Apres-Breakfast with Canadian Author Margaret Atwood
02. August 2008 00:21
Margaret Atwood was quite pleased with her hat. After sitting down to a bright courtyard breakfast table at the Hotel Josef, she took her time putting it on, positioning the green, floppy brim and commenting on its superior packability.
The Toronto writer, whose most recent works include the novels The Tent and The Penelopiad, was in town as part of the Prague Writers' Festival along with her husband, author Graeme Gibson. She spoke with The Prague Post at a pace leisurely but specific, giving words like "cruel" two syllables. She laughed slowly and often, and was generous with her attention, maintaining almost constant eye contact.
Considering her extensive bibliography of novels (13, including classics like the Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye), nonfiction, short fiction, poetry, reviews and essays, Atwood has done her fair share of talking about writing at readings and in interviews. So it was easy to wander off the path of literary subjects and discuss folk songs, finger puppets and Marlene Dietrich.
The Prague Post: You talked last night about participating in readings when you were starting out. What's the importance of writers meeting in these kinds of forums?
Margaret Atwood: Young writers can sometimes make connections that might help them out. And I think younger writers tend to be much more collaborationist. In my time, we certainly got involved in magazines and putting on public readings. You would get the abandoned warehouse painted black, stick in tables with the Chianti bottles, and have readings.
TPP: What did you read?
MA: Rather bad poetry.
TPP: Does your process ever have a collaborative component to it?
MA: I wouldn't call it collaboration, I would call it "first readers." I have some readers who aren't in the publishing business, and others who are my agents. What you want is feedback: Does this work, does that work? Writers, and novelists in particular, are kind of megalomaniac control freaks, and they don't easily let anybody else into their sandbox at the formative stages.
TPP: Are there ways in which your process has changed?
MA: I use a computer to transcribe the handwriting, whereas I used to use a typewriter. It's better with the computer because it gives you the red wiggly line, and the green wiggly line, [although] their idea of what a sentence is isn't always mine. I also write for newspa¬pers, which have word lengths, and the computer has a very handy built-in word count. We used to count by hand.
TPP: Does newspaper writing help you?
MA: [Writing to fit is] a discipline. You've got to say what you have to say in 900 words, and not 750. So that makes you look quite hard at your phrases: Can this be shorter? Do I need this at all? In that sense, it's anti-Proustian. Proust put in everything. Hemingway took out everything. He wrote for newspapers, so he'd think, how can we make this as succinct as possible? One of the other great succinct stylists lived in this city, and that would be Kafka. I was first reading him when I was 20.
TPP: Have you been to the Kafka museum here?
MA: Yes, I got the Kafka playing cards. I think he'd be pretty horrified that his image is turning up on objects of that kind — T-shirts, pencils and pens, plates, ashtrays, cups.
TPP: I've seen a Kafka finger puppet.
MA: Yes, I've seen a Freud finger puppet.
TPP: I think they're in the same set.
MA: Yes, and they also have plastic action figures. One of my favorite items, actually, was a Frida Kahlo paper doll costume book in Mexico. Of course, I bought several. Kafka hasn't turned up as a paper doll; there isn't a lot of scope, because he's got the suit, then he's got the other suit.
TPP; Do you feel you have paper doll potential?
MA: No, no, I'm not enough of a fashionista. You need Marlene Dietrich — that kind of person — somebody who's very into clothes.
TPP: I was hoping to talk about fairy tales.
MA: What happened with fairy tales in the 1950s was they got sanitized. I think people thought the stuff was too gruesome for kids. But we got the full, unexpurgated version growing up in the '40s. My sister is 12 years younger, so the kinds of things that were on offer for her were limited to the pretty ones, in which Cinderella marries the prince — essentially a girl marrying up story. There are other stories that turn up in different cultures, like the bird or animal bride. We have it as Swan Lake. In China, the girl is a snail — I like that one. She lives hi a water bucket when she's being a snail. And she's a very good wife.
TPP: I understand you enjoy opera librettos — kind of that same folk world.
MA: Yes, surrealism. I read opera librettos quite thoroughly as a young person, partly for their bizarre qualities. In the beginning of the 19th century, there was this interest in local folklore materials. So a lot of things — operas, ballets — took their motifs from those newly resurrected, newly collected materials, which, as we now know, were somewhat edited by the Brothers Grimm. They snipped and sewed a bit, yes they did. A lot of the wickedstepmothers were originally wicked mothers, but that was too contra the cult of good mommy that the Victorians were pushing so heavily. So they changed them into stepmothers.
But they left in the skeletons falling down the chimney and people being put into red-hot barrels and being rolled down into the sea, and birds pecking out your eyes — it was all in there. But in the '50s it all came out, and they could only be about nice things — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. And therefore the first waves of feminists said fairy tales suck, they don't give women any dominant roles. But if you take all of the Brothers Grimm, that's not true. Women have very active roles, even if it's as the wicked witch.
TPP: Is music a part of your writing process?
MA: No, when I'm listening to music I can only listen to music. I can't do both. We listen to a lot of music in the car.
TPP: Like what?
MA: Well, right now we're going through all of Beethoven, but we can listen to almost everything: Scottish music, Irish music, Mexican, American, Canadian.
TPP: I thought you might be a folk fan.
MA: That era of the poetry readings was also the folk era. So our intermission would be a folk singer, usually playing the autoharp. Now it's a lot of the traditional ballad tunes, which are very mythic and suggestive. So I have, for instance, [Francis J.] Childs' English and Scottish Popular Ballads — almost all of them gruesome. They're really big on murders, dead people returning, those kinds of events.
By Kimberly Hiss
Prague Post
