The Tim Ferriss Show - #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More

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Starting point is 00:04:53 picking high leverage targets in life to improve the world. So I will also say it one more time because it's noteworthy. They're a nonprofit and everything they provide is free. That takes a hell of a lot of work and a hell of a lot of dedication and a lot of people, a lot of hours on their part. The podcast, the newsletter, even their one-on-one advice, all free. So check it out. 80,000hours.org slash Tim. 80,000hours.org slash Tim. Take a look. Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job every episode to deconstruct world-class performers, to try to tease out the habits, mental frameworks, lessons learned, life stories that you can somehow apply to your own lives. And my guest today is a living legend. I have been wanting to interview her for so long, probably more than a decade,

Starting point is 00:06:13 Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade was published November 2020. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, now an award-winning TV series. I believe in 2017, it was the most read book across all of Amazon, at least so Amazon reports. She has won more prizes than I can possibly list out. Her other works of fiction include Cat's Eye, finalist for the 1989 Booker Prize, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada, and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize,

Starting point is 00:06:58 the Mad Adam Trilogy, and Hag Seed, William Shakespeare's The Tempest Retold. Margaret's work has been published in more than 45 countries, and she is the recipient of numerous awards, as mentioned, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the Penn Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovators Award. Burning Questions, a collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, will be published in March of this year, 2022 that is. Practical Utopias, an exploration of the possible and eight-week live online learning experience, will run later this year, and Margaret is heavily involved. You can find her online at margaretatwood.ca, on, at margaretatwood on Instagram, the real Margaret Atwood. And

Starting point is 00:07:47 without further ado, please enjoy a conversation that turned out even so much better than I possibly could have hoped with Margaret Atwood. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this today. And I've been looking forward to it. Well, my pleasure. We're going to bounce around quite a bit. I will make sure that we touch on burning questions and certainly practical utopias. But I have so many questions about just your life and life energy. And we can come at it from so many different directions. I want to begin with a few questions, if it's okay with you, from someone on my team, who is a huge fan of yours. And it relates to your writing or it's a creative process. And in the research that I've done, it seems like you tend not to outline books before you

Starting point is 00:08:39 start writing them. At least the quote that I have here is, never map it out, just get into it, jump in like going swimming. Is that accurate? That's pretty right. Yes, you have to factor in that the going swimming part is about a very cold lake. So we're not talking about Florida here or pools. We're talking about screaming, running, screaming. Right. When you sit down to write and this is her question one of her questions do you know at the start whether it will be poetry or prose or a specific project i do know that yeah you do i actually do know that and poetry is more likely to be written on the run or on the fly and not necessarily sitting down. Could you expand on that, please?

Starting point is 00:09:31 Well, you know, I always write poetry in something called cursive. You may have forgotten about that. I know cursive. Apparently, they're not always teaching cursive to young people. So we're going to have a whole generation who don't know how to sign their names. They only know how to sign their names. They will only know how to print their names. Anyway, yes, cursive, which we were all taught in school with scratching little metal nibs that you dipped in inkwells. You probably didn't do that because they probably had ballpoints by your day. I used ballpoints, but my grandfather was an actual, well, he was in part a calligrapher. So I spent a lot

Starting point is 00:10:05 of time around inkwells. Oh, extremely classy. Yes, I've bought several calligraphy sets intending to use them, but Tim, I haven't used them yet. But I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to do that. If we look at the poetry and the prose, do they come from different places within yourself? Do they have a different feeling? So you would have to wire up their heads. And you can wire up their heads for novels, no problem, because you know novels, it's 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. So you actually have to work at writing novels. It's called work. You have to sit down.

Starting point is 00:10:56 It's like a job. You have to put in the hours. But with poetry, it's exactly the opposite. You don't know when something may strike you. And that's why poets are so annoying to people who are not poets, because they'll be looking out the window and you'll say, could you please mow the lawn? And they'll say, shh, shh, don't interrupt. No, no, go away. I mean, it can be very annoying. We understand why poets often have quite interesting lives, but I was lucky to be able to do both.

Starting point is 00:11:25 So people think I'm moderately sane in the bell curve of poets and novelists with, let's say, well, I don't know. I mean, I guess a lot of novelists drank a lot too, but let us say that poets are often, let's say their life trajectory is frequently more erratic than that of novelists. How can we put this gently? And especially female poets. I mean, it was just assumed in the 50s that they were sort of crazy. You don't seem crazy to me. Well, I'm not, but I'm living demonstration that this isn't true. But it's my theory that poetry comes from a different part of the brain and the part that's more closely associated with gossip. Gossip, telling stories about people, telling stories about just about anything, and narrative. So this happens, that happens, this happens, that happens, and that goes all the way back to, for instance, Homer. So you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, you can see that there's a narrative approach, very useful. The Iliad starts in the middle of things, and so do a lot of novels.

Starting point is 00:12:53 So you've got several ways you can start. You can start at the beginning and go on until you reach the end, or you can start in the middle. Or you can start at the end and then go back and pick it up but poetry lyric poetry is different epic poetry is more like novels it's got lots of stories in it so my thing about the odyssey is that it's you know all those westerns in which they were holding the fort and the cavalry was riding to the rescue yes so the people in the fort didn't know that. And the cavalry didn't know what was happening in the fort. So you've got a lot of tension. So that's the Odyssey. So here comes Odysseus.

Starting point is 00:13:32 Nobody knows where he's been all these years. And there's Penelope holding out. And just as she's about to give in, he turns up in disguise. You know, a lot of stories involve in disguise. Then we go on from there with a great finale. Do you feel like poetry enables you or enlivens you in a way that fuels the prose work? In other words, is there a synergistic relationship for you between having both of those outlets or vehicles? Yeah. So why do I do that? Because nobody told me not to. There weren't any...

Starting point is 00:14:11 Once upon a time, Tim, a long, long time ago, and you aren't going to believe this, but there were no creative writing schools. I believe it. So essentially, it was open season. You could do whatever you wanted, and there weren't people saying you have to do either this or that will turn up in some other form. So, for instance, I wrote some poetry in which this character called Grace Marks makes an appearance. And then some years later, I wrote a television play about that, back when television was still black and white. You don't remember that, Tim? I don't. It's true. There's so many things you don't remember. So it was black and white, and I was using only one source for that,

Starting point is 00:15:11 because this is an historical person. And the person who had been writing about Grace had got a lot of things wrong. So I did the play for television, and then years passed, a number of years passed, maybe about 12 years. And there I was in Switzerland. It would be Switzerland, you know, home of Carl Jung. And I started writing this piece of prose and I thought, so who is this? It's Grace Marks, and she's dissatisfied with the job I did in that play. She wants me to go back and take another look. So this time we went to a lot of sources, not just the one, and we found this extremely interesting story because it was several stories and there was no resolution. We never actually found out through the historical record whether Grace Marks had murdered anybody or not.

Starting point is 00:16:12 So I wrote a novel called Alias Grace, and then that gets turned into a Netflix series, mini-series by Sarah Pauly. And Sarah Pauly is an actress, director, producer, scriptwriter who wrote to me when she was 17 years old and said, I have to do this. She was 17. I said, hmm, I'm so cute. But she did it finally. She said, it only took me like 20 years. And she did a great job of it. So that's that story. So yeah, started as a poem, turned into a television play, turned into a novel, and then turned back into a television series, only this time, a more accurate one. I'm already having so much fun. I have to ask you, I'm going to put all of my questions aside. I have just pages and pages of notes and plans

Starting point is 00:17:03 and research, and I'm going to push it all aside for a second just to ask, what are the things that you do, if anything, maybe it's just out-of-the-box genetics, you could speak to that too, to maintain such a vital life energy at 82 years young? Because I'm looking for any playbook and I don't know how much of it is nature versus nurture but I would just love any any tips from the field because I've been impressed with watching videos of you certainly it's entirely more impressive to be having the conversation with you what are some of your other activities or things that you do? Let's begin with the genetics. My mom lived to 97.

