager version of the story that grabbed you. Usually you mention the Jacob version of the story. And that's the second one. Why? Well, because it's got more people in it. But the first version has a happy ending, right?

Well, why would I... You get Isaac, you get Ishmael. Why would I write a book with a happy ending again? Yeah, it's not such a happy ending. It's a very ambivalent ending, I would say. Abraham is a very dicey character in the Bible But there's a wonderful book called God A biography

Which is my book Yeah, it's a wonderful book I love it It's called the best exploration Of the book of Job That I've ever read I think it's brilliant But remember where my roots are

So I'm Canadian We took the Bible in school There wasn't any separation of church and state And then I went to College and studied with Northrop Frye And then I went to Harvard and studied with Perry Miller. And for all those people, you had to know the Bible. It might also interest you to know that I won from my Sunday school the prize for the best temperance essay.

Why you shouldn't drink. Would you like to know why? Why? I think I know why, but please tell us. It's a Canadian reason. If you drink and then go out into the cold, all of your blood is going to be in your capillaries. You will freeze to death. That argument doesn't

work in Russia somehow. There's a very interesting little piece to that puzzle, which was that Peter the Great discovered that he could tax the consumption of alcohol. This is for economists. It's in a book called The History of Alcohol. And he discovered that he could tax it

and then he made it unpatriotic not to drink. He made it and he made it a crime to agitate against drinking because he was making so much money from it. Did you know that? No. What are the aspects of conservative religious communities that you admire? They're very stable. Are they stable? For a while. For a while. Yeah, it's kind of a law of

nature that nothing's stable forever. Do you think Canada will ever become much more religious again? No. No. No. I don't know whether it's a one-way street, but Canada's very big. It is, and it is a lot of different populations in it, which is why when people said, when I published The Handmaid's Tale and when was that, 1985, so the British reviewed it by saying Jolly Good Yarn because they'd had their religious civil war and they weren't going to have another one.

They're having a different kind of civil war right now, but it's not a religious one. The Canadians said in their nervous way, could it happen here. And the American said, how long have we got? In fact, they spray painted on the Venice wall in

California. The Handmaid's Tale is already here. And that was in 1985. So, Canada is just two, there's too many different groups to probably provide the 35% that you need to get

a really good totalitarianism going. Now, if Someone argued that women are gaining cultural power all the time, in virtually all countries. Even Ireland has legalized abortion. Is this fear a fear which belongs purely to the past? No. What's the trend today that worries you then, given what appear to be many trends in the opposite direction? Everything's joined at the hip, as you know, being an economist.

So my fear at the moment is essentially climate change driving droughts, floods, making places uninhabitable. And when those things happen, you always get wars of one kind or another. And when you get wars, they're always bad for women. That is, and I'm not alone in having this particular fear. And the other thing that's going on, I don't know whether you caught it,

but there was a big article on the aging of populations. When you get aging of populations, you're going to get a top-heavy population, not enough young people to support it, and a lot of pressure on younger women to have more children. It's now the case, as you know, that in a city such as Toronto, more than half the population, I believe, is foreign-born. That's true.

Does it feel to you that somehow Canada is gone, or this is the new Canada? This is the new Canada. But it's the old Canada, too, because Canada is really big, and it's always been very culturally diverse. If you go back and look at the history, before Europeans. There were numerous different indigenous cultural groups in Canada. So when we say a country, basically it's just line somebody during a map, but to get the deep history of a place, you're looking at populations, who was there, what were they like, what did they do, and what kind of language did they speak.

But you've spoken out in favor of the cultural exception being part of the NAFTA Treaty that protects Canadian cultural industries. it's strange to think that having more than half the population being foreign-born is not a threat to Canadian culture, but that being able to buy a copy of the New York Times in Canada is a threat. By Canadian culture, all we mean is controlling the means of production. That's it. It's not saying things about content. It's saying things about who gets to say what we're going to publish, etc. So the worry is that Canadian newspapers would go away? They're going away anyway. So are yours.

That's true. Yeah, so the newspaper is a forum, but book publishing essentially is where we entered the story, and we entered it in the 60s when there were very few publishing outlets for Canadian writers, and people routinely told you you want to be a writer, go leave the country. Our generation did things like forming publishing companies and starting the writer, Union, one of which the activities of which was to stop the illegal import of overruns of our own books that were coming into the country and being sold as remainder coffees. That kind of, you know, basic economic stuff was what we're interested in, not in controlling what people

were saying. About 30 years ago, you were a major defender of Salman Rushdie and the whole Fatwa affair. Do you think that today, 30 years later, Western governments, would have spoken up as much as they did back then to defend Rushdie? Oh, who knows what they would do? But it's a very different world. How would it play out now? Well, I think people are just scared. I mean, we were in Penn at that time, Penn Canada,

and my partner Graham Gibson was the head of it, and he was the only person speaking out publicly, the only ones. So governments, churches, unions, they were all saying to him privately, you're doing a great job, but they weren't saying anything. because they were frightened. This was an unprecedented sort of thing. The Norwegian publisher got shot. The Japanese translator got shot and killed.

