Margaret Atwood: Dearly

[Music] so [Music] hello and welcome to the chicago humanities festival i'm philip bahar the executive director of the festival and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's program margaret atwood dearly today's program is generously underwritten by our longtime festival supporter ellen stone bellick whose support has enabled us to present some of the preeminent women authors and thinkers of our day from gloria steinem and roxanne gay to julia christeva and camille paglia just to name a few and we're really excited to have margaret atwood for this year's bellic program this week's programs are also generously supported by bank of america and our book selling partner is women and children first chicago's feminist bookstore celebrating and amplifying underrepresented voices since 1979. you can learn more about the festival in our year-round programming or become a member at chicagohumanities.org you can also make a donation right now by clicking the donate button on youtube thank you to our captioner for making this and all of our programs more accessible you can control the captioning on your youtube controllers and you can learn more about our accessible services at chicagohumanities.org access needless to say margaret atwood is one of the most popular and beloved authors of her generation creating both best selling and groundbreaking works such as the testaments oryx and crake and the handmaid's tale which has had many lives and continues to resonate with audiences in print on the screen big screen and small screen and poetry has been at the heart of atwood's practice from the beginning of her career in her first publication double persephone with nearly 20 collections to her name dearly has been long awaited being her first book of poetry in over a decade with that please help me in welcoming the festival's maryland tomah artistic director alison cuddy and the incomparable margaret atwood good evening everyone uh it is a delight to be here especially during this historic week at my last count i think there were close to 700 people signed up for this event so welcome to you all i'm thrilled that you're here with us and margaret atwood it is such an honor to speak with you i'm just thrilled you're here as well uh and you know we're so honored by your presence that we really did have to kind of get that election wrapped up so we could just focus on this conversation so just a small gift to you for your presence here tonight thank you very much i appreciate it deeply uh partly because of course nobody up here was sleeping and we were all we were all doomed scrolling on our phones um and we thought we might have to you know get organized and and uh brew up the cups of tea for all the fleeing refugees that we would have to welcome but but it looks like that's not going to happen no hopefully not we'll see how things shake out from here and i have lots of questions for you about that but i just was curious can you talk about beyond brewing tea for the the coming uh refugees what is the view from there and how what does all of this look like to you you're such a chronicler for someone who is the personification of canadian literature you are also a chronicler of the american experience the american character and i'm just curious what you're thinking right now and what this is all meant to you going through this period of time deep roots allison my ancestors were some of those very same quaker hanging um which persecuting um new englanders of the 17th century so it's it's okay for me to talk about the more related one of the most hair-raising experiences of my life was i was doing a book signing in in boston and a young woman came up and she said i am the great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of rebecca nurse so if you don't know anything about the salem event rebecca nurse was the person wrongly hanged who gave a very stirring gallows speech saying why she had refused to lie um so that was a moment for me anyway why why am i interested well i just told you i've lived in the states quite a few times and in different parts of it and i've i've always bet on the fact that it's diverse enough and ornery enough so that would actually be rather hard to turn it into a lockstep totalitarianism without killing a lot of people oh god sorry but it would be um and um that that is different from some other countries where it's easier to get people lined up to line up and all do the same thing so i was counting on that which whichever way it went and americans should realize that a lot of people in the world would like them to fail they would like american democracy to fail because then they can say okay look it doesn't work you're better off having an autocracy with me at the head of it but but if if it does work then that is a higher standard of personal liberty uh than these other people are making available these other people you know who you are other people so it would not be a good thing for american democracy to fail absolutely not and and you know a really challenging time when those questions about the failure of american democracy are coming from within america right well they shouldn't anymore because it hasn't failed some people are calling it in question they're calling the process in question they're insulting a lot of hard-working election officials um and they're they're insulting a lot of in fact republican heads of states implying that they're dishonest i would stop that if i were in them and and so not going down well yeah yeah that's heartening um you know this this election season comes in the midst of a global pandemic you yeah pandemics are recurring yeah if you go back in history you can see them coming round again and and we had a few that didn't quite get off the ground um even in this century we had we had sars we had a west nile which i in fact got from a crow in the backyard um and h1n1 they they didn't take off the way this one has and that has any epidemiologists will tell you it has it has to do with the um incubation period and and how