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[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com
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[Music] we're very honored to have Margaret Atwood with us here tonight and just to be clear this is the conversation with Margaret Atwood I want to have not the one you want to have just to start with some basic questions about Canada which you've
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written on for decades what defines the Canadian sense of humor uh what defines the Canadian sense of humor I think it's a bit Scottish how so well it's kind of ironic it depends what part of Canada you're in I think the further west you go the less
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of a sense of humor they have but that's just my own personal opinion my family is from Nova Scotia so that's as far east as you can get and they go in for deadpan lying in 1974 you wrote the Canadian sense of humor was often obsessed with
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the issue of being provincial versus being Cosmopolitan do you think that's still true it depends again you know Canada's really big in fact there's a song called Canada's really big you can you can find it on the Internet it's bya
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a group called The Arrogant Worms and that kind of sums up Canada right there for you the burden of the song is that all of these other countries have got all of these other things but what Canada has is it's really big and U it is in fact very big and and therefore
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you it's very hard to say what is particularly Canadian it's a bit like the US so which part of the US is the US what is the most us thing maybe it's Knoxville Tennessee right now right the southeast think but it used to be Cleveland Ohio did it Center of
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manufacturing that when was that you look at where the baseball teams are you see what the US used to be that what it is yes I think so okay yeah yeah we don't we're not able to do that in Canada because um you have one we have one
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yeah used to be two yeah I know well things come and go so we've got hockey though we have that yes you can't take that away from just a minute now you did yeah so what is the most Canadian thing about Canada the most Canadian
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thing about Canada is that when they ran a contest that went finish this sentence as American as apple pie as Canadian as blank and the winning answer was as Canadian as possible under the circumstances I think Canada these days is is where you when when you think
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things are going to get go pearshaped in the states when you think they might Canada is a beckoning Refuge as it has been in the past so I just want you to know if things go too pearshaped here we have a lovely church basement waiting
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for you and a nice hot cup of tea what is funny about catelan what why do Canadians read so much poetry uh where are you getting these funny questions oh yes so scat one isn't very funny Canadians used to read a lot of poetry because we didn't have a viable
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novel publishing business or a film industry or a music industry but we've got all of those things now so they're reading less poet poetry in 1972 in your famous book survival you wrote the Canadian way of death is death by accident is this still true oh in
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fiction or in real life in real life uh I think it's more likely to be true in in Canada than it is in the states where uh the US way of life is by gun violence uh whereas we tend to go in for falling into the lake is survival still the central theme
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of Canadian literature today I think it's the central theme of the entire planet I think we are just a bit ahead of of our of our time so yeah you want to know about it which increasingly you will need to come to us if we look back to the 19th century
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the United States has Melville and Po and Hawthorne and the Canadian tradition seems to be slower to develop because Canada was lower to develop so what you have in Canadian history is 1760 Quebec backf Falls there and is right there and
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if that had not happened there wouldn't have been an American Revolution but Canada took quite a while to uh get a population that was um far enough away from the frontier to bother itself with with literature is it fair to say that Canada was founded in debt
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it had high levels of debt the province is Unified to pay their debts they wanted to take out more debt build more railways oh so you're talking about 1867 around that time Confederation I happen happened I think for a couple of
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reasons that being one of them but the other one was there were there was quite a lot of pressure from incoming people South of the Border and uh they I too many of us they confederated partly just to keep from being annexed now you're
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active on Twitter is Twitter good for literacy on average okay on average you have to be able to read to do it so the quality of literacy oh that's different Yeah by literacy I mean just the ability to read so all of these things where you have to read something
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and then push a button you actually have to be able to read to do that so people are working around it in all kinds of ways such as YouTube and what have you but you still have to be able to go to the website and push something is it
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making North Americans better writers oh I wouldn't go that far at all U but it's made quite a few of them writers who probably weren't writing much before they they had the social media option you once wrote gardening is not a rational act would you care to
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elaborate I think you've slipped over into the silly side uh okay it's not irrational like why did I say that I don't know when when when did I say that I don't remember off hand uh yeah well I mean you plant things things and and um
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you spend quite a lot of time doing it and then you and then you get well I I did have a very successful garden once but that was because I had a lot of excellent rotted cow manure which was just close to hand so gardening is like anything else you re
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first if if you want to succeed read the instructions and you need sunlight good Soil and Water those are the things you need now as you know you've written a work for the future Library called Scribbler Moon and it won't be read by
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anyone else until 2114 correct that's correct how did you write differently for the far off future I'm not allowed to tell you what I wrote no you don't have to tell us what but how did you mentally approach the problem differently or did you just write what
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you would write for an audience today no no I didn't but I can't go into detail because when you sign up for this thing one of the things you can't do is tell what you've written so the mandate was make an artifact out of words of any
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length any kind of artifact as long as it's words and two copies only give it to the Future library of Norway they'll save it up they're going to accumulate these things for hundred years and in 2014 they're going to open the hundred boxes more pressure on people who put
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theirs in 5 years before no pressure on me I'm not going to be there uh unless something very strange happens and uh then they're going to cut enough trees from the forest that will have grown we think to do make the paper to print the future library of Norway
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Anthology so it's a beautiful project it's very hopeful and they're inviting writers from all the way around the world I think they've had a Turkish one they've had an Icelandic one and in the case of smaller languages she's putting