I was down here running in and out of radio stations with people saying, you know, there's your car. But Seattle was good. Seattle kept its bookstore open. Do you think the Western commitment to free speech is waning? Yes. And why has that happened?

Well, you know, people eat their own. I think there's a lot of conversations going on right now amongst people who have forgotten the 40s, you know? Sure. They've forgotten the 40s. They've forgotten Hitler. They've forgotten Stalin. They've forgotten purges.

They've forgotten censorship. They've forgotten book burnings. They've forgotten all those things. These kinds of shutting down of people are always done with great flags of virtue flying overhead. But of course Stalin and Hitler did the same thing. Both of those societies were proposed as utopias. People

were told by both of these outfits including Mussolini, I'll make it three, that things were just going to get better for people under them. But first we had to purify things by getting rid of Antarctica to art and getting rid of bad books and getting rid of people that

weren't desirable. And that kind of, that whole kind of scenario. People have forgotten about it. Have we read recently a book, I think it's called Hitler in Hollywood, there was an active group of Nazis in Hollywood, and they had a plan to kidnap 23 media moguls and hang them in a park. That was in the 30s. We've forgotten all of that. We've forgotten what that kind of thing looks like. So the message is, if you go in for censorship and shutting people down, the next person that's going to happen to will be you. Almost two years ago, you wrote that you were not in every way considered an entirely proper feminist. I'm not.

What did you mean by that? I never have been. What's your greatest heresy? Oh, there are many. There are many and numerous. I don't know. I mean, if you look on the internet and put kinds of feminism, they're now about 75 different ones. So if somebody asks you, if you're a feminist, you read.

have to say, same as they ask, if you're a Christian, you have to say what kind? Are we talking the Pope? Are we talking snakes? Are we talking? Well, there are snakes, you know. Are we talking Mormons? What is the category? So similarly, the feminist, what kind? So enter that, and I'll tell you if I am one. What was the very first business you ran?

My very first business I ran, I think, was selling blueberries for five cents a pop, not per blueberry, but for the little container of them. I mean, it was quite stupid because I was seven, and there were lots of blueberries that people could just go and pick. But nonetheless, that was one of my first businesses. But my first real business that we actually made a profit out of was in high school. and for that business I had a partner and we ran kids' birthday parties

we didn't charge enough we did everything we did the welcoming we did the present unwrapping we did wiping the tears we did the sandwiches and then we put on a puppet show and the moms loved us

because they were out in the kitchen drinking gin when we were doing all of this and we'd go so good at it we'd go to an agent We were doing company Christmas parties with the puppet show. All of this in high school. Yeah.

And your second business was what? My second business was a silk screen poster business, which came just before offset printing and other forms of cheap reproduction. So you know what silk screens are. Sure. You do. We all know. Okay, I have a big screen and you squidge everything through it.

Yeah. So you have to do one color at a time. And I used to do that on the ping pong table. Now, we're going to have a middle segment here. I'll toss out the names of some authors or books, and you tell us what makes them special to you, or if you don't like them, that's fine. What if I like them, but they're not particularly special, is that in category?

Lewis Hyde, the gift. Oh, I love that book. See? Yes. Why? Why? Well, because it's the only book I ever recommend to writing students, but it's not about how to write.

It's about what are you doing? doing. So what is this writing and what is art? And he makes a distinction. You probably like this book too because it's called some economics. Plenty. Plenty. Yes. So he makes a distinction between things that are gifts which operate in a different way from things that are just commodities. And books are a very curious thing because they originate if they're not just formula books. They originate in the gift sphere, but then they have to pass through the valley of the shadow of the commodity before they get back in the hands of somebody who loves them, at which point they turn back into a gift. So it's very instructive for young artists of any kind to read this book,

because it gives them a fix on what they're doing and also on their relationship to money. because if you live in a society where most things are judged by money, you can really struggle with being an artist and how your art gets evaluated and rewarded. H.G. Wells, Island of Dr. Moreau. Yes, well, I read all of Wells in high school because we had the collected volume, and it was in the cellar where I did my homework.

Oh, tempting. It was so tempting to read Wells instead of doing my homework, which, of course, I did. But some of it's terrible, Right? Some of Wells is terrible, but Moreau is quite interesting as a book. He wrote his early works of genius in a very short period of time. It's a very condensed period.