easily and how and how easily a disease is spread so this one this one got out of the box and i hope that the lesson will be be prepared next time which epidemiologists have been telling officials for a very long time we're not prepared enough and that has been shown to be true however note of hope there is another side there is uh the other side there there always is will things be exactly the same when we got to the other side no they will not be because they never are um but there will be a vaccine and what i also hope there will be quite soon is an insta test by which i mean not 15 minutes but like scan my movie ticket yes no and that means that if we go into a room for events with a lot of other people they will have been scanned too and they will not be infectious and that's what will permit live events to come back because as we know the people have been hardest hit by by this among the people who've been hardest hit have been live performance artists so singers dancers actors musicians um have been really affected yeah writers not so much we we crouch in rooms anyway by ourselves talking to people who aren't there so it's it's it's not um a great difference in our in our practice we we can't go on book tours but a book tour is not the same as as writing a book true true you can still practice but there is something about that you know i mean personally i was so looking forward to being together with you in a room and having a large audience there with us and and not having that that vibrancy of conversation feels like a loss although i i'm happy to be having this conversation by these means it's a loss of something but if i were in a in a live venue with you in chicago you wouldn't be seeing my my study in the background think of that that's true i'm getting a glimpse into your life it seemed to be doing well um and you know i was going to ask what you have been up to during the pandemic i mean obviously you've been doing this kind of thing you were touring around the paperback or touring around the paperback of the testaments and now this is the first the first event right for dearly i mean some interviews but your first conversation so that's an honor yes and i've been in chicago lots before as you know and i've been at wilm women and children first before and going back some time into the past so they've been there since 1979 and um and they're still there so so that's good too yeah you'll be happy to know that that neighborhood that where they are andersonville in chicago was uh one of the liveliest celebrations post you know once uh biden was declared president-elect one of the liveliest celebrations in the city i think took place there so well what a my goodness oh yes it ain't over um and and of course it never is it's never over because it is a very diverse country and um there are many different shades of points of view but the choice is always pretty binary you know so how do people make up their minds to vote they may they may have a bundle of things that are important to them and one side may represent some of those things and the other side may represent some of the other things so they're going to have to do triage amongst their interests uh so that's not easy we we've got five or six political parties i forget actually how many um so we have uh our our things are spread into spread out into diff more baskets yes the party system well i want to talk about dearly um you know one of the pleasures i've had during the anxiety of this election season was revisiting your work and and reading dearly um and i thank you so much for i mean it's funny to think about reading about a post-apocalyptic world is reassuring or a form of managing anxiety in this moment but certainly it was and and this collection of poetry is just so wonderful i mean it's it's melancholy and moody but it's smart and sharp and witty and irreverent um magical weird you know there's a moment where a spider instructs us come to terms before you were i am i arrange the rain i take harsh care uh there's another moment where a drone narrates the destruction it reeks and asks was i bad which is so open to so many interpretations as it should be um but i wanted you before you read one of your poems to talk a little bit about the poem zombie uh and this quote that um introduces the poem which is from realca the quote is poetry is the past that breaks out in our heart so can you talk a little bit about that interaction between poetry rilka and zombies well i think we need to think about that for about one minute uh the cult classic of course is is night of the living dead original version uh which i think they made for some paltry salmon and since of course it's had a remake but the original is better um and and that is exactly what you say you you see the the zombies are are coming up out of the ground um so the the rilka quote is uh can be read a number of different ways one of them would be quite positive the image would be of a flower you know coming up that breaks out in our hearts break out however suggests disease uh and and another way of of imagining it would be this very zombie um reemergence of the past zombie stories and and in particular vampire stories um are about the past so of the those three groups of things um werewolves zombies and and vampires people have theorized about this quite a lot in far corners of academia other places but one person has gone into it quite a bit naomi alderman says that that vampires are popular when people are feeling quite affluent because the thing about vampires is they're always pretty rich they've had a long time to accumulate stuff and they're articulate they're quite chatty um they have conversations with people they have they like talking about their past uh in various uh books that we've had recently whereas whereas zombies are not they don't have much to say in fact they don't have anything to say and uh vampires are individualists but but zombies are only dangerous if they're in a crowd one of my pals is is the same naomi alderman who invented a game called zombies run it's