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a dictionary in that box just in case doing it in reverse let's say you were writing for readers from 1890 how would you think about writing for them impossible why well because I'm I don't live in 1890 well but you've read plenty
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of Victorian fiction I have yes but that's a different thing do you sometimes even think of yourself as a 19th century novelist no no no so yeah you can write a historical fiction but it's always going to be of the time in which you're writing it
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because you don't have a choice so Walter Scots ivanho although it's about the Middle Ages uh is a 19th century novel I'm a big fan of your novel The hag seed or hag seed which I believe is your latest a few questions about that in Shakespeare how sympathetic is
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Shakespeare to calaban in the Tempest Shakespeare himself when he was doing the Tempest I think saw caliban as one of his comic figures but as always with Shakespeare nothing is twood dimensional so the Tempest underwent a number of
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different Metamorphoses and performance since Shakespeare we have the Tempest then we have um Oliver Cromwell the theater get shuts down the tradition is broken and nobody is when the theaters come back they they can't actually
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remember how these things were done so in the 18th century The Tempest was an opera and they added some people they added a person called um durinda who was Miranda's sister so that they could have an ensemble group of singers obviously and then they added
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another guy so that duranda would have somebody to marry and uh then they learned how to fly Ariel and Ariel flew around and then when they tried to bring back the original Tempest nobody liked it because they wanted the Opera they
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wanted durinda and the flying aiel in the 19th century when Ariel was always played by a woman who flew around calaban became became a a a romantic sort of byonic hero oddly enough U because by that time people had caught up with slavery in the United States and
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um Noble Savages and other things like that that were of the 19th century and he has real Charisma well it depends how he's played it really depends and I've seen by this time a lot of performances of of the Tempest including film ones
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the one U by Julie hore in which Prospero is prospera she's The Duchess of Milan has a pretty good caliban um but he has a lot of resonance he's given the most poetic lines in the in the play actually and there's a big question about him which is what happens to him
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at the end we're not told it's another of these open questions we just don't know and how sympathetic are you to Prospero there's a line in hag seed he would seem to be the top Jailer in this play well he you like him like or dislike it kind of doesn't matter
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whether I like or dislike him I'm I'm I'm sympathetic to him in some ways but he says himself that that he got himself into this he was the Duke he didn't do his duky duties he didn't behave in a Duke likee way he went off to study
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magic instead and he let his brother usurp the kingdom and by doing so of course he threw his his young child into danger and ended them up on this island and if you want to know why he wants to get off of it look at the menus which I did I did a little foodie
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piece for a food Magazine on what they were actually eating it's not fun as leg suggests in hag seed is there any chance that Prospero is caliban's dead think about it someone somebody has to be his dad so if we're not accepting
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the devil as being the progenitor of caliban who is I ask you so they're both in the magic business why would they have not met up at a convention sort of one night stand producing caliban do you think Shakespeare believed in ghosts did
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Shakespeare believe in ghosts we kind of don't care do you believe in ghosts okay this is another question I believe that people have the exper erience of ghosts but that's different from saying that there are objectively ghosts that can be
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measured people a lot of people have ghost experiences um it's well attested but does that mean there is a thing um out there again it kind of doesn't matter this is people's experience so in the world of Shakespeare there are ghosts and in the world of Margaret Atwood
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there are ghosts yeah there are ghosts people have experiences of ghosts in the world of Tyler Cowen I'm sorry to say no ghosts but I bet you know people who have absolutely this is Virginia it's full of them handmaid's tail is it an accident
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that you started it in West Berlin and I think 1984 wasn't that corny uh yeah it was very corny but I couldn't avoid it if I had been able to do it in some other year I would have because inevitably this question comes up but just happened to be in West B Berlin I
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didn't go there on purpose to to do that but there I was and how handy it was because it was the wall all around and being Canadian I could go into places like East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Poland easier than than German Nationals
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could so I did you had had a prior trip to Afghanistan did that influence the book at all a bit yeah uh I was lucky enough to see Afghanistan 6 weeks before the present unpleasantness started so 6 weeks before they assassinated dud and
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it was clear and it always has been a Crossroads and it's always been desirable it's always been desired by China by Russia and by anybody else in the vicinity because things went through it and at the time we were there there
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was a great big Chinese Embassy there was a great big USSR Embassy and there was a great big American Embassy and D was doing quite well by playing them off against each other and getting stuff out of them they should have stuck with him
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um but it's been chaos ever since but I I saw it at the last minute before a lot of things just got blown up and did reading the book of Genesis serve as an actual influence on handmaid's tail or it's just a connection you noticed later oh it's no it's right there in the
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epigraph U so the question to you is if you're going to take the Bible literally how literally would you like to take it and is it the Jacob version of the story or the Abraham Sarah Hagar version of the story that grabbed you usually you
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mention the Jacob version of the story and that's the second one why well because it's got more people in it but the first version has a happy ending right well why would you get ISAC you get ishma why would I write a book with a happy ending mind
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yeah it's not such a happy ending it's a very ambivalent ending I would say Abraham is a very dicey character in The Bible but there's a wonderful book called God of biography which is by book yeah it's a wonderful book I love it
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it's called the best exploration of the Book of Job that I've ever read I think it's brilliant U but remember where where my roots are so I'm Canadian we took the Bible in school there wasn't any separation of church State and then I went to um college and studied with
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North her fry and then I went to uh Harvard and studied with Perry Miller and for all those people you had to know the Bible you it might also interest you to know that I I won from my Sunday school the prize for the best Temperance
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essay why you shouldn't drink would you like to know why why I think I know why but please tell us it's a Canadian reason if you drink and then go out into the cold all of your blood is going to be in your capillaries you will freeze