So he wrote the time machine, and then he wrote Morrow, and then he wrote War of the World. It's a very compact period. Chinese science fiction. Do you read it? No, not yet, but I've told there is. Three-body problem is. I read this huge volume of Chinese historical fantasy, which is, I think, the Condor Warrior series,

which is very intricate and has to do with the Jenghis Khan and the Han Dynasty and various things like that, with some magic as well, and a lot of martial arts. Young adult novels, do they have lasting aesthetic value, or are they just fun? Oh, some do and some don't. It's like anything else. You've got good ones of, of any kind of book and ones that are not so good, including literary fiction. Not all literary fiction is good just because it's literary fiction. The Charles Lawton movie, Night of the Hunter. Love that.

Why? Why? It's not Canadian. It takes place in a small country, right? That doesn't matter. I'm very universal in my interests. Yes, I think I saw it when it first came out in the 50s, and it got overlooked. It didn't get accorded the attention that it should have

because it came in the same year as the Blackboard Jungle and I think around the same time as what was it an early Marlon Brando movie. Yeah, so there's a period of black and white film in the 50s that's actually pretty interesting and he's and that movie is one of them I would say it's Mentioner's best role. Star Wars. Is it interesting?

It is to me, but the early ones rather than the lighter kind of desperate spin-offs. Why is birding interesting? Let's talk about the Wizard of Oz. Now, there's absolutely core to the American psyche. It's an economics movie. It's about bimetalism, right? The Yellow Brick Road is about the gold standard. This is not commonly known, but it's true.

It's a monetary allegory, the whole movie. You think so? I know so. You know a lot of things. So the tin woodman is what in it? He's one of the people in the bimetallist debates, but there was a Journal of Political Economy article going through all of the parallels.

And Dorothy is what? I think just the innocent American crying for relief. Are you buying any of this? I'm not. And the tornado is? Maybe depression, deflation. And Toto is. That one, I'm sorry.

stumped on. The flying monkeys are. William Jennings Bryant. Okay. So here's the really interesting thing about Wizard of Oz. In the Wizard of Oz, the male wizard is a fraud.

And all of the other male characters are missing something. That's right. Yes. But the witches are real. Now, Tyler, I'm going to tell you a story. One October, my next door neighbor, his name is Sam, came out of his house, and he saw me sweeping my leaves with a broom. And Sam said to me, Margaret, you shouldn't let people see you doing that.

And I said, Sam, why ever not? And he said, it's the broom. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, don't you know that people call you the wicked witch of the annex? And I said, Sam, fear inspires more respect than love. And he said, Margaret, you're right. What do you like to watch on YouTube? Just so you don't get too out of control, Tyler.

What do I like to watch on YouTube? Well, there's been a little collection of Handmaid's Tale Art. artifacts, and one of them is a YouTube thing called, finally they've made a handmade's tale for men. I recommend it. It's very funny. What's the correct search term? For it? For it.

Finally they've made a handmade tale. Why is there so little populism, if that's the right word, in Canada? It's sweeping many other nations, including Australia, but so far not Canada very much. Well, I think it's because of the Canadian sense of humor. We make fun of them. But our turn may come. Yeah, we did have a...

We had a conservative government before you did. And you had a social credit movement in the 30s, which had... Yeah, well, we had this guy called Wackie Bennett out in Vancouver. Yes, he was... Now, what was that called? Some other strange thing. What would a Canadian populism look like? This is our...

problem, you see, as I say, Canada's really big and it's very diverse, so you can have a Quebec populism, and they have had quite a bit of that in the past. I don't know what a Newfoundland populism would look like. I'm not too sure. We sort of know what Alberta would, because they had that for a while, but in Ontario, we've got this one that purports to be that right now, but he keeps running up against a wall because he does something that's not popular. What do you think of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission? They're working hard. Are they succeeding?

Well, there's a lot to reconcile. So just from people who don't know what that is, it's indigenous First Nations in Canada, as in this country, except because you've done a lot more massacres than we had. You had fewer people left to be reconciled with. So reconciling incomers, which means everybody who isn't indigenous, with indigenous communities that have been badly traded in really recent memory. Should there be bilingual education for indigenous communities in Canada, or should the goal be assimilation toward English or French?

It would be for bilingual or trilingual. If possible. Absolutely. These are very interesting languages, and any language is a different way of viewing the world. So if you only have one way of viewing the world, if you only have one language, only one way of viewing the world, you're missing a lot of possible solutions and approaches that you otherwise would have.

Is there at this point a plausible scenario where Quebec leaves Canada? Not at the moment. But the future, or do you think it's inevitable that there'll be greater integration? More immigrants in Quebec? I think things will stag kind of the way they are, but think about this very carefully, as people did when it was a distinct possibility. So you have Quebec there. The people to the north of Quebec are not French-speaking Quebecers.