Starting point is 00:17:49 My dad, not quite so long, 86. But my mom was very, they were both very curious about things. So there's always something new coming along. And you may have noticed that I dabble in those things from time to time, because I'm interested in them. I want to know how they work. I want to know there's a good and a bad for every human technology that we make. I want to know what's the upside, what's the downside, cost benefit, but also what are people using this for? Because it's so frequently that we invent something for one purpose, and then people find a whole different

Starting point is 00:18:34 purpose for it, or lots of purposes. For instance, Velcro. I invented Velcro. I had no idea what it was for. But now we know. It's for putting on your shoes, Tim. So, curiosity. Genetics, curiosity. And if you want to go to the astrology, we can do that too. Oh, wow. You know, I didn't see that coming. But yes, let's go to the astrology. Of course you didn't. Yeah, so what do I know about astrology? Because a long, long time ago, I was in English literature, and I was a Victorianist. And one of the things that you had to know for the kind of English literature that I was in at that time, which began with Anglo-Saxon and ended with C.S. Eliot, was people's worldviews. And especially as you get into the Renaissance,

Starting point is 00:19:27 that's what people believed. They believed in astrology. They believed in palmistry, which is connected. And therefore, it was interesting to know about things because you could see, you could, for instance, look at a portrait, a Renaissance portrait, and look at the rings on the fingers because what fingers those

Starting point is 00:19:47 rings were on meant something to the people looking at the picture and the positions of the hands meant something so like this you see a lot of saints going like this let me see if i can show you yes it's sort of facing a lot of well no it's the little finger oh i see what are you doing with your oh i see the hand i see oh yeah yeah yeah we did that too you know oh this is the the vulcan we go uh live live well and prosper uh yes exactly yeah so our hand gestures still mean things but our hand gestures have changed over the years. Anyway, back into the Renaissance, they believed in astrology, and that's when the tarot cards arise. So if you were studying T.S. Eliot, you had to know something about the tarot because it turns up in the wasteland. So lucky me, I had somebody called Jetske Sibisma living below me when I

Starting point is 00:20:49 was living in an apartment. And she was from Holland. And she was studying Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. And it was her thesis back in 1969 that these funny little figures and Hieronymus Bosch's weird paintings were not figments of his Freudian subconscious, but they were astrological symbols. So she said about demonstrating that, and during the long, cold Edmonton winter nights when nobody went out because it was very slippery and cold, and people's car tires froze in squares. Yetzka's abysm taught me astrology and palmistry. So I know those things. So if you want to do the astrology, we can go there, Tim.

Starting point is 00:21:38 I do. Well, with that type of lead-in, I can't say no. Okay. All I need to tell you is Gemini rising, and you will know what that means. I will not know what that means. I need a footnote. You will not know what that means. Okay. Very curious, Tim. Very curious and a bit flighty. So do you identify then with your Gemini rising assessment? Would you agree with the astrological read of yourself?

Starting point is 00:22:11 Oh, it kind of doesn't matter whether I agree or not. It is what it is. I just throw it out there for you because you wanted an explanation as to why I'm always sticking my nose into things and what keeps me going. So what keeps me going is you never know. And the other thing that keeps me going is don't open that door.

Starting point is 00:22:32 Why not? I'm going to open the door. Is the you never know a reference to why not trying something new? Is that what that means or does it mean something else? Yes, it means that. Exactly, it means that exactly it means that so just to go a little deeper into the astrology the governing planet of gemini is hermes okay otherwise known as mercury and what is her means the god of i was going to say handbags but i don't have my

Starting point is 00:23:01 mythology no handbags get they get into it. They get into it. There's a reason it's called that. Okay. Thieves, jokes, money, communications, travel. He's the opener and closer of doors, the garter of secrets, also the revealer of secrets, and the only one of the gods that can go down to the underworld and return from it. So he is the conductor of souls to the underworld. And as you'll recall, Tim, from the end of the Odyssey, when Odysseus shoots all these people, he shoots a lot of them, really. Good shot. It is Hermes who conducts these souls to the underworld. He's what we call a psychopomp, a conductor of souls to the underworld. So people in my configuration are very interested in plumbing, the sewer system, underwear, thieves, criminals, secrets, and anything that's buried.

Starting point is 00:24:08 Like that. So that's where the curiosity comes in. Let's dig this up. Let's dig this up. Well, you mentioned Hermes, and aside from the handbag reference, which was only partially joking. That's pretty good. Hermes governs money. It all makes sense. Yeah. For those people listening who are offended, Hermes, I get it. But the opening and closing of doors, the opener and closer of doors, it made me think of a book that I really enjoyed called Trickster Makes This World. Great book. I know the author. Oh, really? Lewis Hyatt. So I loved that book.

Starting point is 00:24:40 Well, have you read The Gift, his first book? The Gift didn't grab me in the same way, although I know many, many, many people who would put that up in their top three, five books in terms of influence in their lives. So I should probably give it another shot. Well, I think Trickster Makes This World is more pertinent to you. Oh, as a trickster. quite clearly the world of commerce from the world of the arts. Although if you're in the arts, you may get your inspiration as a gift, but at some point you have to go through the valley of the shadow of commerce to get to the other side where your thing, whatever it is, turns back into a gift in the hands of the recipient, say the ideal reader. So you write the book that's in the world of gift,

Starting point is 00:25:47 it then gets turned into this thing with pages and everything, and it gets something called sold. So it's in the world of commerce. But somebody who then reads your book on the other hand and loves it doesn't say, well, I didn't get $22.95 worth out of this book. I mean, some people do, but usually they don't say that. Because they might say that about an automobile that they bought. You know, the seat belts don't work. I want you to fix them. You do that with things that you have bought. But things that you have received as a gift, you do not do that too. You do, however, have obligations towards gifts. You need to pass them on. You do not keep them. You need to either give somebody else a gift or pass on the gift that you have received in some way. So I do recommend it if you want to understand some of the

Starting point is 00:26:40 odd ways of artists. I did very much enjoy the sections I did read about gift economies and the circulation of gift. And I do want to say, though, that I think Trickster Makes This World applies to you as well. And the reason I say that is there's a term used in that book that I very much loved and I highlighted. I think the description was related

Starting point is 00:27:06 to coyote as one of the archetypes here, but as a boundary walker. And I view you also as a boundary walker between the present and the possible. I've, in the course of doing research for this conversation, read about the different ways we could look at the semantics of, say, science fiction on some other planet with creatures never before seen versus, say, speculative fiction, where you're taking something that exists or is in the process of becoming and then taking it a few steps out. And you seem to be a master of that, which would make you a master in my mind of boundary walking. And I'd love to hear what you think has led you, and this also made me think of how some people describe you as clairvoyant when you were discussing the astrology and the palmistry, because of your adeptness in this boundary area, what types of questions or what types of structured thinking or observation

Starting point is 00:28:07 lend themselves to your ability to write speculative fiction? Okay, you might say the lack of the qualities that make it difficult for me to write science fiction, which I read a lot of, plus dragons, you know, I'm keen on dragons, but I just cannot do them. So there are some things that you can do they have the ability to do and other things that you may admire but you cannot do so dragons outside my range of capabilities in any way or so luke la guin is kind of sold out dragons she got sort of the dragon franchise. Best dragons. Scott. Yeah, so Game of Thrones, the dragons are basically sort of like bazookas, but her dragons have a great intellect and different powers and other things that are usually attributed

Starting point is 00:28:58 to dragons in the English tradition, but they are in the Chinese tradition, etc. We could go on about that, but we won't today. Now, you wanted to know sort of what's behind it. Yeah, what's behind the speculative fiction? What makes you get at it? I grew up in the 50s as a teenager, and I read a lot of those things at that time. So I read 1984 just after it came out. So I read it in the paperback version with the typically sleazy cover of the early 50s. They put classics into these quite, what shall we say about those covers? they made you think that you were buying a really trashy book. So I think a lot of people got enticed into reading like War and Peace and things because they thought it was about ladies and negligees lying on beds, which it partly was, but not much really. So my copy of 1984 had this woman with an enormous cleavage in the foreground and a guy standing behind her looking down her front, which does get in there a bit, but that's not the general import of the book.

Starting point is 00:30:15 So I mainlined all of those books. I read Ray Bradbury a lot. You'll notice that I ended up writing in one of his obits, I think for The Guardian. I went to Comic-Con for the first time because we thought we were on our way to see Ray, but unfortunately he died before we got there. So we ended up having a memorial service at Comic-Con for Ray Bradbury, one of the great inventors in several fields, really. So, read all of those things. John Wyndham, I was reading in the 50s. And I think what you read as a teenage person often goes on to influence what you are then writing when you're able to, you know, when you have the skills.

Starting point is 00:31:02 So, I think I had it in my mind for a while. I would like to write a 1984 only with women like that. So meanwhile, along comes Ursula K. and a number of other people that I was following. So really, it's partly what you're drawn to and partly what you have the skills to do. As I say, I can't do dragons. Well, I can't do dragons or speculative fiction, so you have me beat. I can't do podcasts, you know.

Starting point is 00:31:32 Well, you know, podcasts are just ephemera in the mist. I think that your works will have much more permanence, but I can hope that someday the audio will get locked in the amber in the same way that words are. I'm sure it will. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Today, many small business owners like me are busier than ever. Time spent searching for and interviewing candidates can take time away from managing and, most importantly, growing your business.