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to death that argument doesn't work in Russia somehow oh there's a very interesting little piece to that puzzle which was that Peter the Great discovered that he could tax the consumption of alcohol this is for economists it's in a book called the
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history of alcohol and he discovered that he could tax it and then he made it unpatriotic not to drink he made it and he made it he made made it a crime to agitate against drinking because he was making so much money from it did you know that [Applause]
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no what are the aspects of conservative religious communities that you admire they're very stable are they stable for a while for a while yeah it's kind of a law of nature that nothing's stable forever do you think Canada will ever
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become much more religious again or secularization is a one-way Street I don't know whether it's a one-way street but Canada's very big and it is and it is there's certain has a lot of different populations in it which is why when people said when I published the
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handmaid's tale and when was that uh 1985 so the British reviewed it by saying jolly good yarn because they'd had their religious Civil War and they weren't going to have another one they're having a different kind of Civil
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War right now but it's not a religious one the Canadians had in their nervous way could it happen here and the Americans had how long have we got in fact they spray painted on the Venice wall in California the handmaid's tail is already here and that was in
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1985 so Canada is just two there's too many different groups to probably provide the 35% that you need to get a really good totalitarianism going now if someone argued that women are gaining cultural power all the time in virtually
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all countries even Ireland has legalized abortion is this fear a fear which belongs purely to the Past no what's the trend today that worries you then given what appear to be many Trends in the oppos joined at the hip as you know being an economist so my fear at the
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moment is is entally climate change driving droughts floods making places uninhabitable and when those things happen you always get Wars of one kind or another and when you get Wars they're always bad for women that is uh and I'm not alone in in having this particular
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fear and the other thing that's going on I don't know whether you caught it but there was a big article on uh the Aging of populations when you're when you get aging of population are going to get a topheavy population not enough young
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people to support it and a lot of pressure on younger women to have more children now it's now the case as you know that in in a city such as Toronto more than half the population I believe is foreign born that's true does it feel
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to you that somehow Canada is gone or this is the new Canada this is the new Canada this is the new Canada but it's the old Canada too because Canada's really big and it's it's always been very very culturally diverse if you go back and look at the history before
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Europeans there were there were numerous different indigenous cultural groups in Canada so when we say a country basically it's just line somebody drew on a map but to to get the Deep history of a place you're you're looking at
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populations who who was there uh what were they like what did they do and what kind of language did they speak but you've spoken out in favor of the cultural exception being part of the aftera treaty that protects Canadian cultural Industries is it strange to
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think that having more than half the population being foreign born is not a threat to Canadian culture but that being able to buy a copy of the New York Times in Canada is a threat by Canadian culture all we mean is is controlling
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the means of production that's that's it uh it doesn't it's not saying things about content it's saying things about who gets to say what we're going to publish Etc so the worry is the Canadian newspapers would go away they're going away going
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away anyway so are yours it's true yeah the newspaper is a for but book publishing essentially is where we entered the story and and uh we entered it in the 60s when there were very few publishing Outlets uh for Canadian writers and people routinely told you
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you want to be a writer go leave the country Our Generation did things like for uh publishing companies and starting the writer Union one of which the act the activities of which was to stop the illegal import of overruns of our own
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books that were coming into the country and being sold and being sold as remainder copies that kind of you know basic economic stuff was what we're interested in not in controlling what people were saying about 30 years ago you were a major defender of solman
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rushy and the whole fought with Affair do you think that today 30 years later Western governments would have spoken up as much as they did back then to defend Russ knows what they would do but it's it's a very different world how would it
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play out now well I think people just scared I mean that we were we were in Penn at that time pen Canada and um my partner Graham Gibson was was the head of it and he was the only person speaking out publicly the only one so governments churches unions they were
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all saying to him privately doing a great job but they weren't saying anything CU they were frightened they this was an unprecedented sort of thing the the Norwegian publisher got shot the Japanese translator got shot and killed
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I was down here running in and out of radio stations uh with people saying you know there's your car um but Seattle was good Seattle kept its bookstore open do you think the Western commitment to free speech is waning yes and why has that happened um
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well you know people eat their own um I think there's a there's a lot of conversations going on right now amongst people who have forgotten the 40s you know sure they've forgotten the 40s they've forgotten Hitler they' forgotten
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Stalin they've forgotten purges they've forgotten censorship they've forgotten book burnings they've forgotten all those things these these kinds of shutting down of people are always done with with great flags of virtue flying overhead but but of course Stalin and
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Hitler did the same thing both of those both of those societies were proposed as Utopias people were told by both of these outfits including muscan Omega 3 uh that things were just going to get better for people under them but first
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we had to purify things by you know getting rid of uh arted to Art and getting rid of bad books and getting rid of people that weren't desirable and that kind of that whole kind of scenario people have forgotten about it have we read recently a book I think it's called
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Hitler in Hollywood there were there was an active group of Nazis in Hollywood and they had a plan to kidnap 23 medium Muggles and hang them in a park that was in the 30s we've forgotten all of that we we forgotten what that kind of thing
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looks like so the the message is if you go in for censorship and shutting people down the next person that's going to happen to will be you almost two years ago you wrote that you were not in every way considered an entirely proper feminist
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I'm not what did you mean by that I never have been what's your greatest heresy oh my oh they're many there are many and numerous I don't know I mean if you look on the internet and what kinds of feminism there are now about 75 different ones so if somebody asks you