They're indigenous people. And they said, and that's where the hydroelectric power comes from, by the way. So they said, if you separate from Canada, we're going to separate from you on the same grounds. You know, different language, older culture, etc. And Quebec said, oh, no, you're not. And they said, oh, yes, we are. and by the way we happen to have a treaty with Canada

that says that if any foreign power invades us they have to defend us so Quebec separates north of Quebec separates from Quebec Quebec invades them Canada invades you see what I mean okay so the other one was Quebec separates and makes a military alliance

with France a nuclear power how happy would the United States be about that Not entirely. I would think not. Maybe that's why they had plans for invasion of Canada at that time should go back separate. If you were to recommend to an American, a Canada trip that he or she maybe hadn't already done, something underappreciated. What would it be?

Oh, something they hadn't already done. Odds are. You mean not Toronto. Correct. Or Montreal. Not Toronto, Montreal. Or Vancouver. Okay.

Or Vancouver. Well, there's nothing like the Canadian Arctic. And what should people do there? It will completely change your view of the planet. You should go with a group called Adventure Canada, which is small, so you're not going to be on a huge, enormous cruise ship. In fact, it won't be called a cruise at all, because it cannot be guaranteed that you're actually going to go where they say you might.

You can be set by the ice. Is there Twitter up there? No. there's not much if you're in a community there is but a lot of it of course as I say Canada is really big and there's a lot of geology a lot

earlier in your career why did you quit philosophy I quit philosophy because it was the age of logical positivism and that wasn't the part that I was interested in I was interested in ethics and aesthetics which had been relegated to the sub-basement at that time. They've since been disinterred, but at that time they were quite sneered upon. So I did not want to end up in logical positivism in my fourth year of philosophy.

And quitting was the way to get out of it. I didn't exactly quit. I moved over. I moved sideways into Honors English, but I kept philosophy as a major. For a while, you had a faculty post at the University. University of Alberta. If you would somehow stay there and that counterfactual, how would your writing have evolved differently? Well, my more interesting one was at the University of British Columbia. Alberta was just a part-timer. It was quite small. But UBC, I was teaching grammar to engineering

students at 8.30 in the morning in a Kwan set hut left over from World War II. That was fun. Was it good for your writing? It was good for their writing. But it was good because what I did was I had them read France Kafka's parables and then write their own parables. And France Kafka's parables are sort of problems. You know, they're like engineering problems. So they had a good time doing that. And anyway, none of us were awake at that time of the day in any case. Do you write every day?

No. How do you decide on a given day whether or not you write? Travel aside. No, no. If I'm doing a, if I'm in the middle of a project, I work at it every day. But if I'm in between things, then of course I don't. What's your best work habit, in your opinion? I have no good work habits.

Well, there's evidence to the contrary. Yeah, but those were not produced by good work habits. I tried to have good work habits once, but it was a terrible, terrible failure. I tried to be organized and methodical, but that didn't work. What's your most unusual work habit? Well, it depends who's calling you unusual, isn't it? I don't have any fetishes, sad to say. You know, I don't have some mythic fountain pen or some,

I don't have a court-lined room. I don't have to have, you know, 15, who was it, to drink 30 cups of tea? I don't know how they could have done that. I think it was Johnson. He must have been absolutely mummified inside. Balzac, how much coffee did he drink? I think he must have been insane.

Anyway, no, I don't have any really terrible work habits except possibly caffeine. You've written a great number of book reviews more than most writers. Why has that been the case? Well, it's this thing of coming from this small country where you kind of had to do stuff yourself. So writers were in the habit of writing reviews of books because other people weren't doing it. So I see it sort of like giving blood. You don't like it. And even though they give you a cookie and some orange juice,

I mean, it's not fun. That's about all you get from writing book reviews too, by the way. But you feel you have to contribute to the pool of book reviews, just as you have to contribute to the pool of blood, because one day you may need some. Yeah? You gave a very positive review to John Updike. Do you feel that work is held up, or does it look different now, looking back on it?

I would have to go back and look. It was Witches of Eastwick. That's what you're thinking of. Yes. Okay, the most noteworthy thing about doing that review is that I had this big fight with the New York Times about what sorts of words I could use. Which words were they banning? They were banning words having to do with urine, because there is urine in that book.

So what were we to call it? So we could not call it piss, we could not call it pee, we could not call it urine. This is a family newspaper. What was in their style guide? Well, they didn't have anything. So we ended up calling it bodily fluids, which was much worse to buy you. It was what the witches were putting into their charms. But I was at that time living in a rectory in Norfolk, England,

and there was no phone that I could phone out on. So in order to phone out, I had to go outside the building into a phone booth, remember those, that a farmer was using to store his potatoes in. And I had to climb over these potatoes and put enough money into the phone in order to make a phone call. Anyway, this is what life used to be like. You're too young to remember that, but that did. It seems you're publishing or maybe writing poetry somewhat less frequently than you used to. That's untrue.