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Starting point is 00:32:36 It's why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires over leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates worth interviewing faster. delivering quality hires over leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates worth interviewing faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? So try it out. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Tim, T-I-M. That's linkedin.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. I want to go back in time from your teenage years.

Starting point is 00:33:15 I've read about your experience of growing up in a cabin in the woods and some of the benefits of that. The lack of distractions giving you the concentration that perhaps helped you become a writer later and so on. I'm thinking about having kids in the very near future. And I fantasize about living in the woods because I feel most at home in the woods. Were there any downsides, would you say? Okay, which woods are you thinking of, Tim? What sort of woods?

Starting point is 00:33:40 I like varied terrain. So I prefer something that isn't flat. So we could think American West, we could think upstate New York, we could think British Columbia in certain locations. I would prefer not my dog or dogs or family, and running water of some type and a lake or a pond, having access to both of those, or one of those at least. I grew up on Long Island, more or less in the woods. That's my idealized version, but I don't know what it's like to raise kids in the woods. I'm curious if there are any downsides. Well, you should ask my mom, except she's not here. She is not here. But I can tell you what she said. Yeah, she's kind of still here. So my mom was an unusual person in that she liked being outdoors most of the time. She was very athletic. She grew up in rural Nova Scotia. She was a big horse person. She loved horses. She had horses. She rode them hither and thither,

Starting point is 00:34:55 and she was also a speed skater and, of course, a skier and this kind of thing. So I think she married my dad because he was a very bushy guy. And he grew up in even more rural Nova Scotia, like really rural. So they were so rural that I don't think they got electricity until the late 50s. I was lucky enough to be able to see a 19th century farm operating pretty much the way it would have done. So I think she, who didn't like hats, little white gloves, tea parties, any of that, she really didn't like it, didn't fancy it. She liked dancing, like fast and furious waltzing and things like that, square dancing, but she didn't like the frilly part. And Up in the Woods was great for her because she said you didn't actually have to do much

Starting point is 00:35:49 housework. You just swept the dirt out the door and you didn't have to worry about all of the stuff that people have in their houses, usually like bric-a-brac and china and things like that you don't have to worry about those so she didn't and she doesn't seem to have had a problem in the woods except my brother almost drowned once because he he got out and fell off the dock but apart from that and a few other somewhat hairy moments. It was probably safer on the whole than being in a city. Anyway, she seems to have managed pretty well, although some of her city friends, because they were in cities during the winter. My dad was a forest entomologist, it meant. He was up in the woods when the insects were doing things. But as a rule, you could take it as almost 100%. They don't do much in the winter,

Starting point is 00:36:59 insects. Pretty quiet insect-wise in the winter. So they would go up in, say, April or so, and they would go back in, for instance, November. But this is, I think, quite a lot further north than you were thinking of being in the woods, Tim. I think you're thinking of a more southerly location. Yeah. I think probably not, you know, Baffin Island or anything like that. No, they weren't up there. I know. I'm just kidding.

Starting point is 00:37:19 I'm just kidding. These were, yeah, insects that live in trees. He was a forest entomologist, right? So there had to be a forest. There had to be the forest. Yeah. They had running water, but it was out of a pump and they didn't have electricity. And the transportation was by boat. So no roads there. You could get to, I think by 1939, there was this horrible road, which I remember very well. You'd always get carsick going over it. And then you'd get to a place where you left

Starting point is 00:37:51 the car and then you'd get in a boat. So then it was during the war, so there weren't even a lot of motorboats because gasoline was rationed. So, canoes. I would love to hear you describe an experience that came up in my reading in preparation for this. And it relates to a day you found yourself walking across a football field. I don't know if that's enough of a cue, but I would love to hear you expand on this because I did read about it, but I feel like there's probably more to the story. So could you please just provide some color and tell the story? Writers make stuff up, Tim. You ask them questions that essentially have no answers, but they make stuff up anyway. So I'll tell you what I made up, but it's kind of true.

Starting point is 00:38:48 Sounds like my life. Yeah, yeah right it's like that it's mostly kind of true yeah it's sort of true your previous question what did growing up in the woods have to do with being a writer there wasn't anything to do except when it was raining except reading reading, writing, and drawing. So there were no other things to do, like no theaters, no schools, no television, no what else can you think of, none of those things. So therefore, I fixated on writing pretty early. And it was a narrative family. People told stories.

Starting point is 00:39:27 And my older brother was a gung-ho writer. He wrote lots of things at that age. He turned into a scientist, but he was very narrative when he was, say, 10, 9. Anyway, back to the football field. There I am, having written my first novel at the age of seven. It was about an aunt. Some structural difficulties there, Tim, because ants don't do anything until they're in the fourth stage of their life. They don't do anything when they're an egg. They don't do anything when they're a larva. They do nothing when they're a pupa. And it's only when you get to the last part of the story that they actually have any legs. So I don't start books that way anymore, Tim, but I did then. So then I stopped writing. I took to drawing. I drew a lot.

Starting point is 00:40:13 Then I ended up in high school at slightly too early an age. They skipped people then. I think they've stopped doing that. So I was 12 and some of the people in my class were almost 16 because they failed people then, Tim. So it was a slightly daunting experience. I can imagine. But things evened out after that. Yes, I was quite short. I'm still quite short.

Starting point is 00:40:39 In fact, I'm still quite short. Yeah. People got bigger. For a while, I was sort of normal size, but that's no longer true. There's all these enormous kids who drank a lot of milk with vitamins in it. Anyway, there I was in high school. I love my grade 11 teacher. That would be one, two, the third year of high school.

Starting point is 00:41:00 What do you call that? I guess junior, junior year. What do you guys call it fifth form i don't know if you use british system i have no idea yeah no that's english yeah what do you guys call it in canada well we called it different grades like 9 10 11 12 and in those days 13 but they've done away with that yeah we would call it 11th or junior year junior yeah so my great english teacher who i put in a book which is a peculiar people go back and they do documentaries about you right and usually the teacher says oh yes i could see instantly great brilliant sean right out of her head and i can tell she was you know slated for greatness

Starting point is 00:41:40 but she told the truth she said she showed no particular ability in my class, which was true. I didn't show any particular ability in her class. And I had no idea then that I was going to be a writer. Didn't strike me until the next year when I had a different English teacher who I've also put into a story because she was a legend in her own time. She took hold of the people in her class and she yanked them through the curriculum no matter what. No matter what she got us through. And her name was Miss Bessie Billings. And she made the immortal comment because I showed her one of my poems she said i don't understand this at all dear so it must be good so wonderful i love it that is great that is great yeah so i started writing poetry in in grade 12 and the story i tell about that is that i was crossing

Starting point is 00:42:41 the football field and a pink princess line dress that I had sewed myself. A work of art, Tim. You don't know what that is, do you? Tim Cynova Well, I can envision, based on some of the words, what it might look like. Mary Laird Princess line. It had these panels, and then it sort of flared out. Anyway, it was great. Loved it. And it had a beautiful sort of button on the front, which I still have. I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd gone into home economics instead of the secretarial sciences, which I should have done.

Starting point is 00:43:12 Had I known, I would have done that. And then I would know how to touch type, which I don't. And it's too late now, Tim. So there I was in my pink princess line dress crossing the football field and a poem occurred to me. It wasn't a very good poem, but it was a poem. I was very excited about it. And this is how these things start. You write some pretty terrible poetry that you're very excited about. And luckily, there's nobody there to tell you this is really terrible poetry and then you go on from there what did it feel like when this poem came to you i mean the lie now you can tell me how much of this is uh revisionist history and storytelling and how much of it is a reflection of your experience but quote a large invisible thumb descended from the sky it's the eureka moment tim yeah a big thumb came out of the sky.

Starting point is 00:44:06 You believe that? What else would you like me to tell you that you will also believe? I already asked about astrology, so you got me. Yeah, you can tell me anything. It was very interesting to me. And I had been trying out

Starting point is 00:44:22 these potential careers, like I was going to be a painter and then I revised, like I was going to be a painter, and then I revised that. I was going to be a fashion designer, and then I revised that, and I went into home economics. Because in the textbook that was called Guidance, in grade 9, you were supposed to decide what your career was going to be. Can you imagine? Who knows anything when they're that old oh yeah um so the guidance textbook had had five things that that girls could do and they did not include astrophysicist let's see if you can guess what they were in 1952 i think i can but i'm cheating nurse secretary school teacher airline stewardess, as they were known, and home economist.

