“As a woman of a certain age,
in my 60s’ with certain interests (reading and writing), a brush with greatness, Margaret Atwood (MA) was beyond my dreams. MA has been a part of my life since my twenties when I first read her second novel, Surfacing. I’d seen her speak before. I was pregnant with my first child when I went to her reading from The Handmaid’s Tale in (gulp) 1986 at UBC. And later, her Massey Lecture from Payback (Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth) at the Chan Centre in 2008.
But this time was going to be different.
Adjacent to Alice Munro’s passing, this encounter had an unspoken urgency. MA will be eighty-five in November. And while she hasn’t received a Noble prize she’s the recipient of two Booker Prizes, one in 2000 for the Blind Assasin and one in 2019 shared with Bernadine Everisto for the Testaments.
The Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival (DIRWF) organizers arranged three events on Denman Island and then in coordination with The Comox Valley Writers Society, a fourth event in Courtenay. It seemed to me like a gruelling schedule for an eighty-year-old.
The Wednesday the week before, I lined up outside the Denman Activity Centre, like the star-struck acolyte I am. Eager fans chatted in the sunshine for two hours before the tickets went on sale. DIRWF volunteers tackled the payment logistics, organized the lineup (thank you again for all you do) and I lucked out.
I was one of seventy guests at a private home on Denman at a fabulously catered event with free access to this astonishing woman. She’s diminutive in stature but that is it. She wore the expected brightly coloured scarf. There was no handler and the guests were respectful and polite. You already know she’s a smart, witty and perceptive woman.
In our brief conversation, I gushed pathetically about her influence in all those stages of my life and we talked briefly about agents and publishing. She reminisced about the days when you didn’t need an agent. When I mentioned that there are a lot of writers on Denman and in the Comox Valley, her retort was (paraphrasing here) “Yes but what do they write!” Touché MA. And, in that measured laconic tone, perhaps there was a comment about the multi-year tenacity of one of the organizers in persuading her to come to Denman.
A personal moral disorder (having bought a hard copy of her latest, heartbreaking short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood from our local bookstore, Blue Heron Books) was the vague expectation that she might be signing. But how many MA signatures does one need? And thanks to the common sense of the organizers there was no book signing allowing for more mingling and conversation. At all events, pre-signed copies of After The Flood and Old Babes in the Wood were made available by Abraxas and Laughing Oyster Bookshop.
My second event
was the Sunday afternoon event in Courtenay shared with about four hundred other MA admirers. Stewart Goodings, the co-chair of the DIWRF and possibly the tenacious persuader, hosted the conversation.
MA treated us to a reading of her short story “Bad Teeth” from her latest collection. It is not one of the semi-autobiographical, heartbreaking Tig and Nell stories but also poignantly observes loss and aging in long-term female friendships. My favourite story in this collection is the title one, “Babes in the Woods”— a study of memory, ritual and loss in the setting of a family cottage.
The conversation flowed freely and included topics like her Substack, In the Writing Burrow and her graphic novel, Angel Catbird where a scientist mutates into a feline-avian superhero. MA is a devoted conservationist and bird watcher as was her husband, Graeme Gibson. And yes, migratory birds are the “Canary in the Coal Mine.” She’s passionately anti-outdoor cat (mea culpa). Funds were raised at the CVWS for the Point Pelee organization.
She talked about her cameo roles in the productions of Alias Grace and The Handmaid’s Tale and her serialized online novel which became The Heart Goes Last.
And what about The Future Library? MA was the first author to donate a manuscript to this one-hundred-year project that started in 2014 in Norway where a forest has been planted which will supply paper for an anthology of books.
Oh, and people seem to like making and giving MA effigies. At both events, a cleverly constructed doll was presented to her.
And in the afterglow of the weekend,
I learned where the quote appearing on the 2021 stamp came from—”A word after a word is power,” which is also the title of the 2019 CBC documentary on MA.
It’s a line from the poem, “Spelling” from her tenth book of poetry, True Stories published in 1981. This is a video of her reading it at the NY Public Library in 2020.
And if you aren’t already crying—try “Dearly” from her 2020 collection of poems, Dearly.
“It’s an old word, fading now: Dearly did I wish, Dearly did I long for: I loved him dearly.”
Thank you for this blog. As you know, I too am of a certain age. Since I read Edible Woman in university, I have been inspired by Margaret Atwood. Several of her books are regular return engagements for me. The last time I heard her read was in Calgary at the Performing Arts Centre when she was promoting Oryx and Crake. She walked onto the stage in a full theatre and before she’d even reached the mic, every person in the room stood up. She said, “I’m glad to be in Calgary, the city with the highest readership per capita in Canada.” And as the enthusiastic readers in the room patted themselves on the back, she paused and continued… “Of course, it’s been my observation that readers are driven by the need to escape.” Such is her wisdom, fierceness and no-bs truth-speaking. We laugh… and it is mostly at ourselves.
Thanks Deb. It’s the fierceness and fearlessness I love. And yes, we have to keep laughing!