It's untrue. It's just being published at a different base. I'm about to drop a great big sacful of poetry on a waiting world. Oh, great, wonderful. And when is that coming out? When I get it arranged. Tell us about your patent, the long pen. Oh, it's not just one patent anymore, dear. How many? Oh, I can't have lost count.

It's families of patents. Okay, so a long, long time ago, before you were born, and before there are any smartphones or tablets or any of these things we now use, a FedEx messenger came to my door and he had a little doodad and asked me to sign for my package. So I signed for my package,

and while I was signing for my package, I thought, this signature is winging its way through the air and it's coming out somewhere else in the form of ink on paper. This was not true, but I thought it was, and I thought, why can't I use something like this for remote book signings? Remember, this is so long ago. There weren't even any cameras in your laptop. In fact, there weren't any laptops, yeah.

Yes. Yeah, so I said to somebody, why can't we do a remote book signing? And they laughed at me because they were more technically knowledgeable than I was. And I said, see if it exists. And they went off and looked, and they came back and said, it doesn't exist. the closest thing to it is remote surgery, which is quite a different thing, because you don't want to sort of scribble

on a body with a knife unless you're in a Kafka story. So I said, well, if it doesn't exist, why don't we invent it? So we invented it. It took four prototypes, one of which blew up and flew across the room. But we did it.

It was more difficult than we thought we did it. And we ended up signing books remotely because the idea was to do remote book signings for people who couldn't have them. Couldn't have real people because their publishers would never send them there. So we ended up

doing that but we couldn't, can I use a verb? We couldn't scale it. We didn't know how to scale it. So then it segued into another area of life. So it passed through the valley of the shadow of the digital which we had about maybe

before three years ago there was a period when people were saying everything's going to be digital so are you wasting your time doing the stupid thing and they said all books are going to be e-books that's not true it didn't turn out to be true and it turns out that not everything can be digital and we now know why

why is that because it's so screamingly hackable so the thing is that a lot of higher kinds of documents will not accept digital signatures as such, if you can't produce a pen and ink paper version. And we were the only people who, as it turned out, could do that. And if you'd like to read more about that, you go on to the internet and you put in

s-y-r-g-r-a-f-I-com. And there's the whole story. So the remote signing device that was originally intended for books moved over into business in the area of security and compliance. Women have faced many disadvantages in history, but it seems in the written arts they've managed to overcome those disadvantages much more easily than say in painting.

Why do you think that is? There's even tale of Genji, 18th century, Jane Austen, quite early, large number of... You could do it anonymously, and you could do it at home. And you could pretend to be somebody else. So a lot of women writers did. in painting, and I think this is hilarious. They wouldn't let women into art schools because they might see naked women.

Oh my God. What's that? When you were living in London, I think this is after Alberta. Were you ever tempted just to stay there and be part of the London literary scene? Why not? Because I'm not British. But people often move countries. They do.

Be easier to earn a living as a writer in London? No, I don't think so. I mean, I love going there and making fun of them. So, no, I have lots of fun, but living there would be a different type of thing. So I remember when I first went there, Canada was very low on the totem pole of what you took seriously as any sort of artistic thing.

So people really would say to me, Canadian literature isn't that an oxymoron. Or let me do it correct me. Canadian literature, isn't that an oxymoron? And people there, they didn't know you were Margaret Atwood, right? Well, I wasn't Margaret Atwood yet. Yes, but I was a fly on the wall. Yes, anyway, lots of fun.

But no, I could never really be somebody else. And I have given a couple of lecture series, namely it, at Cambridge and Oxford and I took care on those occasions to be as Canadian as I possibly could

There's no point trying to pretend to be British they find you out immediately I have an agent who is actually Polish, he grew up under the Soviets in Poland and her name is Carolina Sutton and she told me this and I said

but Carolina you've got such an amazing British accent and he says Oh, no, it's very fake. She said, I learned it off the BBC. She said, the British can tell immediately that I'm not British. To what extent do you crave having some part of your life where people really do not know you are Margaret Atwood?

Oh, that's easy to arrange. What do you do? I just go to some other country where they don't know I'm Margaret Atwood. Although you never can tell. You know, you never can tell somebody's going to pop out of the woodwork. That's why you can't be an effective criminal anymore. Last question about your career. Overall, if you were to explain the enormous prodigious output, which people are still reading virtually all of it, some of it is here on these shelves.

To what do you attribute that? Why are you one of the most productive writers? Because I needed to make a living out of it. But you're still writing, yes? There you go. I don't have a pension. I don't teach any university. What can I say? No, I took some measures to avoid teaching at a university because I did teach at universities, but back in the grim old days,

when it was, there were, I don't like to say this, but there were, yeah, there were gender issues, and also there were writer issues at universities in those days because they hadn't yet realized what a tremendous cash cow creative writing courses were. and if you actually were a writer and publishing things, they looked at you as Scants. Margaret Atwood, thank you very much. So now you have to edit that, right?