Starting point is 00:45:07 You've read what I wrote. I know, I'm a bad cheater. Or a very good cheater. Well, you didn't get away with it. That's what was on offer. And being a mercenary child, I looked up what they made. Because I did grow up in a family in which it was expected that you would support yourself. So the home economists made the most, believe it or not. So I went into that. But then I decided, no, this is not for me. I'm going to be a biologist. I was going to be a botanist because I was actually quite good at it. But then along came this writing, much to my parents' dismay,

Starting point is 00:45:51 but being the bite-your-tongue kind of parents, I think they just hoped it would be a phase. I would grow out of it. It's been a long phase. Who would see them? A phase, yeah. Well, they did say the very practical thing right off the bat. They said, well, how are you going to support yourself? I said, you know, I'll get a job, which I did.

Starting point is 00:46:09 I got lots of jobs. And then my mother said rather caustically, if you're going to be a writer, you better learn to spell. And I said, others will do that for me. And you know, they have. Now we have spell check. You know, all good things come to those who wait, I guess. You were right. You were right. I had to wait a while.

Starting point is 00:46:31 It's been panned out. So you wrote, if I'm getting the chronology right, you wrote for 16 years before you could make a living out of it. You had all these different jobs, as you mentioned, as a cashier in a coffee shop and many others. I was bad at that. Over those 16 years, were you maintaining the belief that someday it would pay the bills and you would be able to make a living out of it? Or was it just a labor of love while you did these other things? Oh, the writing? Yes. You mean, did I ever think I would make a living out of it? No. People in my age group in my country at that time didn't think that way. They might have thought that way in the 30s, and even in the 40s, where there were a couple of bestsellers written by people in our country, but right after the war, during the 50s, a couple of things had happened, and one of them was that the paperback book industry had taken off. I think it started with Penguin in the UK, and then it was Pocket Books, and Canada didn't have, it had some nascent book publishers, but paperbacks were not included in

Starting point is 00:47:48 them. So the glossy magazine market was also drying up. So a writer like Morley Callahan, who wrote a lot of short stories in the 20s and 30s, made a living out of selling to glossies. That was dwindling by that time. Some of them still existed, but not in the same way that they had. So we weren't really thinking in those terms, and there were no agents in Canada at that time. We didn't even really quite understand what they were. There were some publishers, but they didn't publish very many Canadian books because it was thought there wasn't a market for them. So if you wanted to publish a novel, your publisher would say, well, we have to get a partner either in London or in New York. And that was easier said than done.

Starting point is 00:48:39 So the book publishing that had been going on in the 30s of cheap hardbacks kind of dried up. In fact, let me just be a little more certain about that. It was gone, having had paperbacks take its place. So it was hardbacks, and I've always been interested in the underpinnings to all of these things. In fact, I was associated with a small publishing company in the late 60s and early 70s. And a lot of it was about money. Like, how many can we sell? What can we publish to support these works of cutting-edge experimental fiction that nobody's going to buy? What can we publish? So we did. We published

Starting point is 00:49:25 the first book on venereal disease. It was called VD. You know, Idiot's Guides. These were sort of Idiot's Guides before there were Idiot's Guides. We got as far as warts, but we didn't get to AIDS because nobody knew about it yet. It's like that. So let me hop in for just a second. When you're writing for 16 years, not thinking you can make a living from it, what did you get from the writing and did you share your writing with anyone? Oh, absolutely. We were all sharing our stuff around because we were editing each other's work. We were publishing each other's work. We were, all of the poets were connected through this kind of spider web network of little magazines.

Starting point is 00:50:15 Ah, I got it. That was, yeah, both in Canada, the US, England, there were these little magazines that published poetry and people knew each other through them. So the poets knew one another before the novelists did in our country. The poets were more peripatetic. They would get on the Greyhound bus and turn up at your door and sleep on your rug. And you, in your turn, might get on the Greyhound bus and turn up at somebody else's door and sleep on their rug. So it was a sort of a rug exchange of poets.

Starting point is 00:50:53 They would turn up here and there and give readings in out-of-the-way places. And some of them, do you remember? No, you don't. Sorry. Coffee shops, coffee shop readings. No, I know coffee shops. No, I do. I do. I have been to a coffee shop readings no i i know coffee shops no i i do i do i have been to a coffee shop reading well a different kind of coffee shops let me not say shops that's it should be houses so they didn't have liquor licenses so basically people brought flasks in their handbags pockets and things like that and you had the usually condemned warehouse or something and the little tables with the checkered tablecloths the little wine bottles with the candle stuck in them and the open mic so poetry night usually on a tuesday Sounds great. That sounds like a lot of fun. Down part of the week,

Starting point is 00:51:46 all the folk singing and jazz went on on other nights of the week, such as Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. That's how they supported the poetry readings. So we did that in the early 60s. And then the poetry readings spread to universities, some of them, and then to bookstores. They decided that they could do that too. And the big festivals didn't start happening until the mid-70s, I would say. All of these festivals that you see proliferating like mushrooms all around, or you did see it before COVID, they didn't exist yet. They sprang up out of the subculture of coffee houses. This is neither here nor there, but I am fascinated actually by the history of coffee houses, especially in the UK, where you have Lloyd's of London coming out of one coffee shop,

Starting point is 00:52:41 and all of this incredible history that I really know from- You mean back in the 18th century. Yes. Way back, which I also don't remember to be clear, but I have read about it. And that, that,

Starting point is 00:52:52 that interchange of ideas and the sort of interstitial tissue in the, in the societal fabric of the time. But what I'd like to ask you about next is teaching. And it's clear reading about your life that you have taught a lot. What type of teaching did you most enjoy, if any of it? I always enjoyed it. I think the most intense year of teaching that I did was in Montreal. I taught at a place that doesn't exist anymore because it's been amalgamated with another institution, but it was called Sir George Williams, and it was a downtown city establishment. You taught your

Starting point is 00:53:31 subject to 19-year-olds in the day, and then in the evening, you taught the same subject to returning adult students. That was very instructive for me. The 19-year-olds weren't too sure why they were there, except their mom and dad wanted them to. And really, they would rather be drinking beer or going to hockey games or something. And the adults were there because they wanted to be. A couple of reasons they wanted to be there. They wanted to up their credentials, but also they were very engaged, and they would argue with you, object to things, and really give you the old run-through, and that was pretty stimulating. people and I also taught American romanticism. And it was they who gave me a button that said, Moby Dick is not a social disease. So they had a sense of humor. I liked them a lot. And it was very instructive because the things that the 19-year-old liked frequently, the grownups would not like. And the things that the 19-year-olds

Starting point is 00:54:46 really didn't like, the grown-ups thought were terrific. So, Middlemarch by George Eliot, the 19-year-old said, we don't like this book at all because the people in it make wrong decisions in their careers, and they marry the wrong people, and we're not going to do that and the adult said this is the a great book make the wrong decisions in their careers they marry the wrong people it's just like life so a big difference in experience and what's the lesson the lesson is that you bring to any book who you already are at the age that you are in the experience that you've had and it's the same for everyone so we're talking about books of course i'll segue to book that i've not read and i'd love to ask you about because you you've recommended that young adults should read the

Starting point is 00:55:38 future of life by edmund osborne wilson if the internet is to be believed. Yes, unfortunately, he's just died. I'm sorry to hear that. Yes, exactly right. Yes, that's right. I've actually put a quote of E.O. Wilson, I guess, as I better know him, in my newsletter, in fact, I guess two weeks ago. And why do you recommend The Future of Life, that book in particular? He's a biologist. Yeah? He's a biologist.

Starting point is 00:56:07 Yeah, he's a biologist. I was familiar with his work from an early period because, of course, he was an entomologist. He was an ant guy, and my dad started out as a bee guy. And as you will know from your deep study of entomology, those are both hymenoptera. So my dad was very interested in his work on ants, and I read it pretty early on. I followed him along, and I was in fact the reviewer for his only novel. And you can probably find that review in the New York Review of Books. And I was well-equipped to do it because I knew about ants. And the central section of that book,

Starting point is 00:56:54 which is the life and death of an ant colony, is the most gripping one. You think, wow, this is so epic. What is going on here? It's like the sack of Troy. I actually knew him a bit. I'd met him. I thought he was very interesting. And he was a huge advocate for the future of life on earth and an early advocate. And a lot of the early advocates for the kinds of things that we are now very concerned about now, they came from the world of biology. So my parents, for instance, were early Sierra Club and early environmentalists, and very clear from any study of biology, life is interconnected. So you contain multitudes, Tim, just telling you. Thank you. I'm still investigating, but yes, I tend to agree with you.

