Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  3428. “[Quote].” The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo) 17 May 2003: Section News: D16. With the publication of Oryx and Crake Atwood’s out with a series of cleverly worded refrigerator magnets: “I think therefore I spam,” “No brain no pain,” and the curious “Life experiments like a rakunk at play.”

  3429. “[Quote].” Salon.com 27 November 2003: s.p. Available from Lexis-Nexis. At-wood commenting on Studs Terkel’s Working: It contained “raw material for 1,000 novels in one medium-sized book.”

  Interviews

  3430. “Atwood Pushes for Forest-Friendly Paper.” Daily Herald-Tribune (Alberta) 10 October 2003: Section: Entertainment: 39. Atwood was interviewed by phone from Frankfurt where she was attending the book fair as part of a Canadian-led effort to persuade the industry to use so-called Ancient Forest Friendly paper, which is 100% post-consumer recycled, chlorine-free paper and fiber. “It’s nice to be a world leader in something,” Atwood said with a wry tone. Two years earlier, Canadian publishers McClelland and Stewart and Raincoast Books signed onto a campaign by a Tofino, BC, environmentalist and began sourcing the costly paper.

  3431. “Books Find Their Readers.” Maclean’s 20 October 2003: 56. Atwood answers questions about Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes. Some examples:

  Where did the idea for Rude Ramsay come from? The same place Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut [1995] came from. I did it partly because Anna Porter, the publisher, is an old friend of mine and was saying, “Help me!” I had this story that I used to amuse my child with when I was trying to comb her hair after having washed it. Her hair being somewhat like mine, it would take a long time, so I used to tell her the story about Princess Prunella. I just wrote some of it down for Anna. Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes was generated partly because Anna was saying “Help me!” again, due to the Stoddart fiasco.

  How long does it take you to write a children’s book? A few days, for the first draft. It’s like poetry. You have to do it all in one go, and then you can twiddle with it.

  Working on children’s stories, is there something in particular that you like? I’m exploring my inner nitwit. Inside every take-me-serious person, there’s a silly person just dying to get out.

  3432. “Margaret Atwood.” Gardening Life 7.5 (August-September 2003): 104. Atwood interviewed about her gardening interests.

  3433. “Margaret Atwood.” National Post 30 August 2003: Section: Books: 6. Email interview with Atwood about Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes.

  3434. “Margaret Atwood Pens New Children’s Book.” Canada AM 9 September 2003: s.l. Available from Lexis-Nexis. Interview with Marci Ien covered Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes as well as Oryx and Crake. When asked, “What is next for you, Ms. Atwood?” she replied: “What is next? Well, you can never second-guess the future. So, I don’t know. And if I knew I wouldn’t tell, because I have a superstition about it. But in the children’s-book line, let us say I’ve got my eye on the letter S.”

  3435. BETHUNE, Brian. “Atwood Apocalyptic.” Maclean’s 28 April 2003: Section: Books: 44. Speaking of genetically modified corn and other crops, and the law of unintended consequences, Atwood paused. “You know,” she smiled, “there are studies that indicate corn-based stuff tells the body to put on more fat. And about 70 percent of the US is somewhat overweight. I’m thinking of writing a new scary dystopia called ‘Waddle,’ about fast-running alien predators and people who can’t get away from them.”

  3436. CASE, Eleanor, and Maggie McDONALD. “Life After Man.” New Scientist 178.2393 (3 May 2003): 40-43. Interview with Atwood about Oryx and Crake when she was in London for the premiere of the opera The Handmaid’s Tale.

  3437. CAULFIELD RYBAK, Deborah. “Future Shock.” Star Tribune (Minneapolis) 14 April 2003: Section: Variety: 1E. Extensive interview in anticipation of the arrival of The Handmaid’s Tale at the Minnesota Opera. The book “had a different reception from different countries,” she recalled. “The English said, ‘Jolly good yarn!’ They’d done all this under Oliver Cromwell and they’re not about to do it again. The Canadians, in their anxious way, said: ‘Could it happen here?’ which is what they always say about everything. The Americans said, ‘How long have we got?’”

  3438. CHAMBERLAIN, Adrian. “Back to the Future.” Times-Colonist (Victoria) 24 April 2003: Section: GO: D7. Atwood in Victoria to read and field questions for a sold-out crowd at Alix Goolden Hall, having ferried over after attending the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival. In Victoria, she planned to visit her writer friends Carol Shields and Audrey Thomas.