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if you're a feminist you really have to say same as they ask if you're a Christian you have to say what kind you know are we talking the pope are we talking snakes U are we talking well there are snakes you know uh are we talking Mormons what what is
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the category so s similarly with feminists what kind so answer that and I'll tell you if I am one what was the very first business you ran my very first business I ran I think was selling blueberry for 5 cents of Pop not per
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blueberry but for the little yes container of them um I mean it was quite stupid because I was I was seven and there were lots of blueberries that people could just go and pick but nonetheless that was one of my first
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businesses but my first real business that we actually made a profit out of was in high school and for that business I had a partner and we ran kids birthday parties we didn't charge enough we did everything we did the we did the welcoming we did the Pres
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unwrapping we did wiping the tears we did the sandwiches we did the and then we put on a puppet show and uh the moms loved us cuz they were out in the kitchen drinking Jin while we were doing all of this and we'd got so good at it
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we got an agent we we were doing company Christmas parties with the puppet show all of this in high school yeah and you're second business was what my second business was a silk screen poster business which um came just before offset Printing and uh other forms of
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cheap reproduction so you know what silk screens are sure you do sure we all know okay I have a big big screen and you squidge everything through it yeah so you have to do one color at a time um and I used to do that on the ping pong table now we're going to have a middle
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segment here I'll toss out the names of some authors or books and you tell us what makes them special to you or if you don't like them that's fine what if I like them but they're not particularly special is that in category Lewis Hyde the gift
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oh I love that book see yes why why well because it's the only book I ever recommend to writing students but it's not about how to write it's about what are you doing so what is this writing and and what is art and he makes a distinction you probably like this book
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too cuz it's got some economics in it plenty reciprocal exchange yes so uh he makes a distinction between things that are gifts which operate in a different way from things that are just Commodities and books are a very curious
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thing because they originate if they're if they're not just you know formula books they originate in the gift sphere but then they have to pass through the valley of the shadow of the commodity before they get back in the hands of
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somebody who loves them at which point they turn back into a gift so it's very instructive For Young Artists of any kind to read this book because it gives them a fix on what they're doing and also on their relationship to to money because if you live in a society where
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most things are judged by money uh you can really struggle with with being an artist and how your art gets evaluated and and rewarded HG Wells island of Dr Moro yes well I used I read all of wells in high school because we had the collected
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volume and it was in the cellar where I did my homework oh tempting it was tempting so tempting to read Wells instead of doing my homework which of course I I did but some of it's terrible right some of Wells is terrible but Moro
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I I is is quite interesting as a as a book he he he wrote These his his early works of Genius in a very short period of time it's very condensed period so he wrote The Time Machine uh and then he wrote Morrow and then he wrote War of
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the world is a very compact period Chinese science fiction do you read it no not yet but I'm told there is yeah body problem is read this huge volume of of Chinese historical fantasy which is I think you know Warrior the cond Warrior series which is
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very intricate and has to do with the jenas Khan and the the H Dynasty and various things like that with some magic as well and a lot of martial arts young adult novels do they have lasting aesthetic value or are they just fun no some do and some don't it's like
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anything else you you you've got good ones of of of any kind of book and ones that are not so good including literary fiction not all not all literary fiction is good just because it's literary fiction the Charles lton movie Night of
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the hunter love that why why it's not Canadian it takes place in a small country that doesn't matter I'm very Universal in my interests yes I think I saw it when it first came out in the 50s and uh it got overlooked it never it didn't get accorded the U attention that
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it should have because it was came in the same year as the Blackboard Jungle uh and I think around the same time as what was it an early Marlon Brando movie yeah so there's a period of black and white film in the ' 50s that actually
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pretty interesting and and he's U and that movie is one of them I would say it's mention her's best role Star Wars is it interesting it is to me uh but the early ones rather than the later kind of desperate spin-offs why is birding interesting
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let's talk about The Wizard of Oz now there's a absolute Ely core to the American psyche it's an economics movie it's about B metalism right the yell brick road is about the gold standard this is not commonly known but it's
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true it's a monetary allegory the whole movie the whole book you think so I know so so you know a lot of things uh so the tin Woodman is what in it I don't he's one of the people in the B medalist debates but there was a journal of
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political economy article going through all of the parallels and D Dorothy is what I think just the innocent American crying for a relief are you buying any of this I'm not and the tornado is maybe depression deflation and and Toto is that one I'm stumped
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on the flying monkeys are William Jennings Bryant no okay so here's the really interesting thing about Wizard of Oz in The Wizard of Oz the male wizard is a fraud and all of the other male characters are missing something that's right yes but the witches are real now
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Tyler I'm going to tell you a [Laughter] story one October my next door neighbor his name is Sam came out of his house and he saw me sweeping my leaves with a broom and Sam said to me Margaret you shouldn't let people see you do it
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that and I said Sam why ever not and he said it's the broom and I said what do you mean and he said don't you know that people call you the Wicked Witch of the annex and I said Sam fear inspires more respect than love and he said Margaret you're
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right what do you like to watch on YouTube Just so you don't get too out of control Tyler what do I like to watch on YouTube uh well there's been a little collection of handmaid's tail artifacts and one of them is a YouTube thing called finally
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they've made a handmaid's tail for men I recommend it it's very funny what's the correct search term for it for it finally they've made a handmade why is there so little populism if that's the right word in Canada it's sweeping many other nations including