actually an exercise aid because exercise is so boring you download zombies run into your into your phone and you listen to it it tells you a story and the story is that you're one of the few surviving human beings in a couple of enclaves where they're holding out against the zombie hordes and you've been sent out to gather things like um bottles of water band-aids you know necessities of life and you're running so it's usually you're running it's for runners so i said no ma'am i can't run i can walk she said oh you can gear it to your own speed story and um you're running along and your your dispatcher says all clear pick up the bottle of water pick up the band-aids oh i've made a terrible mistake there's zombies all around you run and then you have to run just fast enough to escape the zombies and it tracks your heart rate and your speed and all of these things and i think it's now in its eighth or ninth season so it has an ongoing narrative but it also makes it interesting for you to do your exercising and um gives you incentives and um is a a metaphor for poetry as a metaphor for poetry it connects back to the real good quote um so the past isn't always um joyful to remember it wasn't just had the past the past isn't over the in fact it's not even past i think it was um so we are all uh haunted by not only our own past but by the past of wherever it is that we live and those those things in the past if they've been pretty traumatic you will you will usually find that there's a period of oblivion in which everybody just doesn't talk about them whatever they may be but then back around it comes so people start digging things up people start writing about past events people revisit these things that we were not supposed to talk about or even know about and back they come and i think we're in one of those periods right now in the united states of america we're in a uh same the same kind of period in canada except what we're hearing about is how um indigenous people were treated in the 19th and 20th centuries um something that you just weren't supposed to know about that's why canadian history was so boring did you go to high school in canada yes it did wasn't it it was so boring it was all about wheat uh we weren't told the interesting things because they were discreditable my opinion i mean there were some interesting things world war one was pretty interesting but and so it was world war ii but but but the stuff that that happened on this continent um of a discreditable kind was not spoken about yeah yeah well i want to come back to that um in canada's reckoning with its past um even more recently through politics but let's let's have a poem because you were talking about three figures that are connected with the past the vampire the zombie and the werewolf well we're wolves are not about the past they're about animal side so they used to be about if you're old enough to remember old werewolf movies they were they were about um men turning into animals so dr jekyll and mr hyde is basically a werewolf story even gets harrier um but what made it different for its time was that it wasn't the moon that was the transformative age and it was this chemical very up to date for the 19th century so in those old werewolf movies the werewolves were the werewolves were always male figures but in recent years we have had some gender expansion for werewolves progress yeah yeah we actually have female werewolves in some uh films and accounts some novels there's some pretty good novels in which the uh central figure is a female werewolf um quite convincing nothing to do with my personal life you understand hey absolutely not we won't go there so you're going to read update on werewolves i have to stop calling them were wolves it has to be werewolves update on werewolves in the old days all werewolves were male they burst through their blue jean clothing as well as their own split skins exposed themselves in parks how old at the moonshine those things frat boys do went too far with the pigtail yanking growled down into the pink and wriggling females who cried wee wee wee all the way to the bone hackett was only flirting plus a candid sense of fun see jane run but now it's different no longer gender specific now it's a global threat long-legged women sprint through ravines and furry warm-ups a pack of kinky models and sado french vogue getups and airbrushed short-term memories bent on no penalties rampage look at their red rimmed paws look at their gnashing eyeballs look at the backlit gauze of their full moon subversive halos hairy all over this bell down and it's not a sweater oh freedom freedom and power they sing as they lope over bridges bums to the wind ripping out throats on footpaths pissing off brokers tomorrow they'll be back in their middle management black and jimmy choos with hours they can't account for and first dates blood on the stairs they'll make a few calls goodbye it isn't you it's me i can't say why. at sales meetings they'll dream of sprouting tails right in the audio visuals they'll have addictive hangovers and ruined nails wonderful so that was an update on werewolves from dearly your newest collection um you know i mean obviously there's something [Music] playful and tongue-in-cheek about that poem but it there's also it's a violent poem in a way as well and and i'm violent yes go ahead sorry lulu's are violent yes very violent um do not to be trusted uh the i'm curious about that um you're you have a kind of unflinching ability to describe violence the human capacity for violence the animal capacity for violence uh imaginary or not and is that something that came easily or early to you or is that something you had to steal yourself to and develop in terms of writing every character in a book and also for every person you meet it's it's very interesting to know when they were born you know what year they were born in because that can give you a clue as to what happened to them between the ages of one and five what happened between the ages of five and ten what happened between ten and twenty you know