  Did the essential plot-line of Oryx and Crake come to her in one flash of insight? “It did come in a flash. And then you have to work out the flash,” Atwood said. “Like all flash experiences, it’s built on a huge mountain of non-flash. The eureka experience, as anyone will tell you, comes out of long times of thinking about a problem.”

  The interviewer also observed that Atwood certainly was no ogre. She was sharp, amusing, and intelligent. Yet there was a sense that she didn’t suffer fools gladly. A week earlier a Globe and Mail reporter had written: “Talking with At-wood is like playing an interactive video game with a highly competitive and wily opponent.” “Famously prickly and formidable,” wrote another journalist. When the interviewer asked Atwood about the latter quote, she said that such a reputation may have been forged in the 1970s, when fiction writers—especially female fiction writers—were routinely asked rude and hostile questions. These included (Atwood dispatched them in the voice of an obnoxious radio hot-liner): I haven’t read your book. And I’m not going to! But why don’t you tell us in about 25 words what it’s about. ■ What’s the book about and why should anybody read it? ■ Do men like you? ■ When do you find time to do the housework? Said Atwood: “It was like, ‘Who do you think you are, writing these books? Eh?’” She laughed. “This doesn’t happen today, of course.” But she believed it could well happen to another, younger writer.

  3439. COFFEY, Edel. “Alias a Chronicler of a Future Dystopia.” Sunday Tribune 8 June 2003: 2. On the difference between science fiction and speculative fiction: “Science fiction to me means way out there, other planets or intelligent beings with eight legs, or things we have thought about theoretically but nobody has any idea of how to do, such as going from one dimension to another or ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’” she said, indulging in her low laugh, a kind of half-hearted but good-humored chuckle. “Speculative to me means that we could actually do it, we’ve done it somewhere on the planet of Earth, we have the tools.”

  Coffey notes that Oryx and Crake is her first novel that has a male narrator the whole way through. “Somebody said, ‘why a boy narrator’? And I said, how many girls do you know who spend endless hours playing video games? I actually clipped a piece from the paper yesterday where they were trying to study whether video games improved your visual acuity, and they could only find one girl; the rest were all boys. Girls go for things that involve relationships much more, which is why they will not relentlessly watch cricket, except as an accompaniment to husband.” Atwood added that she could understand the male point of view having grown up in “an all-male household—my dad was a boy, my brother was a boy and my mom was also a boy.”

  Coffey also remarks that if there is one thing Atwood is good at, it’s getting it right. She had one of her early books, which featured paleontologists, proofread by paleontologists, just to be sure. “Even my daughter gave me a piece of advice on a certain bit of swearing. I think it was supposed to be ‘what the fuck’ rather than ‘what in the fuck.’ A minor point.”

  3440. COMBS, Marianne. “Minnesota Opera Premiers The Handmaid’s Tale.” All Things Considered (National Public Radio) 12 May 2003. Available from Lexis-Nexis. Atwood one of several interviewed in connection with opera’s North American debut.

  3441. ______. “The Handmaid’s Tale: A Cautionary Opera.” Voice of America News 19 May 2003. Available from Lexis-Nexis. Transcript of story about opera presented by Minn
esota opera, which includes comments by Atwood.

  3442. COULSON, Sandra. “Atwood an Eclectic Interview.” London Free Press (ON) 18 June 2003: Section: Entertainment: D7. Interview in connection with Atwood’s upcoming visit to the city.

  3443. ECKLER, Rebecca. “How Can I Tell Her How I Feel: Meeting My Idol Gives Me First-Date Butterflies.” National Post 16 April 2003: Section: Arts & Life: AL: 2. Eckler and a friend meet Atwood at launch party for Oryx and Crake at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. Conversation goes as follows: “‘Hi, Ms. Atwood?’ I say. ‘My name is Rebecca Eckler. I’m a reporter with the National Post. I just wanted to tell you you’re the reason I wanted to become a writer.’ Phew. ‘Oh,’ says Atwood, staring at me with her ice-blue eyes, smiling thinly. Then…silence. This is why Atwood is the only person in the city who scares me. I’m not scared simply because I want to be her (or rather, that I want her talent) but because I’ve seen her interviewed many times and you just never know how she’s going to respond. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d walked away without saying anything.