You have to edit it and make it into a podcast. Do you just run the whole thing? We'll just run the whole thing. We have two mics for questions. You may line up at the mic. We are here to hear Margaret Atwood, so this is not the time to make speeches. If you start making a speech, I will just come. cut you off and turn it into a question.

Why did you put Edgar Allan Poe up here? Well, he's an influence of yours, correct? Well, he is, yes, absolutely. A strong influence. Well, he was when I was 15, yeah. Who in Canadian literature has been the strongest influence on you? I don't know. Probably Alice, maybe, but we were contemporaries, Alice Monroe.

I think it was just a kind of probably most in poetry. I was of that age to get influenced. After a while you don't get influenced because your brain has turned to cement. First question over here. Hi, Ms. Awood. Thank you very much for being here. I wanted to ask you,

you are very special in that throughout your work, especially your novels like Cats Eye, Robber's Bride, even the Handmaid's Tale, even though it goes unnoticed, you portray the cruelty and psychological manipulation that women inflict on one another. I wondered, in your opinion, why mainstream progressive feminism today can't seem to acknowledge the role of intracial competition in the lives of the oppression of women.

You mean woman, woman? I don't know, because they've forgotten grade four. I think it's an ideological thing that it's a piece of ideology that says this shouldn't happen and therefore we're not allowed to say that it does happen. But, you know, essentially women are people

just like other people. And that means that there's a wide variety and there are different degrees of aggression and dominance and so forth amongst them. And there are power struggles. And that's just like people. So why be surprised and why try to pretend it doesn't happen?

It's kind of not the point. Women don't have to be perfect in order to have rights. If men had to be perfect in order to have rights, they wouldn't have any rights. It's not perfect. Women aren't perfect either, and they shouldn't be expected to be perfect any more than anybody else. So it's really a pretty simple, story, even if you get a quite heavily invested ideological

female person, if you go back in her past, there's going to be you will find a moment in her life when some other female person wasn't totally nice to her. It happens. So what? It doesn't mean that women aren't worthy of having rights like other people. You still can submit iPad questions, but next question over here. I thought I heard that there was going to be the Ham Mays Tale, a sequel.

There is. And so I was wondering if you could comment on that. I can a bit. I can't tell you much about it because my publishers will immediately arrive in a balloon and kill me. But if you go on the internet and put the Testaments, you can see the cover.

And I can tell you it will be published on September the 10th, and I can tell you that there are three narrators, and that's about all I can tell you. But they're bringing leakages out over time as is their way these days. Increasingly, they tend to launch books in the same way that they launch movies. Question from the iPad. What are you reading right now? I'm editing a book. So that means I'm not reading.

much. But I noticed an interesting trend. I always used to be able to depend on the Gideons because no matter what else you were doing, there would always be a Bible in the hotel room. They're dwindling away.

You know, you can no longer read about wholesale massacres in the land of Canaan. I don't tend to cart around big heavy books with me when I'm traveling. Question. I guess you

to be able to depend on one being there, but they're failing. I'm an annual visitor to the Stratford and Shaw festivals, and I was wondering if you could tell this audience. Good for you. I know, for about 15 years. About Canadian theater and probably the Stratford Festival in particular, since I see, you know, you often retweet about what they're doing. That's right, yeah. So the Stratford Festival started in the 50s,

and when it first started, it was in a tent. and it was a town that had been quite a heavy railroad town and also a center of pigs. It was a pig center. And if you go online and look up slings and arrows, you can find a very funny mini-series that sat essentially in Stratford. And one of those pig jokes gets into it. But so I've been going there for a long time.

I used to take my parents and the teenage kids and everybody. It's pretty inventive. I think it does a pretty good job. So what else can I tell you? The town fathers when it first started or the town citizens looked at it askance because it was artistic, don't you know? And it was in the 50s, and they had been used to railroads and pigs, and they didn't get it that this might rejuvenate their town,

which it has done. So it's one of the first festivals that brought the economic level of the venue up. Question. Hi, what's your favorite fairy tale and why? My favorite fairy tale? Well, there's a cluster of them that are interesting to me. I would say probably the juniper tree. if you know that one

no no no no have a look that one the robber bride groom which I wrote a book called the robber bride which takes a similar type of motif but flips it so they're infinitely suggestive

these folk tales fairy tales legends and myths because we don't really know what they mean So everybody's always reinterpreting them for their own time and in their own way. And I'm working with an actress right now on a reinterpretation of media. Next question. Thank you for speaking and all of your writings, especially your poetry.

I wanted to ask what television or shows, because it's not necessarily television anymore, shows and movies interest you and what do you watch? I'll watch anything. No, I'll watch anything partly because my parents refused to get a television set when I was young, so I always felt deprived. I felt I was a social pariah because I was not watching the Ed Sullivan show. So I will watch anything, but I don't watch things very frequently because I'm too busy. But who else went off to see Aquaman?