Starting point is 00:57:53 Maybe not in the way you think. Almost certainly not in the way I think. I'm thinking more of your microbes, but never mind. You could not exist without them. Now, that is actually something that i spend quite a bit of time thinking about the microbiome and the the exobiome do you i do yes it's and well so the knowledge has percolated out from the biologists into the podcast somehow yes i'm not going to be writing any books about it, but somehow these things do happen. I would love to chat with you about something that I think a lot of my listeners would be very interested in, and certainly I'll be interested in exploring a bit. And that is what seems like a predilection to resist labels or being labeled, being claimed

Starting point is 00:58:43 for causes. And you wrote an essay titled On Being a Woman Writer, which got a lot of attention. Is it fair to say that you resist labels being labeled? And if so, why is that? How would you explain that? I resist closed boxes. Okay. The reason I resist closed boxes is that nature does not deal in closed boxes. Yeah, it doesn't. If it did, there wouldn't have been any evolution. If it did, you and I would not exist. So everything in nature is on a bell curve there are a lot of liminal beings or let's say forms that cannot be put into closed boxes such as for instance the platypus so i just don't like closed boxes and labels are a way of filing people oh you're a this we're going to file you there under this letter your box is going to go there and and that's who you are, and that's all you are. And I don't think that's true the end of the story there have been a lot of women writers

Starting point is 01:00:06 and not all of them are exactly like me so we we don't you can put a general heading over something just as you can put a general heading over science fiction speculative fiction stories about werewolves Dracula Frankenstein ghost stories they're all wonder tales. You can call them all wonder tales. So you can call all women writers, women writers, but that's not the end of the story. There's a lot of other things that can be added to that. So Dracula is not the same as War of the Worlds. They're both wonder tales, but they're very different like that. So sure, let's say woman writer, 82, generational, okay? Country, city, height, hair, curly.

Starting point is 01:01:00 That's important, Tim. So like that. So you can build up the picture. You can start with a few labels, but it's not the whole story for anybody. And if you're a novelist, of course, you deal in individuals. So you're not just doing types. Does that make any sense to you? It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. You know, I think that labels are also dangerous because if you assume them for yourself, you're more inclined, if you get attached to them, to want to defend those labels as a facet or as the sole entirety of your identity. And that's, I think, how we end up in a lot of the places where we find ourselves collectively now yeah well people attach labels to other people and then they attack the label and that has been going on for at least you know five thousand years as far as a few years yeah quite a few years so that's that's a thing that if we wish to live in a multiple democracy, we should attempt to go beyond labels. And of course, what people then go is, well, you're a feminist. And then I always have to say, what kind of feminist are you talking about?

Starting point is 01:02:19 Because there's at least 75 different kinds. So am I the kind that thinks all men should be rounded up and shoved off a cliff except for 10 kept for breeding no i am not that kind you will be happy to note him yes yes thank you i think you're happy to know no i said you want to be kept for breeding do you i want to be kept for breeding yes please keep me for breeding. No, you don't. Maybe not. Maybe not. It really depends on how that's all organized. Yeah. I should probably think more before I answer these types of things. But you strike me as a very joyful person. Before we started recording, I said I didn't want to bore you and you said I'm never

Starting point is 01:03:05 bored. One might say, and again, this is applying a label, but that you've long been interested in what people might consider dystopian literature. You seem to be a connoisseur of possibly dystopian speculative fiction. Utopian, too. Utopian. Do you consider yourself, and I am asking you to use a label, so pardon me, but generally speaking, an optimistic or hopeful person? I think hope is built in on a very fundamental level to human beings because we get up in the morning and if we thought it was going to be a horrible day every day, we probably wouldn't bother

Starting point is 01:03:45 doing that so some people are afflicted you know they are they've got depression and it's just a horrible thing to live with so there is a difference between sad and being depressed so of course I'm sad about various things but I'm also I'm hopeful about our species in that although we have lots of downsides, which we know about through history and looking around you and reading dystopian fiction, we know we're capable of really awful things. We're also capable of really pretty wonderful things, and we're smart and inventive. So yes, we're facing a climate crisis. It's real. We're also inventing a lot of things having to do with that. We are looking at the problem,

Starting point is 01:04:33 and we are coming up with solutions. And that's very interesting to me, and it's why I'm doing this program called Practical Utopias. So the 19th century was a big century of utopias. They wrote a lot of them because they had made so many improvements already in the 19th century that they thought, well, this is just going to go on and it's going to get better and better and better. But then along comes the First World War, bloodshed, slaughter, mustard gas, and all kinds of awful things. And then along come various totalitarianisms and the Second World War. So people aren't writing utopias much in the 20th century. They're writing a lot of dystopias. Things could get much worse instead of things could be a lot better. So I'm doing practical utopias to bring together a lot of this thinking

Starting point is 01:05:30 that's been going on about not how to make a utopia in which everything is perfect. We don't get to have that. Human beings are different, fallible, and they don't always agree on what is better. But we're going to have to think of different ways to live if we are going to overcome the crisis that is facing us and short form is the oceans die we're gone sorry we're gonna have to deal with that tim let's expand on practical utopias so practicalopias, and then the subheading or description and exploration of the possible. This is an eight-week, if I understand correctly,

Starting point is 01:06:11 live online learning experience. How did you choose this project of all of the things that you could spend time on? Why is this important to you? I think it's important to us. I think it's important in the general scheme of things and at the point at which we are now finding ourselves, and we know what the problems are because we carp about them endlessly. It's important to turn people's minds to what can be done apart from blanket statements like we all have to not use gasoline anymore so there is going to have to be a transitional period about that tim right so getting people together gathering people who know something about these fields putting them together with people who are knowledgeable in

Starting point is 01:06:57 other fields and constructing you know lego making a lego village you know minecraft so world building in a practical way what are we going to eat what sort of clothes are we going to wear what are they going to be made out of what sort of houses will we live in what about vertical farms i'm really interested in vertical farms right now how about mushrooms did you know you can make bricks out of mushrooms? Would you like to have a mushroom coffin? I did not. Bricks, yes, bricks. Yeah, yeah, you better join up.

Starting point is 01:07:34 Do you know you can 3D print houses out of compressed earth in two days? Do you know that there are now prefab houses that you can erect that create more energy than they consume? So all of these ideas brought together and for the practical utopia is going to have to be, the solutions will have to be green, they'll have to be cheap enough, and they'll have to be scalable. This is a problem-solving enterprise, and we can look at some of the things that went pear-shaped about previous attempts to make utopias, and we're going to have to build in the social component to try to keep that from happening. How do you take something with great idealism attached, like the early stages of the Russian Revolution and keep it from turning into Stalin show trials like that. You know a lot about the Russian Revolution. What might be some of your observations with respect to the example you just gave?

Starting point is 01:08:38 Well, it's not just the Russian, it's the French. The American one is a bit of an anomaly because it was not conducted in a confined space, as it were, and it was a particular kind of revolution that was not so much overthrowing a ruling class from within as ejecting a ruling class that was coming in from without. So that's a different kind of thing. So with the French and the Russian, they were toppling a ruling class from within. And the way that both of those things went is very interesting to me. And then you find them, you reach a point where it all falls apart. I mean, the other example, of course, is Hitler and Mussolini on the right. The French and the Russian, I guess you would say, were from the left.

Starting point is 01:09:36 So how do you keep those things from sort of falling apart and turning into the terror and the show trials and the cultural revolution and things like that. In fact, one of these books, no, it's not under there anymore. It's around here somewhere. It's over here. Great book on the Chinese cultural revolution by a guy who was there. What's the title? The World Turned Upside Down. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 01:10:02 The World Turned Upside Down. it's by Yang Jisheng. The most interesting part for me is how they went about toppling the gang of four. They actually did meet in houses and write things on little pieces of paper, which they then burned, because they were convinced their houses were bugged which they were so high drama high drama sort of george smiley territory you know what there have been multiple times when you have said do you remember that and then you said of course you don't because i was not alive who is george smiley i'm going to admit ignorance on this one george smiley is john lecure's uh tinker taylor soldier spy got it mmi6 guy who sets out to catch a mole a mole from within the intelligence service

Starting point is 01:10:56 what was the uh the film it's a it's a tv series starring uh alec guin, who's very good at it, too. From about the 70s, early 70s, you can find it with a cursory search of web streamers. There's a fantastic film. Depths of the Cold War. That's the Cold War. There's another film that might sort of tie into that example. One of my favorite films, actually, certainly for a long period of time called the lives of others which was about fantastic monitoring of East Berlin residents by the Stasi incredible you bet so I lived in West Berlin in 1984 and went across to East Berlin and

Starting point is 01:11:40 also in Czechoslovakia and also Poland. Very instructive. You had to be quite careful how you talked to people if they would talk to you. And those three countries were very different. So the one that was sewed up the tightest was East Germany. The one that was quite loosey-goosey was Poland. So you're going to be bringing your life experience, your study of history to bear on practical utopias.

