A couple of people chose to read Hag-Seed for MARM this year, which reminded me of this discussion (which you can view, alongside) from the 2018 Stratford Festival Forum: In Conversation With Margaret Atwood—“The award-winning Canadian author, essayist, poet and activist returns to the Forum for a candid conversation with Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino.

For the first four weeks of MARM this year (first, second, third, fourth), I posted about writers whose early works garnered Margaret Atwood’s admiration and support. This week, I’m focussing not on the way that Margaret Atwood has engaged with the work of an emerging author, but the way in which she has engaged with a well-established author whose work overlaps and aligns, thematically and, to some extent, stylistically too. There have been instances in which writers have viewed the decision of other writers to tell stories that seem similar to their work as an affront, a challenge more personal than it was (likely) intended, rather than embraced the idea that varied points-of-view encourage problem-solving.

Many reviewers (and possibly publicists) referred to The Handmaid’s Tale in discussing Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God.  The Canadian paperback edition is crowned with this declaration via the American NPR reviewer Maureen Corrigan: “A streamlined dystopian thriller…Erdrich’s tense and lyrical new work of speculative fiction stands shoulder-to-braced-shoulder right alongside The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Certainly in this conversation, Atwood as interviewer leaves a space for Erdrich to discuss just how wide-ranging her reading has been during the course of her lifetime (even though the editorial note that introduces their conversation also suggests that Atwood’s story was an influential factor in Erdrich’s work—Atwood doesn’t assume that Erdrich read The Handmaid’s Tale and thought Oh, I can do better than that).

Instead, here’s what Erdrich counts as influential:

“I loved Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and other books about social devolution. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (the loss of humanity with new developments in cloning). P. D. James’s The Children of Men (no babies at all). The Book of Joan, by Lidia Yuknavitch. Everything by Ursula Le Guin, including the world of Always Coming Home. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is about sexual shape-shifting. I love the [Frank Herbert] Dune trilogy, which is about lineage and interbreeding on a desertified, jihad-wracked, earthlike world. Also: Octavia Butler. Lilith’s Brood is a visionary work filled with sensuous tension and dark humanity. Her series of novels—Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (all part of Lilith’s Brood)—is about what happens when humanity is rescued from annihilation by a race of gene-splicing aliens who fall in love with us.”

You can catch glimpses of all of these in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017).

In some ways, her dystopian novel is what you would expect: “This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.”

In other ways, it’s a story with particular relevance to indigenous readers: “Eddy tells me that his book is basically an argument against suicide. Every page contains a reason not to kill yourself.” [I’m immediately reminded of Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers.]

In some ways, it is dystopian: “…I haven’t done badly with being stuck indoors. Sometimes I’m good at living within limitations. Besides, after all is dark and silent in the street, we go out, all three of us.”

In other ways, it is about the present-day, a story about survivability, towards which indigenous people have had to strive, in the wake of and presence of genocidal policies and practices: “I really have no proficiency at simply experiencing the present. But since the past is so different from the future that to think back at all is like looking down the wrong end of a telescope, and since the future is so disturbing that to give in at all to my imagination is enough to cause a full-blown panic attack, it is really best for our mutual health if I stay focused on what is most immediate.”

What makes Erdrich’s novel particularly remarkable is the way that the structure of her story reflects and contains indigenous beliefs and philosophies.

It’s not uncommon to have dystopian stories consider matters of fertility and societal control of women’s reproductive capacity (and the link with present-day reality continues in the courts of southern U.S. states today).

“Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won’t surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part. What if some of those silenced genes were activated? I don’t know how, but what if they were? And they decided to restore us to some former physical equilibrium?”

But she works time and other concepts of time directly into the novel, in the context of the story exploring both the idea of a fetus’ development in a separate world, outside of time, and the idea of a fetus’ development in a separate world, OF time. This has a disorienting effect on the shape of the narrative:

“…I am lost in contemplation. I have that sense of time folding in on itself, the same tranced awareness I experienced in the ultrasound room. I realize this: I am not at the end of things, but the beginning.”

In the context of indigenous storytelling, many of these crafting decisions make sense. In the context of more mainstream dystopian stories, the arc feels distinctly different (Erdrich has enjoyed great success and has a mainstream publisher, but most of the fiction I’ve read that contains elements of indigenous mythology has been via independent presses).

So we have Cedar: “Turning around to the beginning. Maybe that’s not the same as going backward.”

And we have a mythological creature that reminds me of the water panther Mishibijiw (also a hybrid animal like the one Cedar sees flying in the trees, with wings and scales—a panther with scales, one of the most powerful creatures of the underworld, considered the counterpart of the Thunderbird, creature of the air).

We also have an ordinary story of grandmothers and lakes that freeze too quickly, of road trips and fractured relationships.

Like Ann Patchett and Alice Walker, like Stephen King and Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood is one of those writers who speak as often about reading as they do about writing. (Both Louise Erdrich and Ann Patchett are also booksellers too!) The books they read nourish the words they write and the worlds they imagine. And, in this digital age, their recommendations swell our TBR lists and plans. This is how one story leads to the next.

And you? Have you read Louise Erdrich? Are you reading Margaret Atwood with MARM in mind?