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Australia but so far not Canada very much well I think it's because of the Canadian sense of humor we make fun of them you but our turn may come yeah we did have a we be we had a conservative government before you did and you had a
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social credit movement in the 30s which yeah well we had this guy called wacky Bennett out in out in uh B couver yes he was a now what was that called some other strange thing what would a Canadian populism look like this is our
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problem you see as I say Canada's really big and it's very diverse so so you can have a Quebec populism and they have had quite a bit of that in the past I don't know what um Newland populism would look like I'm not too sure we sort of know
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what Alberta would because they had that for a while but um and Ontario we've got we've got this one that purports to be that right now but he keeps running up against a wall cuz he does something that's not popular what do you think of
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Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission they're working hard are they succeeding well there's a lot to reconcile so just for people who don't know what that is it's um indigenous First Nations in in Canada as in this country except because you've done a lot
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more massacres than we had you had fewer people left to be reconciled with so reconciling incomers which means everybody who isn't indigenous with indigenous communities that have been badly treated in the uh in really recent memory should there be bilingual
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education for indigenous communities in Canada or should the goal be assimilation toward English or French it would be for bilingual or trilingual if possible absolutely these are very interesting languages and and any language is a different way of viewing
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the world U so if you only have one way of viewing the world if you only have one language only one way of viewing the world you're missing a lot of possible solutions and approaches that you otherwise would have is there at this
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point a plausible scenario where Quebec leaves Canada not at the moment but the future or do you think it's inevitable that there'll be greater integration more immigrants I think things things will stay kind of the way they are but you know think about this
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very carefully as people did when it was when it was a distinct possibility so you have Quebec there the people to the north of Quebec are not french-speaking quebecers they're they're indigenous people and they said um and that's where
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the hydroelectric power comes from by the way so they said if you separate from Canada we're going to separate from you on the same grounds you know different language older culture Etc and Quebec said Oh no you're not and they said oh yes we are and by the way we
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happen to have a treaty with Canada that says that if any foreign power invades us they have to defend us so Quebec separates North of Quebec separates from Quebec Quebec invades them Canada invades do you see what I mean sure okay
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so the other one was Quebec separates and makes a military alliance with France a nuclear power how happy would the United States be about that not entirely I would think not maybe that's why they had plans for invasion of Canada at that time should Quebec seate
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if you were to recommend to an American a Canada Trip that he or she maybe hadn't already done something underappreciated what would it be oh something they hadn't already done odds are you mean not you mean not Toronto correct or Montreal not Toronto Montreal
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or Vancouver okay or Vancouver uh well there's nothing like the Canadian Arctic and what should people do there completely change your view of the planet you should go with a group called Adventure Canada which is small so
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you're not going to be on a huge enormous uh cruise ship in fact it won't be called a cruise at all because it cannot be guaranteed that you're actually going to go where they say you might you can get be beset by the ice is
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there Twitter up there no there there is not not much no there is if you're in a community there is but a lot of it of course as I say Canada is really big uh and there's a lot of geology a lot earlier in your career why did you quit philosophy I quit
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philosophy because it was the age of logical positivism and that wasn't the part that I was interested in I was interested in ethics and Aesthetics which had been relegated to the sub basement at that time they've since since been disinterred but at that
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time they were quite sneered upon so I did not want to end up in logical positivism in my fourth year of philosophy and quitting was the way to get out of it I didn't exactly quit I moved over I moved sideways into honors
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English but I kept philosophy as as a major for a while you had a faculty post at the University of Alberta if you would somehow stayed there and that counterfactual how would your writing have evolved differently well my more
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interesting one was at the University of British Columbia Alberta was just a part-timer it was quite small but UBC I was teaching grammar to engineering students at 8:30 in the morning in a quan s hot leftover from World War II that was fun was it good was it good for
40:22
your writing uh it was good for their writing but but it was good for it was good because what I did was I had them read France cfus Parables and then write their own Parables and France capus parables are sort of problems you know they're like engineering problems so
40:43
they so they had a good time doing that and anyway none of us were awake at that time of the day and in any case do you write every day no how do you decide on a given day whether or not you're right no no if I'm doing a pro if I'm in
40:58
the middle of a project I work at it every day but if I'm in between things then of course I don't what's your best work Habit in your opinion I have no good work habits well there's evidence to the contrary those were not produced
41:12
by good work habits I I tried to have good work habits once but it was a terrible terrible failure I tried to be organized and methodical but that didn't work what's your most unusual work habit my most unusual work well it depends who's who's calling you unusual isn't
41:30
it I don't have any fetishes sad sad to say you know I don't have some Mythic fountain pen or some I don't have a cork lined room I don't have to have you know 15 who was it who drank 30 Cups of Tea I don't know how they could have done that
41:46
I think it was Johnson he must have been absolutely mummified inside oh ballsac how much coffee did he drink I think he must have been insane anyway um no I don't have any really terrible work habits except possibly caffeine you've written a great number
42:04
of book reviews more than most writers why has that been the case well it's this thing of coming from this small country where you kind of had to do stuff yourself so writers were in the habit of writing reviews of of books because other
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people weren't doing it so I see it I see it sort of like giving blood you you don't like it and even though they give you a cookie and some orange juice I mean it's not fun that's about all you get from writing book reviews too by the
42:39
way but you feel you have to contribute to the pool of book reviews just as you have to contribute to the pool of blood because one day you may need [Music] some yeah you gave a very positive review to John Updike do you feel that work is held up or does it look
42:58
different now looking back on I would have to go back and look it was Witches of Eastwick that's what you're thinking of yes okay the most noteworthy thing about doing that review is that I had this big fight with the New York Times
43:11
about what sorts of words I could use which words were they Banning uh they're banning words having to do with urine because there is urine in that book so what were were we to call it so we could not call it piss we could not call call it P we canot call it urine