Starting point is 01:12:09 How many other people are involved? What does the structure look like? So we're doing it with a platform called Disco, which is an interactive live learning platform. It's structured so that they give you the tools. So you know what Substack is? I do. So Substack gives you the tools to basically publish your own newspaper, and Disco gives you the tools to do your own live learning experience.

Starting point is 01:12:39 There are other kinds of learning experience, which are like TED Talks and things, and Masterclass, which I did one of. And they're more like films. In fact, the background of the Masterclass people was in film production, and they do a beautiful job of film producing your class. The disco one is interactive in that people join you you and there's a to and fro. So the idea is that people will bring their ideas to add to the building of their version of a better way to live that will be green, scalable, and affordable. And they're going to have to make practical decisions.

Starting point is 01:13:24 They're going to have to say, okay, which is better? Is it better to get your corpse disposed of by cremation? Very carbon producing. Is it better to put it in a mushroom coffin? Is it better to do this new thing that has started up in Seattle called Recompose, in which you get turned quite quickly into compost. And they're going to have to do the cost in money and the cost in carbon and figure out which choice they're going to make because there's ups and downs to all of these choices. So what you're going to eat, are you going to eat the 100-mile diet? Are you going to grow things in vertical gardens quite close to you?

Starting point is 01:14:10 Is it going to be nothing but brown rice? It wasn't about 1973. That was very bad for people. You're going to have to do the nutrition plus where are you getting these things. And we were so used to going into the supermarket and everything is just there. Yeah. You know? So how long can that continue?

Starting point is 01:14:33 And all of these things, what are you going to do with old people? Yeah, what are you going to do with the old people? Are you going to sort of shove them out the window at some point or what? Well, I'll make you a deal. If I am kept as one of the 10 or 20% of males for breeding, I will prevent them from throwing you out the window. So we can strike a bargain. Now, you have a lot going on. You also have Burning Questions, a collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, which will be published in March

Starting point is 01:15:06 of 2022. Could you tell us more about Burning Questions? So it's the third in a series. There's been two other collections of essays. The first one was called Second Words because it was mostly book reviews. I did a lot of book reviews at that time. The second one was called Moving Targets, and that took us up to 2004. And then we have Burning Questions. And to do these collections, we have to weed through an awful lot of stuff because it turns out that I write about on an average of 35 short pieces a year. So you can see that adds up. Now, when you say short pieces, what do you consider short?

Starting point is 01:15:54 What is the range on short? Well, anywhere from four pages to 25 pages. Wow. Okay. Some of them are speeches, you know, they can dribble on for a while, but some of them Wow. Okay. in the first part of my life because nobody died that I knew. So there are some of those I did. Well, we won't go into all the people that have died, but I have written some of their obits. I wrote actually two for Ursula K. Le Guin.

Starting point is 01:16:35 I wrote one for The Guardian. I wrote one for The Washington Post, and they both had to be different. But these things are very sudden. You know, somebody is suddenly dead, and they want you to write it right now. So I wrote one of those on a plane. So that's what it is. And quite a lot about conservation issues, which have come increasingly to the fore, as usual, gender issues, and other things that you might not expect, nor did I. I didn't expect them either, but suddenly there I was writing about them.

Starting point is 01:17:11 Is Burning Questions taken from one of the pieces that was included in the collection? Otherwise, where did the title come from? Oh, I think it just came out of the air like a lot of titles. Like that big thumb in the sky. Like that. Yes, exactly like that. It's suddenly just there. I think the issues that we are facing,

Starting point is 01:17:34 although we have been in these very tight spots before, I can remember sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, thinking that we were all going to get atom bombs dropped on us at any minute. That didn't happen, but I think it came pretty close. So like that, things that almost happened but didn't. And I'm hoping that the climate crisis, although it's already underway, I'm hoping that it can be at least stalled enough for people to get a grip on it.

Starting point is 01:18:10 That is certainly a subject area and a research area that I'm spending a lot of my time on as well right now. That you are. Well, you should join Practical Utopias. Come and join us. You probably by this time have gathered a lot of things. Every day there's something new that comes into view for instance i hadn't been thinking at all about about vertical farms and now i am i'm suddenly doing a lot of thinking about about how and there's a number of companies putting this together for you there's a bunch of kits out there

Starting point is 01:18:40 things like that did you know you can make fabric out of algae i did not know about the fabric example no neither did i but now i do but but it's so funny that you mentioned algae i was just going to say as one of my examples in the last six months is aquaculture so vertical sea farming and specifically algae i didn't know about the application of clothing so no i did not know that it's the hemp of the sea i guess yes well the clothing and you know growing cotton growing stuff that you make fabrics out of is pretty consumptive of energy and materials and water so so how do we deal with with these things i want to push back on a quote that I read from you at some point when prepping for this. And it was related to, I believe, an interviewer or

Starting point is 01:19:34 someone profiling you saying that you were prolific. And you said, I believe, and this could be a misquote, but Joyce Carol Oates is prolific. I'm just old. Now, you have a great sense of humor. So I can see it now, especially having spent some time together, how you would say something like that. I would say that you are most certainly prolific. But it mounts up. You see, it just accumulates. So, you know, John Keats was probably more prolific, but he died young so there's two things there's the accumulation which makes you look prolific but then there's the speed the rate which can actually be quite slow but if you're this old and it all sort of adds up has your

Starting point is 01:20:18 writing cadence or your writing habits changed much over the last few decades or have they remained fairly constant of course no no of course they change so when you have a job you write at night yeah so when you have a job when you're a student those kinds of things you're going to be a night writer when you have a child when the child is small, if you still have a brain at that point, and it does come back, you are going to write when the child is asleep. When the child goes to school, you're going to write when the child is at school when the child sniffle sniffle sniffle goes off on its own grows up and goes off on its own then you're probably and you're

Starting point is 01:21:14 getting quite dare i say middle-aged yes i'm going to say middle-aged tim i'm there i'm there already you're probably going to be writing in the daytime. Then there's another thing that happens when you pass a certain moment, which you seem to need less sleep. So right now I'm a procrastinating nighttime writer. In other words, I'm back to doing what I used to do in about 1964. What does it look like when you write at night? Is it a set block of time, a set number of pages? I know that you, as I understand it, don't have any sort of magical talismans. You don't have a particular writing setup that you require. But what is it in the last, just say, handful of years, what does your night writing look like? So many pages is usually how I do it. So not so much time.

Starting point is 01:22:10 That's motivating. Because if you write the number of pages that you think you should be writing that day, you can then goof off and watch really silly murder mysteries, Tim. Sign me up. I was just doing it on Netflix the other day. What were you watching? I was watching In the Dark, which is a series about a very attractive blind woman

Starting point is 01:22:40 who is attempting to solve a murder mystery. And it's very funny. Oh, that's the Audrey Hepburn plot from long ago. What is that movie that she was in? Oh boy, I don't know. I don't know. Wait Until Dark. There we go.

Starting point is 01:22:56 That's what it is. Wait Until Dark. She's blind. A guy comes in, the house is going to murder her, and she shuts off all the lighting. So that she can get around better than he can. Oh, wow. And that goes back to, I think, an H.G. Wells story called In the Valley of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King, which is a sci-fi story in which this guy thinks he's pretty…

Starting point is 01:23:23 You want to hear the plot? Yeah, I do. I do want to hear the plot. Yes. He, he strays into a valley in which everybody is blind. In fact, they don't even have any eyes. They just have sort of blank spaces there and not even any sticky out things. And he, he decides that he can be king of this because he can see. And he falls in love with a woman who says yes yes we can get married but first we have

Starting point is 01:23:46 to get rid of those ugly bumps on your face wait a minute i'm gone it makes me think of that uh that twilight zone episode i can't recall the name of the episode but the very sort of anti-social i guess this is sort of a redundant way to put it, but misanthrope, this man who wears glasses, who survives the end of the world, and now he can be alone and read all of his books, and he steps on his own glasses at the end of the episode. Oh, no. Oh, no. Yes. A sad Christmas. Yes. Margaret, this has been so much fun. People should certainly check out Practical Utopias,

Starting point is 01:24:29 an exploration of the possible. We'll link to that in the show notes at tim.blog.com. So people will be able to find that very easily. We had to move along to launching in September because we got too much, there's too much input. So we just needed a bit more time and we also decided to add a low cost nft you know what an nft is i do know what it is you do well we're doing them at first they said let's do one of those and we can't do that because they consume too much energy, like a lot. So they went out and they found one that doesn't. It consumes the same amount of energy as a tweet.