  “Instead, she said, ‘Oh.’ ‘Yep,’ I continue. ‘I just, uh, wanted to let you know that.’ ‘Are you writing a novel now?’ she inquires. Asking an aspiring novelist if she’s writing a novel is like asking an aspiring mother who has no partner whether she is pregnant yet—a bit of pressure, a lot of regret, a feeling of ‘I have to get moving on that.’ I knew it would be wrong to tell her the truth—that I believed I was well on my way to winning the Giller Prize because I have recently purchased a new computer, a good first step toward writing a novel. Instead, I answer, ‘Well, no, I have this full-time job at the paper and everything.’ ‘So what do you write?’ she asks. Apparently, my hero has never read a word I’ve written. How could this be? Maybe I should get her a Post subscription. ‘Girl stuff,’ I answer, at the same moment my friend answers, ‘She writes about her sex life.’ Which isn’t exactly true. ‘That’s good,’ says Atwood. ‘If you have a sex life.’ This is also why I love Atwood. She is funny.”

  3444. ______. “Read Us a Story, Aunt Peggy.” National Post 10 September 2003: Section: AL: 5. Atwood comes over to Eckler’s apartment to read Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes to the pregnant Eckler and her dog Bogie. “‘Shut up now, dog,’ she says to Bogey. ‘I’m about to read here.’ (God, how can you not love a woman who tells a dog to shut up?) She begins. ‘Rude Ramsay resided in a ramshackle rectangular residence with a roof garden, a root cellar and a revolving door.’ She reads the book in its entirety, laughing when she stumbles on a couple of sentences. (You try saying, ‘Ramsay emerged into a resplendent realm. A ranch-sized garden with a river rippling through it revealed itself to his regard, rendering Ramsay rhapsodic.’) ‘I’ve never read to anyone’s stomach,’ she tells me afterward, ‘except my own when I was pregnant.’ I ask her if she enjoyed being a mother. ‘I loved it. Your life will never be the same again. You’ll get your brain back in about two years.’”

  3445. EICHLER, Leah. “Imperfect Timing.” CairnsPost / Cairns Sun (Australia) 24 May 2003: Section: Weekend Extra: 48. Coincidence of SARS events in Oryx and Crake.

  3446. EVERETT-GREEN, Robert. “Words into Music: Novelist Margaret Atwood and the Art of an Opera Librettist.” Opera Canada 44.2 (Summer 2003): 18-21.

  3447. FORTNEY, Valerie. “Apocalyptic Atwood: Author Takes on End of the World with Humour.” Calgary Herald 23 September 2003: B9. Interview in connection with Oryx and Crake.

  3448. GESSELL, Paul. “Atwood Takes a ‘Realistic’ Look at the Future in Chilling Novel.” Standard (St. Catharines, ON) 24 May 2003: E6. (832 w).

  3449. GOODLIFFE, Kim. “In Search of a Saving Grace.” Vancouver Sun 19 April 2003: Section: Mix: D7. On 11 September 2001, Margaret Atwood was working on Part Eight of her new novel, Oryx and Crake, while waiting for a flight to New York at the Toronto airport. Her response? “I stopped writing for a number of weeks. It’s deeply unsettling when you’re writing about a fictional catastrophe and then a real one happens. I thought maybe I should turn to gardening books, something more cheerful. But then I started writing again, because what use would gardening books be in a world without gardens, without books?”

  What motivated her to keep writing, after her first (and still unpublished) novel, Up in the Air So Blue, was simply this: She had another idea. “By the time that first [novel] was completely rejected by everybody, I’d already started a second one. In fact, the first one was rejected definitively in the restaurant at the top of Hotel Vancouver when I was living [in BC] in 1964 and 1965. The man there said, very nicely, ‘Do you think you could change the ending?’ And I very nicely said no. And he reached across the table and patted my hand and said, ‘Is there anything we can do?’ I said, ‘No, I’m fine.’” Her vision of the novel was already very firm.

  When asked if her perspective has changed as her awareness of aging changes, she didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely,” she said. “It’s the only point of aging. You get a new view….[W]hat you know is an accumulation of knowing lots of people, making mistakes, having successes, eating ethnic food. It’s why prophets and seers are depicted as old: They know the plot.”

  3450. JONES, Adrienne. “Margaret Atwood.” Australian Financial Review 5 December 2003: Section: Boss: 28. Questions focus on Atwood’s ideas about organizations and business. (2185 w).