Yeah. I'm surprised at you. Why don't you all go? It's an absolute grab bag of every hero myth on the planet, including the Arthurian legends. There's a reason why the half-brother is called Orm. I'm just letting you know. Yeah, so it's, I don't keep up, because nobody can.

There's too much. Now that we have web streaming, there's just a huge amount out there of stuff. but I intend to watch something called Dark Mirror when I'm not editing a book anymore does anybody watch that? Is it good? Yes.

Is it Edgar Allan Poish? Yes. Okay. What's your favorite classic movie? I'm really bad at favorites. These favorite questions, they just throw me for a loop every time, and that's because I had a young daughter

who used to say, What's your favorite color? And I would say, I would say red, and what's your next favorite color? And this would go on. And she would go, say, which of my friends is your favorite?

I'd say, well, I like them all. And she would pester me until I would name somebody. And then she'd say, why don't you like the others? So if you say something's your favorite, the next thing somebody's going to say is, why don't you like the others? And then they'll feel very left out. The ones who are not the favorite will feel left out.

So I'm against favorite things in general. I think it's none of anybody's business. and anyway, I don't have favorites. I have a sort of a range of things I like. What's your favorite pair of shoes? Well, why aren't you wearing the other one? Question from the iPad. Why is television the seemingly ascendant popular art displacing film?

I'm not sure it is. I think they mean streaming rather than television. Okay. Yeah. Because it can expand to fill the space available for the stuff. story of whatever length it may be. So films have a sort of set period of time. It's usually 90 minutes.

And if you take something even like great expectations, which has been made into film several times, you have to squish it. And it becomes, instead of an expansive work of art, it becomes a sort of reference to the book. So I think one reason that streaming has been popular is that things can be the length that they are. Next question.

Yes, I wanted to know when you write, do you read it out loud to yourself, to someone else, or do you just reread it? I'm a reader out louder. To yourself or to myself? Yeah. But if you start then reading from your book in public, you're bound to catch some stuff that you should have got before.

Why did I do that? Do you ever read out loud other writers? Yes. I do. Two other people. Yeah. So we were great readers to children. And I was read to as a child, and I think that's really important. Question.

So you have at least two high school English teachers here in the audience. And so my question is, we are looking to expand what our kids are reading. And I didn't know if you perhaps had some suggestions of overlooked authors, titles, anything that's approachable for the high school student that maybe we haven't come contact with. So 9th through 12th graders, 14 to 18. Okay, so I would say it's different for each of those years because people lump adolescents all in together, but that's, it's not true.

17-year-old is very different from a 13-year-old. I don't know. I'm out of touch. What are they reading now? Well, the newest text that our 12th graders just got is Purple Hibiscus, and things are going well. Things are going well, okay? I would have to give that some thought, but I think, you know, I don't know the, if you're going to recommend books to somebody, you should know that person. You should know what they like, what is really not going to do it for them.

proceed accordingly. The ones of mine that get taught the most to that age group, sometimes much to my dismay, because I think they're a bit young, but apparently not anymore, are Oryx and Craig and The Handmaid's Tale. And that's, I think some books are teachable, and other books are great,

but it's hard to figure out how to teach them, if you see what I mean. Next question. I've always enjoyed the way you write about the ability of objects to invoke memory or nostalgia. Why is it that you think you're so good at that and how do you approach writing about our relationship with objects and memory? Wow. Well, first of all, I'm Canadian, so I'm not allowed to say I'm good at anything. Yes, we do the puncturing of hubris in our country. unlike you and yours.

So thank you. Thank you, but we won't let that get out to the general audience. I think probably because I read a lot of Dickens. So Dickens is not very good about women unless they're eccentric, weird women. He's kind of bad about the heroines. But he's very good about objects. And the other person is very good about objects, is Raymond Chandler.

Raymond Chandler is particularly good about furniture. In fact, I have a little prose poem called In Love with Raymond Chandler, which is about his handling of sofas. Yes, objects are very evocative, especially if you're a person who's been a child and has a memory because children relate quite strongly to objects in their, in their environment when they're little. From the iPad, how do you choose which nonfiction to read?

How do I choose which nonfiction to read? Generally the biology, not so much the physics, unless it's got colored pictures, and not so much the economics, but sometimes... But history, right? A lot of history. Surrounding what you're learning about. Or just in general.

And so I've just always been interested in history. So we have a great big library of World War II, partly because Graham's dad was a Canadian general in it, so he collected a load of books. My dad, although he was a biologist, was very interested in history. And my mother liked to read historical novels of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, of which there were a lot more than you might think. Another iPad question. How much is Cat's Eye autobiographical?