Starting point is 01:25:12 And it is called a T-E-Z-O-S. Oh, Tezos. Yes. Tezos. I know Tezos. Yes. You do. What do you know about it, Tim?

Starting point is 01:25:23 Well, I know that many creatives, artists of different types, Yes, you do. What do you know about it, Tim? for those who are seeking a less energy-intensive way of engaging with the NFT non-fungible token space. So what we are doing, we're hiring graphic illustrators to draw the utopias. So each of our interactive groups is going to make choices about how their utopia is going to be, and these illustrators are going to illustrate them. And I'm going to do some illustrating of them too, because one of my background things is graphic design and comic book writing, pretty elementary kind. So we're going to get some wonderful illustrators, and they're going to make five illustrations for each of our utopias, and we're going to put them into these NFTs. And this is a whole new world for me, but one of our team members knows quite a lot about it. In fact, he is an NFT artist himself,

Starting point is 01:26:37 so he just gave us a crash course last week on how this works, what it could look like, and how it's all going to come together. So I think that part is pretty exciting. And I have worked with graphic artists before. They live in a wild and wonderful world. You probably know that I did what is essentially a bird conservation project called Angel Catbird with a wonderful graphic artist called Johnny Christmas. And that was so much fun. And we exchanged ideas through drawing them and sending them over the internet. So he would send me one, and I would say,

Starting point is 01:27:17 make the ears bigger. Then I sent him a cat skeleton. This is a cat skeleton. You have to look at the skull. It's very narrow at the bottom. So he did a wonderful job. And I'm looking forward to seeing which graphic artists our team member, Rick, manages to talk into doing this. And they will all be in these NFTs at low energy cost. That's the idea.

Starting point is 01:27:49 It's a fascinating space. I think it's also wonderful that you're experimenting with some of these alternative platforms and drawing some attention to different options that people have in the space. Yeah, well, I'm keen on Dis disco because it allows people who aren't in a physical space to participate in an experience that usually people only had in physical spaces. And that goes way back to the beginning of the 21st century when I was trying to think of a way to make book signings and author appearances available to places that normally wouldn't have them. We did succeed in doing that. The enterprise was called Longpin, but the publishing industry couldn't get their heads around it so now it's segued into a business tool with a different name it's called s-y-n-g-r-a-f-i-i it is um biometric digital signing within a video signing room but because we started it so early

Starting point is 01:28:59 we've got all these patents tim because nobody else was doing it and people thought we were nuts. You've heard this story before. Sort of the Velcro story, like what is this good for? Well, that's how a lot of things start. Post-it notes would be another example. Was it? They thought it was a flawed, doomed, failed adhesive because it didn't work. It didn't keep things stuck in one place. And then somebody said, well, wait a second here. Maybe we can actually change the positioning and there is an application. It's just not the application that we're used to. It's actually the opposite

Starting point is 01:29:35 of what we would normally look for. I use them a lot in novel writing, post-it notes with words on them. How do you use them in novel writing? Well, you know, there's my thing that I'm writing, and then I have an idea, so I stick it on the table. Oh, yes. The idea on the table. Well, I have been taking notes as we've been talking. I have so many things that I'm going to be following up on, ranging from The World Turned

Starting point is 01:29:58 Upside Down to, of course, Practical Utopias, Burning Questions, this collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, coming out March 2022. I feel like we could talk for many, many hours. And for those people who didn't catch it, not only have you produced work and written in every possible format or genre imaginable, because why not, right? Why be constrained? I do, because why not right uh why be constrained i do because why not you also are an inventor because i think people may have not just in case they didn't get the underscoring on that with patents with this long pen originally long pen technology allowing i guess it would be remote robotic writing? The physical long pen, of course, we have an entirely digital service now, but the physical long pen still exists and people still want to have them because you write on your end

Starting point is 01:30:55 and the pen holder on the other end duplicates that exactly with real ink. So yes, it's bizarre, but it came out of the requirements of the book signing industry because book collectors would not accept anything that wasn't perfectly your signature. And we did these events from Australia to North America, from back and forth from England. We were able to do it and people didn't know how to scale it but as it is now that has all been solved so you can you can do the digital version but if you need the physical one with ink that can be produced but it's not like an auto pen an auto pen is of is like a sewing machine designed this is every remember cursive i do your signature every every time you

Starting point is 01:31:44 sign your name it's it's different signature. Every time you sign your name, it's different from the last time you signed it. So I have just two more questions for you. One, I'm going to warn people ahead of time, this has a bit of a spoiler. So fast forward 30 seconds if you don't want a spoiler of sorts. This is on behalf of my employee I mentioned

Starting point is 01:32:00 who loves your work. And here's her question. When you wrote The Handmaid's Tale decades ago, did you plan Aunt Lydia's role as a double agent, which the rest of us didn't find out until The Testaments, or did she evolve as a character in the space between the two books? She evolved, for sure. She's a secondary character in The Handmaid's Tale, and she becomes a primary character in The Testaments. The thing about characters who speak for themselves, you're always a lot closer to them, and they're always more

Starting point is 01:32:32 complex than somebody that you're just seeing, you know, that's sort of across the room. And as you know from what I've already said, everybody is more complex than just a sort of cardboard cutout. So once we get inside Aunt Lydia's head, she turns out to have quite a few more dimensions. And also it's further along in the plot. So the Testaments is approximately 15, 16 years after the Handmaid's Tale. Things have happened to Aunt Lydia since that time. I always base things on stuff that's happened. And one of my go-tos for Aunt Lydia

Starting point is 01:33:17 was people who had been believers within a system and then changed their minds. And there are a number of those in history. They're pretty interesting. And how do you go about doing research for characters like those in history? Or were those already examples you had in mind and therefore you didn't have to go digging for them? Were they already references in your head or did you do research? Okay, so remember what I said about being old and stuff accumulating. So did you have a granny who had an attic? I did.

Starting point is 01:33:54 Okay, what was in it? I wasn't allowed up there, so I don't know. Oh, darn. You weren't allowed up there. Well, that's very bad. Everybody should be allowed up into their granny's attic once because it's basically like a collection of stuff that just, it's there. You put it up there because you can't think of what else to do with it,

Starting point is 01:34:16 but you don't want to throw it out. So the inside of my head is like that, Tim. There's just a lot of stuff in there. And there's also a lot of books in this house and and one of the sections is devoted to wars and totalitarianisms and spies and really interesting things like programs of deception in wars i I mean, I find those fascinating. The British hired a lot of theatrical set designers to design illusions in the desert, make it look as if there were people where there weren't people, hide their oil drums, disguise trucks as tanks and tanks as trucks, and then they switched them at night. So theatrical illusions.

Starting point is 01:35:06 Yeah, so I had a lot of it already in the junk shop of my brain. Some of it in the war spies totalitarianism section of my library. And some of it, of course, in Shakespeare. You always go to Shakespeare. So Richard III, a villain who tells us right off that he's really bad, and now we can watch him being bad. Margaret, I don't even know how to begin to close up this conversation. And you contain multitudes.

Starting point is 01:35:46 Is there anything else that you... Tim, have I confused you? Oh, you've impressed me. I think you haven't confused me. I think you've just outranked me. I need to do a lot more reading. Okay, so let's have a little bit about you. How did you get into this? What put it into your head to do a podcast? Well, the truth is, I wrote books before the podcast, nonfiction books. So I wrote three of those. And I found the third book to be particularly difficult. And it really took a lot out of me. And in the process of launching that third book, I ended up on a number of podcasts and I really enjoyed the long form conversation. And I decided that I would take

Starting point is 01:36:32 a break from writing to do six to 10 episodes of a podcast with my friends to get better at asking questions. Because with the nonfiction books I was writing, it all came down to asking questions of experts at the end of the day. So it seemed like something that would transfer. So I decided to have fun, long conversations with friends to hopefully get rid of some lazy verbal tics and some lazy mental habits as a consequence. And I just fell in love with doing it. It was, for me, the fun part of the research process without the writing. And I know that sounds terrible, but at the time, I was just so battered and bruised from my experience with this third book. And that's how the podcast started.