what what was going on so i was born in 1939 november what had already started world war ii so the early part of my life was spent in world war ii luckily not on the battleground but in the atmosphere of world war ii and everybody knew including kids that there was a war going on and uh i had an older brother who was extremely aware and what were all the little boys doing they were playing war games they were collecting airplane cards that you could get out of cigarette packages the what media there was was was pretty wartime geared and that would include radio serials and it would include the black and white comic books that were available at that time in in canada um so that wasn't that wasn't far away and so going along with my life story i was there for 10 in 1949 when we were still very post-war um but it places me at at 15 when elvis presley makes his appearance that's a big jump you know from world war ii to elvis presley that's quite part of travel things changed very quickly from 1950 on and they changed again about 1966. so the 60s by the way was a violent decade it was a decade of turmoil very rapid change it was a civil rights movement it was the vietnam war it was the assassination of kennedy and martin luther king and robert kennedy was like what just happened like that um so this is this is part of the world that we live in i did not live a sheltered life as far as that kind of thing went and i also because i grew up in the north of canada during war what did we eat when did we eat well we were out in the woods we fished what does fishing mean it means you catch the fish and then you kill it and then you um and then you got it so i'm i was quite aware of of what was inside um biological beings but i never thought that food came from the supermarket yeah so much more touch with the processes of life than oh i'm sorry go ahead yes some kids that i think think that what they're eating just comes out of a package they they don't they don't make the connection back um yes very very close to um life in many varieties and um and if you're close to we we did live on a farm for 10 years and we asked a farmer what animal should we get and he said none and then he said if you've got if you're gonna have livestock you're gonna have dead stock and that's true too so if you're on a farm with animals something's going to die sooner or later yeah um you know you were talking about things changing rapidly and kind of what just happened and i'm really struck by the origin story of you as a writer that you've told that you know you were almost struck or a poem appeared in your head one day when you were walking home from school origin story uh there must be more to it than that those things don't just happen yeah so i wasn't an early reader and i read very widely but i didn't have any intention of being a writer up until then i was going to be in succession i was going to be a painter i was going to be a fashion designer believe it or not it's pretty funny i was going to be after we were up to we were given the guidance handbook that said what careers we should have and there were only five for girls uh i was gonna i didn't want to be any of them but i was going to be the one that paid the most which was home economist which is why i can't type i can do zippers but i can't type uh and then i was going to be a biologist i was quite good at that but then i got this idea that i was going to be a writer much to the horror of my parents i'm sure they bit their tongues she'll get over it it's a phase what you know what was it about that moment though i mean as you said you you were widely read you'd considered many other things what was it about that moment that you recall that made that so clear to you that realization actually knows um it's very hard to think yourself back into what you were like when you were 16. i can remember what i was wearing which was a beautiful princess line creation that i had sewed i bet you don't even know what the princess line was but it was quite flattering to the figure you sewed it in panels had a sort of skirt that went like that um and it just seemed to me very involving so i guess people who use these terms would say it was a flow moment a flow moment when you're very identified with whatever it is that you're doing um people who play sports describe them quite a lot especially people like tennis players they're in the flow of the whatever's going on with the tennis ball um so so that's what it was and why i thought that it was possible for me to be a writer was was simply ignorance i was not aware of what it would actually involve what were you reading at that time were you reading poets okay so 16 i was reading um three kinds of books books that were on the school curriculum which in the 50s in canada was pretty english so you quite a few dead english men but some dead english women too so you could be a woman and a writer but you just had to be dead in english some americans dead and except for emily dickinson uh male and not canadians much because we didn't know about them they were not being taught in our school so i was reading that at school those school books uh books in the cellar of our house which included a lot of science fiction so my dad had quite a leaning towards it and detective stories he liked to read sci-fi and detective story so we had a large number of those which i went through pretty quickly and a third kind of book which you would find in the houses of people you were babysitting for and those would be things like forever amber and you know verboten you're not supposed to be reading this grown-up books with sex in them of the 20th century 19th century novels the sex always took place off stage which is why i frequently didn't know what was going on in these books what what just happened another one of those experiences what was going on in the woods enlighten me no it was the days of newspapers when they would say things like somebody would be found murdered and they would say but she had not been interfered with and i would say what are they talking about so