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they said this is a family newspaper what was in their style guide style guide for everything they have anything so we ended up calling it bodily fluids which was much worse to my view it was what the witches were putting into their
43:43
charms but I was at that time living in a in a in a rectory in norfol England and there was no phone that I could phone out on so in order to phone out I I had to go outside the building into a phone booth remember those uh that a
44:00
farmer was using to store his potatoes in and I had to climb over these potatoes and put enough money into the phone in order to make a phone call anyway this is what life used to be like you're too young to remember that but did it seems you're publishing or maybe
44:18
writing poetry somewhat less frequently than you used to that's untrue it's untrue it's just being published at a different place I'm about to drop a great big sack full of poetry on a on a waiting world oh great wonderful and when is that coming out uh when I get it
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arranged tell us about your patent the long pen oh it's not just one patent anymore dear how many oh I can't cires your p with patents it's families of patents okay so a long long time ago before you were born uh and before there
44:51
were any smartphones or tablets or any of these things we now use a FedEx messenger came to my door and he had a little dudad and asked me to sign for my package so I signed for my package and while I was signing for my package I
45:09
thought this signature is winging its way through the air and it's coming out somewhere else in the form of Ink on paper this was not true but I thought it was and I thought why can't I use something like this for remote book signings remember this is so long ago
45:25
there weren even any cameras in your laptop in fact there weren't any laptops yet yes yeah so so I said to somebody why can't we do a remote book signing they like and they laughed at me because they were more technically knowledgeable
45:40
than I was and I said see if it exists and they went off and looked and they came back and said it doesn't exist the closest thing to it is remote surgery which is quite a different thing because you don't want to sort of scribble on a body with a knife unless
45:58
you're in a cafka story um so I said well if it doesn't exist why don't we invent it so we we invented it it took four prototypes one of which blew up and almost and flew across the room U but we did it it was more difficult than we thought we did it
46:16
and we ended up signing books remotely because the idea was to do remote book signings for people who couldn't have them uh couldn't have real people because their Publishers would never send them there so we ended up doing that but we couldn't can I use a verb we
46:32
couldn't scale it we didn't know how to scale it so then it segwayed into another area of life so it passed through the valley of the shadow of the digital which we had about maybe before 3 years ago there was a period when people were saying
46:50
everything's going to be digital so are you wasting your time doing this stupid thing uh and they said all books are going to be ebooks that's not true it didn't turn out to be true and it turns out that not everything can be digital
47:04
and we now know why why is that because it's so screamingly hackable um so the thing is that a lot of higher uh kinds of documents will not accept digital sign signatures as such if you can't produce a pen and ink paper version and were the only people who as
47:27
it turned out could do that and if you would like to read more about that you go onto the internet and you put in s y n g r a fi.com and there's the whole story so the remote signing device that was originally intended for books moved
47:45
over into um business in the area of security and compliance women have faced many disadvantages in history but it seems in the written Arts they they' managed to overcome those disadvantages much more easily than Sayan painting why
48:01
do you think that is there's even tal of Jenji 18th century Jane Austin quite early large number of could do it anonymously and you could do it at home and you could pretend to be somebody else it's a lot of women writers did uh in painting and I think this is
48:19
hilarious uh they wouldn't let women into art schools because they might see naked women oh my God what's that when you were living in London I think this is after Alberta were you ever tempted just to stay there and be part of the London literary scene why
48:39
not because I'm not British but people often move countries it's probably easier to earn a living as a writer in London no I don't think so U I mean I love going there and making fun of them um so no i' I I have lots of fun but
48:58
living there would be a different type of thing so I remember when I first went there Canada was very low on the totem pole of what you took seriously as any sort of artistic thing uh so people really would say to me Canadian literature isn't that an oxymoron or let
49:15
me do it correctly Canadian literature isn't that an oxymoron and people there they didn't know you were Margaret Atwood right well I wasn't Margaret Atwood yet yes but I was a fly on the wall oh yes anyway lots of lots of fun but no I
49:33
could never uh really be somebody else and I have given a couple of lecture series namely at at Cambridge and and um Oxford and I took care on those can on those occasions to be as Canadian as I possibly could there's no point trying to pretend
49:56
to be British they find you out immediately I have an agent who is actually polish he grew up under the Soviets in Poland and her name is karolina Sutton and um she told me this and I said but Carolina you you've got such an amazing British acccident and he
50:11
says oh no it's very fake she said I learned it off the BBC she said the British can tell immediately that I'm not British to what extent do you crave having some part of your life where people really do not know you or Margaret Atwood oh that's easy to
50:26
arrange what do you do I just go to some other country where they don't know I'm Margaret at although you never can tell you know you never can tell somebody's going to pop out of the woodwork that's why you can't be an effective criminal
50:41
anymore last question about your career overall if you were to explain the enormous prodigious output which people are still reading virtually all of it some of it is here on these shelves to what do you attribute that why are you
50:54
one of the most productive writers because I needed to make a living out of it but you're still writing yes there you go I don't have a pension I don't teach at a university what can I say uh no I took I took um some measures to avoid teaching at a
51:13
university because I did teach at universities but back in the Grim old days uh when it was there there were gender issues I don't like to say this but there were oh yeah there were gender issues and also there were there were writer issues
51:29
at universities in those days because they hadn't yet realized what a tremendous Cash Cow creative writing courses were and if you actually were a writer and Publishing things they looked at you as scants Margaret Atwood thank you very [Music]
51:49
much so now you now you have to edit that right you have to edit it and make it into a podcast they just run the whole thing we'll just run the whole thing we have two mics for questions you may line up at the mic uh we are here to
52:05
hear Margaret Atwood so this is not the time to make speeches if you start making a speech I will just cut you off and turn it into a question so why did you put Edgar Allen Poe up here well he's an influence of yours correct well he is yes absolutely a strong influence
52:21
well he was when I was 15 yeah who in Canadian literature has been the strongest influence on you oh I I don't know probably Alice maybe or but we were contemporaries Alis Monroe U I think it was just a kind of a probably most in in poetry I was of that age to
52:43
get influenced after a while you don't get influenced because your brain has turned to cement first question over here hi Miss Atwood thank you very much for being here um I wanted to ask you you are very special in that throughout your
53:03
work especially your novels like cat's ey Robert's bride even the handmaid's tale even though it goes unnoticed you portray the cruelty and psychological manipulation that women inflict on one another I wondered in your opinion why
53:21