  3451. KEENAN, Catherine. “She Who Laughs Last.” Sydney Morning Herald 3 May 2003: Section: Spectrum: 6. Phone interview with Atwood in Toronto about Oryx and Crake. “This engaging woman with the wicked sense of humour is not the Margaret Atwood of legend: stern, intimidating, giving short shrift to fools. I didn’t find her like that when I met her in person, either. Other journalists have also found her generous, helpful, and this is a constant, very smart. I suspect the latter is why she is sometimes depicted negatively, as she has answers for everything. In conversation she flits from the war in Iraq, to George Orwell, to Napoleon and to gene-splicing without missing a beat and she expects people to try to keep up, at least.”

  3452. KEMP, Peter. “Future Shock.” Sunday Star Times (Auckland) 4 May 2003: 27. Atwood interviewed in her Toronto home about the origins of Oryx and Crake. Originally published in Sunday Times (London) 20 April 2003: Section: Features: 5. (1749 w).

  3453. LANPHER, Katherine. “Talking Volumes: Margaret Atwood.” Minnesota Public Radio 9 May 2003. One-hour interview with Atwood, focusing on The Handmaid’s Tale is available at http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/programs/midmorning/listings/mm20030505.shtml (1 May 2006).

  3454. LINLEY, Boniface. “Our Fate in Her Hands.” Dominion Post (Wellington, NZ) 8 November 2003: Section: Features: 8. Report of discussion about Oryx and Crake on occasion of her book tour. “My book is quite cheery, because, first of all, it’s just a book,” she says. “You can choose to say, oh, it hasn’t happened yet. You can be like Scrooge—he wakes up, discovers it was all a dream and goes out and buys everyone turkeys. The other thing about my book is that at least it doesn’t tell you everyone’s happy. A book that tells you everyone’s happy—throw that against the wall!”

  3455. MADDOCKS, Fiona. “A Twist in the Tale: Margaret Atwood Is Dreading the UK Premier of Her Novel The Handmaid’s Tale—It Will Be a Shocking Theatrical Experience.” Evening Standard (London) 3 April 2003: 45. Interviewed in London before opening, Atwood remarked that The Handmaid’s Tale lends itself surprisingly well to operatic setting. “Because so much of it uses internal monologue, it actually works better as opera than as film. In cinema, unless you use voiceover, it’s hard to convey that what someone is saying may not be what they are thinking. In opera you can have soliloquies. Characters can come forward on stage and say things the rest of the cast can’t hear. And a sextet or trio, even when you can’t hear all the words, is an accepted way of allowing you into the minds of the characters. Ruders and Bentley have found a very effective way of disentangling the different layers of the book. Someone asked me the other day how they ended the opera and do you know I’ve c
ompletely forgotten.”

  3456. MARTIN, Deborah. “For Writer Atwood, ‘Stories Appear’: Man Booker Prize Winner to Speak, Read from Latest Chiller in S.A.” San-Antonio Express News 12 October 2003: Section: Culturas: 1J. Atwood interviewed before appearance in town. Commenting on Oryx and Crake, she noted that as disturbing as the book is, it’s also darkly funny, something she expects Texans to pick up on. “Texan people have a robust sense of humor; it’s hard to avoid,” she said. “That’s why I gave you a republic all your own in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Atwood has said that the story sprang into her mind so forcefully that she immediately started writing. That’s pretty much how it happens for everything she writes, she said: “Stories appear; there’s no other way of describing where they come from. Those are the only ones you write if you are an indolent person such as myself. Otherwise, it’s right to the hammock.” She also noted that she writes out her stories longhand, sometimes on spiral notepads, then transcribes them—not a simple task. She edits as she transcribes, then re-writes. When she can’t take the story any further, she knows she’s at the end. “You keep going until you don’t know what’s going to happen next, you don’t know which way the cat would jump. If you can’t go on, you can’t go on.”

  3457. MARTIN, Sandra. “Beyond Here Be Crakes.” Globe & Mail 19 April 2003: Section: Weekend Review: R1, 16. Interview in the Royal Ontario Museum.

  3458. McGLONE, Jackie. “Hand Made Tails from a Gene Genie.” Scotland on Sunday 27 April 2003: 3. On the occasion of the publication of Oryx and Crake. (1398 w).

  3459. O’HARA, Delia. “Global Warning.” Chicago Sun-Times 5 June 2003: Section: Features: 45. Interview conducted with Atwood by phone from England in anticipation of her visit to Chicago.