yes it was an age of of greater verbal innocence than the one we live in now i was reading a lot of poetry we got the english poets we got uh keith's tennis and wordsworth and byron um and how did i end up in english literature and in college i thought first i was going to be a journalist but my parents to head that off invited over a real journalist that they actually knew who said if i was a girl working at a newspaper i would be writing either the obituaries or the ladies pages and that would be it so i thought not going to do that um so i resignedly decided that i would have to go to university and and um and study english which i did and taught english and todd he did yes off and on i did teach it um i was a victorianist and uh also american romantics so ama about american romantics plus the 17th century which i had to study it was my gap we didn't study american 17th century writing in canada but uh but there it was waiting for me uh and all my forgotten relatives behaving badly in the 17th century right right yeah you know it's interesting because one of the contexts that um people talk about when they talk about the handmaid's tale for example is the rise of the religious right during the reagan era but you write about also studying the puritans the american puritans and i wonder do you see a through line i mean to you are the contemporary evangelical christians uh kind of a continuation of puritanism or are they very distinct to you there's a direct through line so we we could go into this in some detail but every time you hear somebody like george w bush quoting a city upon a hill a light to all nations they are quoting a 17th century theologian um you won't find that exact wording in the bible it's a it's a portmento of two bits of the bible that this 17th century theologians stuck together um so american exceptionalism goes right back there they they thought they were escaping england they're going to sit set up the perfect godly society in in the new world because the old world wasn't letting them do that but after they left of course cromwell won the war against the monarchy and had a protectorate for some years and american puritans then thought that maybe they left too soon maybe maybe they sort of missed the boat but then of course cromwell died there was a restoration and that's when um england opposed governors from england on new england and that was considered a great falling off anyway it's a fascinating history it's it's uh the good part of of the puritans was the the engaging of one's conscience you know the individual conscience the individual relationship uh was very important and there's a lot of negatives that we could also talk about but but not to be dismissed as an influence on everything that has happened since and you can see it going all the way through hawthorne and various revival moments the same themes come back again so yes i would say that there's a direct line and and that is why my gilead society draws so heavily upon that kind of thinking the historic i mean thinking about the social context or the historic context is important to thinking about your novels um and the historical moment in which you wrote the handmaid's tale or were thinking about or writing the early 80s versus the historical moment in wrote which he wrote the testaments much more recent how do you compare those two historic moments to one another well in the um early 80s we had had the 60s quite a lot of turmoil quite a few changes uh the 70s rise of of the second wave women's movement um so you can almost pinpoint it to the moment when it became public in 1969 there had been some some roiling about in in the under brush before that but when the general public became conscious of this i think you could say was about 1969 and then through the early 70s there was a lot of turmoil in that area quite a few marriages broke up um a friend of mine who was a lesbian writer had all these women appearing at her door saying they wanted to be lesbians how did you do that um so so that was happening and and then and then reagan got elected so again let's let's go back to the future uh we're gonna we're gonna have some stability we're gonna have you know daddiness again and um we are going to um change things back what she proceeded to do and that's when the religious right which had not been they had been pietists um up until then decided they were going to be a political power so i started reading what people were saying they would do if they had the power and one of the things they said they'd like to do is put women back into the home where they belonged so i thought well how are they going to get them to go back in know they're all running around they're having jobs and bank accounts and other um ungodly things that they're too dim-witted to really be able to handle um plus they can vote so how are you going to get those women back in the home well you just take away their financial and political power and that's where they'll be so you go back to about 1850. anyway this these are long long conversations that have been going on for quite a while um and 2016 this is before the election but anybody who had been watching that and had studied with at the same time as marshall mcluhan was rising to ascendance which i did would recognize that trump had a very convincing up close television persona at that time i don't think he does anymore but at that time he could sort of look you in the eye in a very convincing way out of the television screen i saw his closing speech and i thought it's good oh he's good at that and um it is a used car salesman manner but but but it comes across well on tv i think mcluhan said the reason nixon lost the election to kennedy as the kennedy was going on tv and nixon wasn't any time there's a new medium people are mesmerized by it my other theory is that hitler never would have got so far if it hadn't been that radio had just been deployed so when there's a new medium such as radio or television or social media people get entranced by it after a while it just becomes background noise