mainstream Progressive feminism today can't seem to acknowledge the role of intersexual competition in the lives of the oppression of women in and you mean women women um I don't know because they forgotten grade four I I think it's an ideological thing
53:39
that it's it's it's a piece of idology that says this shouldn't happen and therefore we we're not allowed to say that it does happen U but you know essentially women are people just like other people and that means that there's a wide variety
53:56
and there are different degrees of aggression and dominance and and uh so forth amongst them and there are power struggles and that's just like people so why be surprised and why why try to pretend it's it doesn't happen it's kind of not the point women don't
54:15
have to be perfect in order to have rights if men had to be perfect in order to have rights they wouldn't have any rights it's not perfect women aren't perfect either and they shouldn't be expected to be perfect any more than anybody
54:30
else so that that's it's it's a really a pretty simple story even if you get a a quite heavily invested ID ideological female person if you if you go back in her in her past there's going to be you will find a moment in her life when some
54:50
other female person wasn't totally nice to her it happens so what it it doesn't mean that women aren't aren't worthy of having uh rights like other people you still can submit iPad questions but next question over here I thought I heard that there was
55:09
going to be a h the handmaid tale of sequel uh there is and so I was wondering if you could comment on that I can a bit uh I can't tell you much about it because my Publishers will immediately arrive in a balloon and and and kill me but if you go on the
55:26
internet and put the Testaments you can see the cover and I can tell you it will be published on September the 10th and uh I can tell you that there are three narrators and that's about all I can tell you but they're Le they're they're
55:45
bringing they're bringing leakages out of over time as is their way these days increasingly they're they tend to launch Books in the same way that they launch movies question from the iPad what are you reading right now um I'm editing a
56:01
book so that means I'm not reading much uh but I noticed an an interesting Trend I always used to be able to depend on The Gideons because no matter what else you were doing there would always be a Bible in the hotel room they're dwindling away you know you can no
56:21
longer read about wholesale massacres land of Canan I don't tend to cart around big heavy books with me when I'm traveling question I used to be able to depend on one being there but they're failing me I'm an annual visitor to the strapford
56:39
and Shaw festivals and I was wondering if you could tell this audience I know for about 15 years um about Canadian theater and probably the Stratford Festival in particular since I see you know you often retweet about what they're doing that's right yeah so Str
56:55
the Stratford Festival started in the 50s and when it first started it was in a tent and it was a a town that had been quite a heavy railroad town and also um a a sender of pigs it was a it was a pig sender uh and if you go on online and
57:20
look up slings and arrows you can find a very funny miniseries that set essentially in Stratford and um one of those pig jokes gets into it so I've been going there for for a long time I used to take my parents and the teenage kids and everybody it's pretty inventive
57:40
I think it doesn't a pretty good job so what else can I tell you the the town fathers when it first started or the town citizens looked at it a scance because it was artistic don't you know and it was in the 50s and they had been
57:54
used to railroads and pigs and they they didn't get it that this might rejuvenate their town which it has done uh so it's one of the first festivals that brought the economic level of the of the venue up question hi what's your favorite fairy tale and why
58:14
my favorite fairy tale uh well there's a cluster of them that are interesting to me I would say probably the uh the juniper tree if you know that one no no no no have a look um that one the robber bridegroom which I I wrote a book called
58:39
The Robber bride which takes a similar type of motif but flips it so they're they're infinitely suggestive these folktales fairy tales Legends and and myths because we don't really know what they mean so uh so everybody's always reinterpreting them uh for their own
59:04
time and in their own way and I'm working with an actress right now on a reinterpretation of media next question thank you um for speaking and all of your writings especially your poetry um I wanted to ask what television or shows
59:21
because it's not necessarily television anymore shows and movies interest you and what is what what do you watch okay I'll watch anything uh and I I'll watch anything partly because my parents refused to get a television s when I was
59:35
young so I always felt deprived I felt I was a social Pariah because I was not watching the adivan show so I I I will watch anything but I I don't watch things very frequently because I'm too busy but um I'm who who else went off to see
59:53
Aquaman yeah I'm surprised at you why didn't you all go so it's an absolute grab bag of every every hero myth on the planet including the aruan Legends oh there's a reason why the half brother is called orm just letting you know yeah so it's it's um I I don't keep
1:00:15
up because nobody can there's too much now that we have web streaming there's just a huge amount out there of stuff but I intend to watch something called dark mirror when I'm not editing a book anymore does anybody watch that is it
1:00:32
good yes is it Edgar Ellen poish yes okay what's your favorite classic movie I don't I'm I'm really bad at favorites these favorite questions they just throw me for a loop every time and that's because I had a young daughter who used to say what's your favorite color and I
1:00:51
would say I would say red and what's your your next favorite color and then this would go on and then she would go say which of my friends is your favorite I say Well they're I like them all and she would pester me until I would name somebody
1:01:05
and then she'd say why don't you like the others so so if you say something to your favorite the next thing somebody's going to say is why don't you like the others and then they'll feel very left out the ones who are not the favorite
1:01:17
will feel left out so I'm against favorite things in general I think it's not of anybody's business in anyone I don't have favorites I have a sort of a range of things I like question from what's your favorite pair of shoes well why aren't you wearing the
1:01:32
other one question from the iPad why is television the seemingly ascendant popular art displacing film I'm not sure it is um I think they mean streaming rather than television okay yeah uh because it can expand to fill the space
1:01:52
available uh for the story of of whatever length it may be so films have a sort of set period of time it's usually 90 minutes and if you take something even like Great Expectations which has been made into film several times you have to squish it and it
1:02:11
becomes instead of a uh an an expansive work of art it becomes a sort of reference to the book so I think one reason that streaming has has been popular is that things can be the length that they are next question yes I wanted to know when you write do you read it
1:02:30
out loud to yourself to someone else or do you just reread it I I I'm a reader out louder to yourself or to someone to myself yeah but if you start then reading from your from your book in public you're bound to catch some stuff
1:02:44
that you should have got before why did I do that do you ever read out loud other writers yes I do to to other people yeah so we were great readers to children and u i was read to as a child and and I think that's really important question so you have at least
1:03:05
two high school English teachers here in the audience um and so my question is we are looking to expand um what our kids are reading and I didn't know if you perhaps had some suggestions of overlooked authors titles anything
1:03:22
that's approachable for high school student um that maybe we haven't we haven't come how old are they uh so 9th through 12th graders 14 okay so I I would say it's different for each of those years um because people lump adolescence all in together but that's
1:03:41
it's not true a 17-year-old is very different from a 13-year-old um I don't know I'm I'm out of touch um what are they reading now well the newest text that our 12th graders just got is Purple Hibiscus um and things are going well things are going
1:04:01