And is there a bit of you in Tony from the Robber Bride? Those are two different questions. Yes. All of these public school teachers in Cat's Eye are real. I changed the names. But you had them. Oh yeah, I had them. They had you. They had me. I had them. They had me. That school building, although torn down was real, to have a certain vintage of school

building. And the food is all real. What else can I say? The clothing is real. The children's pastimes are real. So the period is real. The plot, some of the plot, not so much. The behavior of little girls is real, but it's not confined to me and my generation. It seems to have been pretty universal. And the only difference now is that a lot of it has moved on to text, message, and that kind of thing, whereas it used to be little folded pieces of paper. Next question. I know you said you didn't keep up with a lot of shows, but I was wondering if what you thought about the Hulu Handmaids tale series.

Oh, yeah, I keep up with that one. Yeah, I'm something called an executive consultant. What does that mean? Nothing. It means that I have conversations with people on the phone, but they don't have to do what I say. Yeah, so I personally, haven't watched it except for a few clips because I quite like your book rather than the show.

But from what I have seen, they've really changed up. They updated it. They updated it. They made Serena Joy younger. Yes, Serena Joy. They made her younger. They made her friendlier. They have a multiracial caste, whereas in the book, it's much more of a South African pattern in

which they're white supremacist segregationists. And I noticed they also made Alfred pregnant, like she actually did get pregnant. in the show and I was wondering. She gets pregnant in the book. Really? Yeah, it's at the end. Oh my God, I didn't know that. Okay, that's something new. You know what? The last two chapters. I also just found out that you actually did provide offered's name in the book and shocks. I'm still shocked. No, I didn't. No, June isn't her name? No. She doesn't have a name in the book. The readers figured out what the name was. So I had to accept their verdict. And they did a piece of reasoning which goes like this. There are, you a number of names mentioned in the first chapter, and of all of those names mentioned, only one of them isn't mentioned again, so they figured it had to be her.

But that was them, it wasn't me. However, the show adopted that. So it's a question of readers adding in something that is in the book, but it wasn't in the mind of the writer consciously. And I've got nothing against that because it's not, it does,

doesn't contradict the text, it adds something in. Yeah, I just, I didn't like that because I was like, no, the whole point is that she never gave her name and her daughter's name. No, she doesn't. She doesn't in the book, but the readers decided that that must be her name, but they're not in the book. Yeah, so I just wanted to know, like, what was your take on how the show is going, and I know that they kind of have your blessing, but I was just wondering, like...

Well, the show is going very well, because I think for the people in it, it's not just a show. It is the showrunner His name is Bruce Miller decided when he was 19 that this is what he wanted to do when he grew up and he pitched himself

at the time when they were looking for a showrunner so people are quite passionately involved with it and it has given rise to an international protest symbol which is not confined to this country it's popped up all over the world in which people put on the outfit

it and it's kind of brilliant because you can't be kicked out for being dressed immodestly and you can't be kicked out for causing a disturbance because you're not saying anything but everybody looks at it and they know what it means so there again it wasn't anything i thought up it was i think it started in texas to tell you the truth and it has since spread and that is entirely due to the show question from the iPad after Testaments, is there a project you're working on that you're able to talk about? Well, let me get through one thing at a time. But you finish Testaments, right?

I'm editing it. You're editing it? Yes. Yes. It's never over. And what comes next? Probably this big sack of poetry. Big sack of poetry.

Big sack of poetry. Another reader question. Would Margaret choose to live forever if it were possible? No. Absolutely not. Why not? Well, first of all, if everybody, else was also living forever, we would have a big problem.

The only people I don't want to have live forever. So if I'm going to have them not live forever, I'm going to have to agree to not live forever either. But I think people have written about this a lot, the living forever theme. And it always turns out to be a very dicey proposition. Number one, you get bored. Number two, you're probably a vampire. Number three.

You've seen the brilliant. Here's a brilliant. film I have seen, which is quite brilliant. Swedish version only, please. Let the right one in. Anybody? Very well done. It's the Swedish vampire film about a 12-year-old vampire

that Ingmar Bergman would have made if he'd ever made a Swedish vampire film about a 12-year-old vampire. It's got one of the all-time best lines in it where the little boy says to this 12-year-old vampire, how old are you really? and she says, I'm really 12, but I've been 12 for a very long time. Last question, if you were giving advice to someone starting out today as a writer,

not that they would be growing up in the times you grew up in, but what advice would you pass down to that person? Keep doing it every day. Keep doing it every day. Yes, I don't, but you should. Because if you're a student. starting out writer, that's good for you. But the main thing to remember is

nobody's going to see it until you let them. So you need not be inhibited when you're actually writing. It's just between you and the page. And if you don't like what you wrote that day, the waste paper basket is there for you. Margaret Atwood, thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And if you like this podcast, please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review. This helps other people find the show.