Apres-Breakfast with Canadian author Margaret Atwood at Josef

Apres-breakfast with Canadian author Margaret Atwood

By Kimberly Hiss
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 11th, 2008 issue

MICHAEL HEITMANN/The Prague Post

Diminutive Margaret Atwood is a literary heavyweight, with numerous awards for her novels, poetry and short stories, many inspired by fairy tales and myths.

Margaret Atwood was quite pleased with her hat. After sitting down to a bright courtyard table at Prague's Hotel Josef, she took her time putting it on, shaping 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, had arrived three days earlier to take part in the Prague Writers’ Festival along with her husband, author Graeme Gibson. She’d given a reading the night before and would participate in a discussion on the significance of the year 1968 — the festival’s theme — later that evening.

Over a breakfast of fresh fruit and coffee, Atwood spoke at a pace leisurely but specific, giving words like “cruel” the time to be two syllables. She laughed slowly and often, and was generous with her attention, rarely breaking eye contact.

Considering her extensive bibliography of novels (13 so far, including classics such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye), short fiction, nonfiction, poetry and essays, Atwood has done her fair share of talking about writing at readings and in interviews (plenty of which were packed into her festival itinerary). So she didn’t seem to mind wandering off the path of literary discussion to speak on the affairs of folk tale characters, finger puppets and Marlene Dietrich.

The Prague Post: You talked last night about participating in readings when you were starting out in the ’60s. What’s the importance of writers meeting in these kinds of forums?

Margaret Atwood: For young writers, they can sometimes make connections that might help them out. And I think younger writers tend to be more collaborationist. In my time, we certainly got involved in magazines and putting on public readings. So you get the abandoned warehouse, paint it black, stick in the tables and the bottles with the candles in them and have readings. Ours were on Tuesdays.

 TPP: What did you read?

MA: Rather bad poetry.

 TPP: Does your process ever have a collaborative component to it?

MA: It does once I’ve finished something. I wouldn’t call it collaboration; I would call it “first readers.” So 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? But 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 a given that I can’t type, so I used to employ a professional to redo my very messy manuscripts. It’s better now 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 newspapers, 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: It’s a discipline. You’ve got to say what you have to say in 900 words, and not 750 either. So 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. At that point he was known in German circles but of course the Nazis didn’t like him. And the Czech communist regime didn’t like him either.

 TPP: Have you been to the Kafka museum here?

MA: Yes, earlier. 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. There’s quite a bit of cup-making.

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 in 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 from that same folk world.

MA: I read opera librettos quite thoroughly as a young person, partly for their bizarre qualities. And yes, surrealism. In the beginning of the 19th century there’s this interest in local folklore materials. So a lot of things — operas, ballets — took their motifs from those newly resurrected 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 wicked stepmothers 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, nonetheless, they left in the skeletons falling down the chimney and people being put into red-hot barrels and rolled into the sea, and birds picking out your eyes — it's all in there. But in the ’50s it all came out, and they could only be about nice things — 12 dancing princesses, Sleeping Beauty. And therefore the first 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: Women have a lot of dying roles in operas.

MA: Yes, but you have to factor in the role of the diva. The 19th-century diva had quite a lot of influence and they loved those dying scenes — they were very popular with the public and you got to show your stuff as a singer. Composers could be very interactive with their female singers, so there was some of: I want to die in the end; write that. Men often get blamed for killing off all these women, but, well, talk about collaboration.

TPP: Is music a part of your writing process?

MA: No, when I’m listening to music I can only listen to music. It can’t be background wallpaper. We listen to a lot of music in the car.

TPP: Like what?

MA: Well, right now we’re going through all of Beethoven with various people playing the same piece and seeing how different they are. But we can listen to almost everything, I would say. 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 auto harp. 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.

TPP: I once took a writing class that said suffering was a prerequisite for creation. What do you think about that tortured artist approach?

MA: I think they’ve got it backward. Any healthy animal avoids suffering as much as possible. Sure, you will suffer; everybody does unless they’ve a heart of stone. But to tell kids they have to go out and suffer first and then they’ll be creative — that’s just cruel. And it makes you self-conscious: Am I doing my suffering right? How’s my suffering?

As I say, you can’t teach anybody to be a writer; you can help them if they are. But you can’t take somebody who isn’t one and cram them into a mold. Some people suffer a huge amount and never create anything. Suffering will happen anyway, you don’t have to go get extra, gosh. In the meantime you should have as much fun as possible.