but but at that moment you think i'm hearing a divine voice luckily churchill was also good at radio some people said that world war ii was won by churchill's voice you know i'm struck that um we're in a moment right now where as you said earlier you were talking about the poetry in zombies and that you know the past can recalling the past especially a past that's been repressed is a painful experience individually or collectively and so i wonder how you think about um [Music] remembering as a mode of resistance it's certainly a theme across many of your works i mean um [Music] oh go ahead i think it's a mode of resistance if you're remembering some something that people have tried to erase so something important that people have tried to erase a lot of murder mysteries turned on this you know the buried evidence thought you were dreaming but that really happened so it can be like that but as we know there's such a thing as false memory syndrome and you can remember things that didn't happen um anything in in human existence is is tricky i don't think any anything about human beings is transparently simple um so yes it's it's uh it is a it's a theme i wrote a book about debt in in which i examined that for many different uh sides including what it means in in religious uh traditions but one of the other themes is that without memory there is no debt because debt is um a memory of a transaction that occurred in the past so when the peasants revolted in in medieval and renaissance and early modern europe the first thing they did was was go to the castle and burn the records he said nobody would know who owed what to anybody so a debt is a memory i just i'm curious what you think about a figure like i mean as we think about moving forward from this moment um and nobody knows what that's going to look like but certainly the story is uh contested in many ways right um in in canada um which i've heard again and again from americans um who think of it as a place of refuge it's a place of refuge in your writing as well sort of in the testaments and and in uh handmaid's tale but you know we have an example of a prime minister who in many ways tried to rewrite history who defunded libraries and archives who rewrote the story of canada and left out certain kinds of identities i mean what impact do you think you know who was a leader who was animated by a kind of a stance against science um an alignment with a kind of religious power harper harper stephen harper what what influence and impact has that had on canada and the moment that country finds itself in now well you know canada is a tryout place so i think harper was a tryout for trump like a franchise yeah yeah a lot oh it's the same playbook and uh if you go back to you know dictators i have known um what they put on the flag and what they um how they decorate the space it's different um but the but the playbook is pretty much the same and one thing that they all try to do and this is what 1984 chronicles so brilliantly they try to remove truth as a category and you have seen that in action in your own country and and russian disinformation they they they weren't necessarily supporting one candidate and attacking another they were attacking the idea of truth because if you have people who don't know what to believe you have a confused population without any direction so the the aim of of them is not to elect this person or to elect that person but to to get rid of the rudder of the ship of state uh to make it directionless simply for for machiavellian power politics reasons it gives them more scope it gives they themselves more scope so you'll notice that putin has not rushed to congratulate joe biden he did with trump trump because he saw trump as a as um a fermenter of chaos and that suited him just fine so the american people united uh around an idea that pulls them together that's bad news for for him i'm going to turn to some questions from the audience and just remind everyone if you do have questions for margaret atwood please um send them via the chat and we'll try to get to as many as we can so julia thayer writes i started reading your novels thanks to a wonderful english teacher i've enjoyed all of them but the blind assassin captured me completely do you have a writing experience you've most enjoyed um i would never tell if i did but but let's hear it for wonderful english teachers because i had a wonderful english teacher too um at the time i began writing so wonderful english teachers in high school can make a lot of difference and also once in college that's my little wonderful english teacher speech did teaching enrich your writing i mean you taught for a long time i'm just curious how it how it shaped you as a writer that's long than you may think really not very much at all but one year in montreal some in edmonton one year in in toronto and then from time to time i will turn up and do maybe three months of something uh as a as a ch as a guest chair um it does i i like teaching i'm quite pedantic and uh i like teaching particularly victorian and and american romantics which are the things i know a bit about um [Music] i i don't think i would probably i'm i'm not much of a theorist uh i'd probably uh come from the let's read the text first when i was doing uh my studying it was the new criticism and we didn't learn anything about writer's biographies i think that was a mistake because every writer has a time and place and and um what were the what were the pressures what were the influences what were the energies what did they think they were saying um i think that is important i don't think you can just do an explication dude text and leave all of that out but similarly trying to second guess what the writer must have been thinking that's a bit problematic too so yeah i like teaching i sometimes teach creative writing and and when i do if if it's people with novels i concentrate only on the first five pages because that's reality if you really want to be a writer and to really want to be a published writer and you really want to have your books