Starting point is 01:37:21 And now we're almost 600 episodes in in and it's something that gives me incredible nourishment and energizes me. I was having such a, if I'm being honest, terrible day before we had this conversation. I was just having a brutal day and the last week has been very difficult and I feel great right now. Well, that's wonderful. And I think that's why I do the podcast. Well, I think that's a really good reason. Yeah. So have you ever, this is completely off topic.

Starting point is 01:37:52 That's okay. Do you know anything about dictation apps in which you talk into the microphone and then it turns into text. I would like to start using such a program because a friend of mine, a new friend named Noah Feldman, who's a professor at Harvard Law School, is just a prodigious talent and an incredible writer. And he uses, I want to say, Dragon, which might have been previously known as Dragon, naturally speaking, to draft everything that he writes articles books and so on why do you ask well you know typing is hard typing is hard especially if you can't touch type especially if you can't touch type which i can't i have to look so you know that they said instead

Starting point is 01:38:40 of henry james there are three Henry Jameses, James I, James II, and the old pretender. But late Henry James dictated. Did you know that? I did not know that. Yeah. So people used to dictate to stenographers, but I don't think those people exist anymore.

Starting point is 01:39:02 And also it would be a bit inhibiting because there would be another person in the room. Don't you think? It would be inhibiting, yes. Yeah, we knew a person a long time ago who wrote romance novels and also drank, and she used to sit behind a screen and dictate her romance novels to a stenographer. Like a confessional. And she would be dictating away, and she would say, you know, no, no, she's dictating romance novels. Oh, yeah, I Like a confessional. And she would be dictating away and she would say, you know, no, no, she was dictating

Starting point is 01:39:26 romance novels. Oh yeah, I like the confessional. The voice would come from behind the screen and she would say, and Letitia with her flashing green eyes and the stenographer would say, a couple of pages ago her eyes were blue. Well, change them.

Starting point is 01:39:43 So maybe I need a person like that. Yeah. So you're saying I should drink and use some dictation software. Is that, if I'm hearing you? I'm not telling, no, not you. No, no, no, no. You're not writing flashing-eyed romance novels. No, no, you don't need to do that.

Starting point is 01:39:58 But I think if you have an iPad, I think you can do this, right? Yeah, oh, for sure. I've been meaning to test the software. Do you use dictation software or anything like that? Not yet. That's why I'm asking you. I'll test it out for you. I'll test it. Noah is a true believer, and he is extremely smart. He says it takes a little while. We were just texting about this the other week, in fact, to work out the kinks and get comfortable. But he has, I believe it's carpal tunnel or some type of issue

Starting point is 01:40:30 with his hands and his lower arms, whereby he really can't sit and type for long periods of time. But he's a true believer with the dictation software. So I give you my word, I will test it out and I will let you know how the experiment goes and what my pro and con evaluation is. Yeah. So I do write a lot in longhand, and I can just read the longhand rather than having to transcribe it. Oh, yeah. I think that's a brilliant idea. I'll test the software and let you know because I need someone to hold me accountable. So I will do that. I'll make that commitment. It's going to be me holding you accountable?

Starting point is 01:41:08 I know that I've made a promise. And now, even if you forget who I am tomorrow, I will still feel badly if I don't do it. So I will download some form of transcription software and I will test it out and let you know how that goes. And is there anything else you would like to say, share, questions you'd like to ask, requests of my audience, complaints about the podcast you'd like to lodge publicly? Can you come over and shovel the snow off my roof?

Starting point is 01:41:37 You know, I would love to, but I don't think I'm terribly close by. If I were closer by, I would be happy to do that. Where are you, Tim? I am actually in the mountains, and there is quite a bit of snow. It's going to start snowing again very soon. And I just love it here. Are you there to go skiing? I'm absolutely skiing. I'm going on a backcountry trip tomorrow for my first time to learn how to skin, which I have never done before, which is putting on almost like a shark skin

Starting point is 01:42:11 condom on your skis so you can go uphill and then you take them off and you have alpine skiing. I'll be doing that for a few days. And I find the geography and the ecology here to be just stunning. It is unlike any place I've ever spent an extended period of time. My girlfriend's family is here. She grew up here. That's another reason that I'm here. And it's spectacular. Just being immersed in the enormity of nature here is calming for me. I'm reading a book right now called Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez. He was a friend. Oh, he was. Yeah. So one of my little write-ups and burning questions is Barry. He passed away so recently and I was so sad. Imagine that. I was so sad to hear that I had been gifted of Wolves and Men, and it absolutely blew my mind. It was such a beautifully written, meticulously researched book.

Starting point is 01:43:15 And Arctic Dreams, of course, was recommended and recommended and recommended. And I'd never spent time near the poles, but recently had my first trip. I was invited by a friend to go to Antarctica and became fascinated by these polar regions. And so only in the last few weeks have I started Arctic dreams and the permanence that he writes about in the vastness of some of those spaces reminds me, in a sense, of the Western United States at altitude. And they're very different, very, very, very different. But you can get a taste of what he's referring to in places like Montana, certainly in Alaska, you can get that feeling. So I'm happy to be here. I'm very, very happy to be here. And where are you at the moment? I'm sitting in my study, which you can see in the background, in Toronto. But I made it down from the woods just in time for this interview. We had a blizzard yesterday, so I was supposed to come down yesterday, but we did not take that chance.

Starting point is 01:44:20 And made it down, passing 12 stuck buses on the way and uh he made it made the interview hooray well thank you for thank you thank you for putting in such an incredible effort and this was uh this was wonderful i encourage people to really do a deep dive on everything that you're up to including practical utopias and burning questions people can find you online at margaretatwood.ca, on Twitter at Margaret Atwood, Instagram, TheRealMargaretAtwood. And this has just been such a joy to spend time with you this afternoon. So thank you very much, Margaret, for carving out the space to have this conversation. And thank you. It was a real pleasure and enjoy your skiing. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:45:07 I will. And to everybody listening, you contain multitudes. Do not be contained by closed boxes that do not conform to the greater beauty of nature and be just a little bit kinder than you have to be. And until next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And until next time, thank you for tuning in. super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes

Starting point is 01:45:56 articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 80,000 hours. You have roughly 80,000 hours in your career. That's 40 hours a week,

Starting point is 01:46:41 50 weeks a year for 40 years. They add up and are one of your biggest opportunities, if not the biggest opportunity, to make a positive impact on the world. In other words, if you want to make the best use of your 80,000 hours until we wrap up this show called Life, where should you start? Where should you focus? It can be really hard and quite frankly,

Starting point is 01:47:03 pretty stressful to try and figure out. Some of the best strategies, best research and best tactical advice I've seen and heard come from 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit co-founded by Will McCaskill, an Oxford philosopher and a popular past guest on this podcast. Will is perhaps best known as being the co-founder of the Effective Altruism Movement, which has gained a lot of steam and a lot of popular coverage in the last handful of years. 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help you find a career or path for tackling one of the world's most pressing problems. If you're looking to make a big change to your direction mid-career, say,

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Starting point is 01:48:23 conversations with experts about how to best tackle pressing global problems and really try to find that needle in the haystack. There's so many things to choose from. How do you pick the right high leverage problem for you to focus on helping solve? My team has raved, for instance, about the interview with Ezra Klein. That's number 94. And you can subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. That's the 80,000 Hours podcast. If you join the newsletter now as an extra bonus, they'll mail you, yes, physically mail you a free book about impactful careers, such as Will McCaskill's Doing Good Better. You can sign up at 80,000hours.org slash Tim. That's 8-0-0-0-0 hours, H-O-U-R-S.org slash Tim. That's 8 0 0 0 0 hours. H O U R S.org slash Tim. Check it out.

Starting point is 01:49:10 I really encourage you to check out this site. Even if you have no plans to change your career, if you're just curious about picking high leverage targets in life to improve the world. So I will also say it one more time because noteworthy, they're a nonprofit and everything they provide is free. That takes a hell of a lot of work and a hell of a lot of dedication and a lot of people, a lot of hours on their part. Podcasts, the newsletter, even their one-on-one advice, all free. So check it out. 80,000hours.org slash Tim. 80,000hours.org slash Tim. Take a look. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30%

Starting point is 01:49:53 of Americans struggle with sleep. And I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating ad nauseum. But now I am falling asleep in record time faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by 8sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced but most user-friendly solution on the market. I polled all of you guys on social media about the best tools for sleep, enhancing sleep, and 8sleep was by far and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this. So I used it and here we are.

Starting point is 01:50:50 Add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the heat and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing. Now for me and for many people, the result, eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster, reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40% and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery. So you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now, my dear listeners, that's you guys. You can get $250 off of the Pod Pro cover. That's a lot. Simply go to 8sleep.com slash Tim or use code Tim. That's

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More

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