well okay I would have to give that some thought but I I I think you know I I don't know the if if you're going to recommend books to somebody you should know that person you should know what they like what uh is really not going to do it for them and
1:04:21
um proceed accordingly the ones of mine that get taught the most to that age group um sometimes much to my dismay because I think they're a bit young but apparently not anymore are or and CRA and and the handmaid's tail and that's I think some
1:04:41
books are teachable and and other books are are great but it's hard to figure out how to teach them if you see what I mean next question I've always enjoyed the way you write about the ability of objects to invoke evoke memory or
1:04:57
Nostalgia why is it that you think you're so good at that and how do you approach writing about our relationship with objects and memory wow well first of all I'm Canadian so I'm not allowed to say I'm good at anything yes we do uh we do the
1:05:14
puncturing of hubris in our country unlike you and yours so thank you thank you but we we won't let that get out to the general audience I think probably because I read a lot of Dickens so Dickens is not very good about women unless they're eccentric
1:05:39
weird women he's kind of bad about the heroins uh but he's very good about objects and the other person who's very good about objects is is Raymond Chandler Raymond Chandler is particularly good about furn in fact I have a little Pros poem called
1:05:58
in love with Raymond Chandler which is about his handling of sofas yes objects are very evocative um especially if you a person who's been a child and has had a and has a memory because children U relate quite strongly to objects um in their in their
1:06:19
environment uh when they're little from the iPad how do you choose which non-fic to read which how do I choose which non-fiction to read um I generally the biology not so much the physics unless it's got colored pictures and um not so much the
1:06:39
economics but some sometimes but history right a lot of history surrounding what you're a lot of history or just in general so I've just always been interested in history so we have a a great big library of World War too uh partly because Graham's dad was a
1:06:58
Canadian General in it so he collected a lot of books my dad although he was a biologist was very interested in history and um my mother liked to read um historical novels of the 50s 60s and 70s of which there were a lot more than you
1:07:15
might think another iPad question how much is cat's eye autobiographical and is there a bit of you in Tony from the Rober bride those two different questions yes uh all of the public school teachers in cat's eye are real I changed the
1:07:34
names but you had them oh yeah I had them they had you they had me I had them they had me that school building although torn down was real it's of a certain vintage of school building and um the food is all real um what else can I say the clothing
1:07:52
is real the children's pastimes are real so the the the period is real the plot um some of the plot not so much the behavior of little girls is real but it's not confined to me and my generation it seems to have been pretty Universal and uh the only difference now
1:08:13
is that a lot of it has moved on to text messaging and and uh that kind of thing whereas it used to be little folded pieces of paper next question um I know you said you didn't keep up with a lot of shows but I was wondering if uh what
1:08:28
you thought about the Hulu handmaids tail series oh yeah I keep up with that one okay yeah I'm something called an executive consultant what does that mean nothing it it means that I have conversations with people on the phone but they don't have to do what I say
1:08:44
yeah so I I personally haven't watched it except for a few Clips because I quite like the your book rather than the show but from what I have seen they've really changed up um they updated it they updated it they made Serena Joy
1:08:57
younger yes Serena Joy they made her younger they made her friend multiracial cast whereas in the book it's much more of a South African pattern in which they white supremacist U segregationists and I noticed they also
1:09:12
um made um offred pregnant like she actually did get pregnant in the show and I was wondering gets pregnant in the book really yeah it's at the end oh my God I didn't know that okay that's something new um you know the last two chapters I also
1:09:28
just found out that you actually did provide offred's name in the book and shocked I'm still no I didn't no June isn't her name no she doesn't have a name in the book the readers figured out what the name was so I had to accept their verdict and they they did a piece
1:09:42
of reasoning which goes like this uh there are a number of names mentioned in the first chapter and of all of those names mentioned only one of them isn't mentioned again so they figured it had to be heard her but that was them it
1:09:55
wasn't me however the show adopted that U so it's a it's a question of of of readers adding into some adding in something that that is in the book but it wasn't in the mind of the writer consciously and I've got nothing against that because it's it's not it doesn't
1:10:16
contradict the te text it adds something in yeah I was just um I didn't I didn't like that because I was like no the whole point is that she never gave her name and her daughter's name no she doesn't yeah she doesn't in the book but
1:10:29
the readers decided that that must be her name but they're not in the book yeah so I just wanted to know like what was your take on how the show was going and I know that they kind of have your blessing but I was just wondering like
1:10:40
well the show is going very well because I think for the people in it it's not just a show it is um the showrunner his name is Bruce Miller decided when he was 19 that this is what he wanted to do when he grow up grew up up and he he
1:10:55
pitched himself at the time when they were looking for a showrunner so people are quite passionately involved with it and it has given rise to an international protest symbol which is not confined to this country it's popped
1:11:09
up all over the world uh in which people put on the outfit and it's kind of brilliant because you can't be kicked out for being dressed immodestly and you can't be kicked out for causing a disturbance because you're not saying anything but everybody looks
1:11:30
at it and they know what it means so there again it wasn't anything I thought of it was uh I think it started in Texas to tell you the truth and it has since spread and that is entirely due to the show question from the iPad after Testaments is there a project you're
1:11:47
working on that you're able to talk about well let me get through one thing at a time but you finished Testaments right I'm editing it you're editing it yes yes it's never over and what comes next probably this big sack of poetry big sack of poetry
1:12:03
big sack of poetry another reader question would Margaret choose to live forever if it were possible absolutely not why not uh well first of all if everybody else was also living forever we would have a big problem lot of people I don't want to
1:12:19
have live forever so if I'm going to have them not live forever I'm going to have to agree to not live forever either but I I think people have written about this a lot living the the living forever theme and it it always turns out to be a a very dicey
1:12:36
proposition number one you got bored number two you're probably a vampire number three have you seen the brilliant here's a film I have seen which is quite brilliant Swedish version only please Let the Right One In anybody mhm very well done it's the
1:12:55
uh Swedish vampire film about a 12-year-old vampire that ingar Bergman would have made if he'd ever made a Swedish vampire film about a 12-year-old vampire it's got one of the alltime best lines in it where the little boy says to this 12-year-old
1:13:10
vampire how old are you really and she says I'm really 12 but I've been 12 for a very long time last question if you were giving advice to someone starting out today as a writer not that they would be growing up in the times you grew up in but what
1:13:32
advice would you pass down to that person keep doing it every day keep doing it every day yes I don't but but you should because if you're a starting out writer that's good for you uh but the main thing to remember is nobody's going to see it until you let
1:13:52
them so you need not be inhibited when you're actually writing it's just between you and the page and if you don't like what you wrote that day the waist paper basket is there for you Margaret Atwood thank you very [Applause] much thanks for listening to
1:14:16
conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show