in a bookstore that's what happens the reader walks into the bookstore they are entranced by your spectacular cover let's suppose they haven't heard your name before they're entranced by your excellently chosen title and your spectacular cover and they pick up the book and what's the first thing they do they open the front front flap and they they read about the book and you the author will have rewritten that because that task will have been given to the um to the youngest person in the company so you you have to redo it so so it's good and then they might read your biography and look at your picture but the next thing they do is open to the first page and if you can't get them past the first page they'll never get to page 20. and if they'll never get to page 20 they will never get to page 86 where the most important thing you have to say is embedded so you have to get them into the book so that's why i say you put too much on the first page you haven't put enough on the first page let's look at your first sentence and and we go on from there and one of the texts i use is dracula why is that because the first part of dracula is a man on a train writing a quite boring travel journal you know the peasants i tried some goulash i looked out the window the mountains are nice and the difference is that the man writing that that journal doesn't know that he's in a book called dracula but we readers know so it's very suspenseful for us but not for him because he doesn't know [Laughter] you want to say don't don't get off the train turn around go right back don't get into that strange looking um but he's all unsuspecting you do have to wonder in horror films why did they open the door haven't they seen a horror film before don't no horror films that's just it they should all see some immediately and then they will go oh i don't think i'm going to open that door i'm not that seller you're joking maybe that's the human condition that we don't recognize the genre we exist in like maybe we're living the gothic and if we just recognize that we would have a much better guide to life that's pretty profound i think you could start a cult around that very idea you can say to to each of your cult members i will help you identify the literary genre that you are living in and then i will yes i will analyze you based on that furthermore so i can keep the relationship going and you know make some money it's a it's an idea go for it it's an idea yes an idea um so you were just talking about what you focus on when you're teaching creative writing but there's a question that asks what is the single most important step in your writing process so putting aside you know you know you're going to rewrite your biography and you're thinking about your opening gambit but what else i mean you one of the things i love about um the end of the testaments is there's a short conversation with you in the archive of the handmaid's tale um which is an amazing thing that there is an archive for the handmaid's tale and and all the research that you did it's a repository for that so i imagine research is a critical important thing but um what to you is the most important step darting i'm like everybody else you know there's the page you've got to put something on it are you going there so so alison you went to lake of the woods as a young person did you go swimming in it oh yes how cold was that literally cold okay so like i'm putting you on the verge of that moment you're in your bathing suit you stick your foot in the water it's freezing cold and you say am i gonna do this or not so it's like that so getting those first paragraphs on the page is like going swimming in lake of the woods you just have to run and screaming that's going to be horrible but you you're either going to do it or not do it and if you're going to do it you just have to take the plunge uh oh um [Music] as a lover of new mediums you were just talking about people's fascination with mediums and that's part of how people become leaders by you know marshalling the forces of whatever new medium uh tim martin wants to know have you ever considered producing your own podcast or youtube channel i'm too lazy i'm i can be on other people's podcasts and youtubes um because they do the work of producing it but think of all the things i would have to learn i would have to learn a lot of tech i would have to learn um you know deep fake stick i had somebody's head on a goat i'm i would have to learn how to do that [Laughter] those are arts so i think i don't think i would be able to to get good enough at it soon enough to to do it in any way well you just need a good producer well um maybe not allison i think people won't do that um there are so many questions here sorry give me a minute um one is then oh other than dystopian fiction do you think there's any other works of literature that can help somehow dissect or help people understand the dangers of conspiracy theories in the real world um murder mysteries uh or probably spy thrillers um so one of the necessary books of the 20th century to me anybody wants to try to understand that century would be tinker taylor soldier spy and the follow-up called smiley's people and they're both by john le carre um so i'm i'm pretty interested in in constructed fakes and um forgeries and and lying and that's where you find people um leading other people down the garden path so conspiracy theories you don't know whether the people actually believe them or not you don't know whether they're they're doing it for fun whether they're doing it because they really believe it or whether they're doing it to to make money you actually don't know um but uh because of social media these things can snowball in a in a pretty wild way um but things could snowball before there even was um social media as i say radio was was hitler's thing and he put out a lot of conspiracy theories in that way it's whatever people are mesmerized by at the time you know one way that um people have thought about the connection between your novels and your poetry is that somehow they're in conversation with one another like surfacing was in conversation with power politics the collection of poetry you agree with that no what do you see as a connection or do you see connection sometimes and sometimes there isn't so there's a very clear connection between this poem sequence called the journals of susanna moody and the novel called alias grace because the same real historical figure appears in in both of them and it was through writing them suzanna moody poems that i that i learned about this character called um or this person called grace marks and um i actually wrote him i wrote a television play about her in which i the i used the version of her story that had been told by suzanna moody as it happens it was wrong so when i really started writing about her and going back to newspapers of the day and whatever else it could be found susanna mooney had got a lot of things wrong she got the place wrong she got the time wrong she's she got what happened wrong and i think because she had read a lot of charles dickens she was channeling oliver twist to a considerable extent um so that was very interesting to discover and a very interesting book to write for the simple reason that the truth was never known we we knew something had happened but we never knew what because there were four people involved uh three of them were dead pretty soon and the fourth one never told namely grace so it was a very interesting book to write because i couldn't come down on one side or the other did she or didn't she because historically it wasn't known and people projected on her like mad so they projected their own their own views of women they projected their own views of young irish women they projected their own views of servants they projected their own views of of um the people who got murdered so the the more um liberal people tended to think she was innocent and the more conservative people thought she was guilty you know i want to we're going to have to wrap up which i really don't want to do but um i was thinking about as you were talking the kind of open-ended nature of of some of your works um to me the the testaments i mean the henry's telling away the testaments too where there's this kind of ending another academic symposium and they're kind of trying to make sense of you know these this monument and their understanding right which is an imperfect one but also matt adam the way it ends which it's kind of a beautiful ending and you can see that this the chronicling that's so important the kind of telling of story that structures that narrative so beautifully is going to continue but there's to what end you know will then the children of craig become like craig will they destroy the world we don't know there's kind of an open-endedness there which i really appreciate um so we can project a lot of things on to it but i think a lot of us want to project hope onto the world right now and there was a question that seems like a nice question to end with which is where are you finding hope what what right now is your source of hope as we move forward um in a continuing very uncertain time yes so so right now i'm quite enthusiastic about the under 20 year olds that we are seeing come along um they are fueling the extinction rebellion they are they're making politicians pay attention to the plight of the biosphere if we destroy the biosphere that's the end of us we will not be a species on the planet anymore um so so vote to be a species if you want if you want there to be people that's what it comes down to and um the the activism and and joining together in community of of movements like black lives matter uh which is so so there's always there's always a push and pull between between i and we between between i communities in which the individual is is most valued and we communities in which the group is most valued and and every society has got both but it goes back and forth in emphasis um so the the real um impetus of of joining together as we is to make it more possible or it should be um to make it more possible for the i for the individual to exist in a better way but in order to do that you often have to come together as a we and as it turns out americans in general are actually pretty good at doing that everything from bake sales to um uh working for for political parties in elections and um and and even demonstrating you know people go blah blah blah violet blah blah not really if if you want to look at really violent demonstrations and sort of out outbreaks of of um mass atrocity you kind of at this point in time have to go elsewhere in them in the world um so um yugoslavia after the breakup it's not and that that's to be commended so what are you gonna do now you're you're going to work hard to rebuild the ability to listen to other people you hear what they're actually saying um to not just stick them in a box and put a label on it in their way uh to not demonize to understand that people have got their reasons for doing the things they do and for thinking the things they think but i'm hoping also that you will reassert a category called truth because unless we unless we can rely on on the truth of a matter our opinions about it are worthless they're not founded on anything so let's reassert the category truth no it's not all fake news some of it's real news and unfoil the attempts of people who want america to fail uh foil the attempts to erase the category called truth it's true that my novels are sometimes open-ended but that doesn't mean there wasn't a truth it just means that we don't know what it was about that's a good start i think um thank you so much and happy birthday in advance i know you've got a birthday coming up you are forever young and forever wonderful thank you so much thank you lovely to talk to you and good luck with everything thank you you too bye bye everyone thank you

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 2,756

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: qYGq4r9Hwpk

Length: 65min 42sec (3942 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020