Today, Margaret Atwood turns 82. For those who wish to celebrate her birthday, consider adding a candle to your favourite treat, and watching this video (in the column alongside), when she sat down with Tom Power on her 80th in 2019.
It’s a quick-fix time-travel device, YouTube, isn’t it? The kind of trick that Ian Williams was longing for, when he moved from Vancouver to Toronto recently.
His essay “Four to Eighteen Days” (included in Disorientation, which was nominated for the Writers’ Trust Award this year) is titled for the range of time that his moving company claimed it would take to transport his belongings from.
Some time prior, a literary festival holding a celebratory event and pairing authors online for a discussion, asked for his dream interviewee, and he named Margaret Atwood; the interview was scheduled to take place shortly after his move was expected to be complete.
But the process took longer than expected. (Aside: I’m not sure that ANYthing in my October made me laugh as hard as his imagined one-star review for this moving company, which is also included in this book. I howled.) And the interview takes place against such a stark background that Margaret Atwood is compelled to enquire about his surroundings.
“As I explain the moving situation, she gets progressively more disturbed by the course of events. Her line of questioning is insistent, her attention dizzying—downright disorienting.” (Now would be an appropriate time to remind you that this essay appears in Disorientation: Being Black in the World.)
“She is not loud or forceful in the least, but when her attention is on me, I am unable to steer the conversation away from her curiosity. Hers is the kind of magnetism where you are not so much captivated as held captive until she decides to release you.”
They get into the nitty-gritty, the details the service providers had promised. An inventory is required. What he has and what he lacks.There’s talk of an onion. She makes sure he’s got food. Later, Williams writes: “People want Atwood to blurb their books, to retweet them, to say they’re geniuses, to bless them and their children.” He wants something else.
The essay also describes the event, the interview that does—eventually—happen. Part of me wishes I could have attended. Part of me feels like his description is even better. All of me enjoys the screen-caps, which seem to support both positions simultaneously.
“In screenshots of the event, she is pale against a black background. I am dark against a white wall. She looks like a still from a film. I like that I’m trapped in a passport photo.” I feel like I can hear him laughing in his near-passport photo and hear the smile in her voice.
This reminds me of another book that appears in Margaret Atwood’s Twitter timeline more than once: Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation (2020). It opens with an airport scene and a flight, during which she has a challenging discussion about race and privilege, with a white man who is returning from Cape Town while she is returning from Johannesburg.
This is one of several liminal spaces in Rankine’s book, which astutely represent the between-ness of her own position—privileged enough to travel in first-class for her work, but so precariously perched that she might be openly challenged by white people who can’t imagine she’s a first-class traveller.
Photographs, excerpts of documents, tweets, excerpts (one of my favourite Audre Lorde essays is spliced into “ethical loneliness”, for instance): this magpie approach illustrates the systemic constructions that Rankine seeks to explore and expose beautifully.
She writes: “To create discomfort by pointing out facts is seen as socially unacceptable. Let’s get over ourselves, it’s structural not personal, I want to shout at everyone, including myself.”
Is this an American Conversation? Perhaps. But Rankine asks universal questions. “How to understand all our looking away?” she writes. This volume provides another opportunity to look, to see. It’s longer than Citizen and its pages are glossy—it confirms and secures my interest in her work.
Next week? One of the books that she recommended in a Twitter thread, early in 2020, when readers were looking for recommendations, whether for information and escape…this one was recommended as an escape.
I have a subscription to the Wordfest channel so I need to go watch that interview between Atwood and Williams, it sounds hilarious. I am so intrigued by this moving company, especially because I want to make sure I never use them. 4 to 18 days! My lord.
Let me know if it’s as much fun as it sounds!
The William’s essay sounds fascinating. I can’t help but wonder what it must be like to sit down with Margaret Atwood and talk to her, interview her. She is a mesmerising presence even through a screen, one on one would be incredible and maybe a little intense.
It intrigued me that she was his first choice, his dream interview, because she has a reputation here for “not suffering fools gladly”, for calling out journalists who haven’t prepped for interviewing, and for responding in kind when something is foul. At one reading I attended, she outright asked a questioner if he had read the book he had stood up to criticise and, when he said he had not, that was the end of that “discussion”.
I am very clearly commenting in the right spot… I double and triple checked – we’ll see where it ends up. Ha!
Your mention of glossy pages makes me think about the impossibility of saving glossy-paged books from a soaking, which I just read about in The Library Book.
Your post makes me want to read Ian William’s essay, but also to watch the interview with him and MA. I’m guessing it’s not possible since you didn’t provide a link. I love what he says about being held captive until she decides to release you. I can totally picture that.
My plan was to have my MARM post ready for the 18th, in time for her birthday, but I’m not very surprised that didn’t happen. I have finished reading my book, though, and hopefully it’ll be up by the end of the month!
Your obsessive checking and re-checking seems to have paid off!
I want to read The Library Book too. I’ve borrowed it on audio a couple of times, but just couldn’t get into it that way.
See Anne’s comment re: rubbing it in. You have to have paid access to Wordfest to have “attended” the interview (and I’m not entirely sure it’s remained online for viewing later, beyond the festival dates..maybe she’ll come back to brag). 😛 😀
The passages in the essay about her reflect her patterns of speech and tone perfectly. Of course, Disorientation is much more than this single essay-just as, in the broader context of his life, this horrendously slow and irritating move will become a single, small inconvenience in time-definitely worth reading, and I think you’d appreciate it in particular, for his ideas about belonging and identity.
This reminds of a conversation I listened to this week between MA and Paul Holdengraber which actually took place a few years ago, such fun to listen to the two of them! Claudia Rankine is a brilliant thinker and writer, definitely someone to listen closely to on pretty much any topic she chooses.
That sounds great! Here’s the link for others who might also be interested: https://lithub.com/margaret-atwood-on-magic-technology-and-changing-the-world/
Seems like I’ll need to get on to Disorientation!
I think you might enjoy his poetry and short fiction too, if you’ve not already read them?
Only Reproduction at this point.
You started with the longest!
The Williams essay sounds fascinating, and unlike Bill, I have a curiosity about author events even as I acknowledge the ‘show’ that is inherent in the whole process. I was lucky to see Atwood in conversation in Sydney in Feb 2020. It had a very sad tone as it was her first trip back to Australia since her husband had died, so there was some reminiscing about previous trips. It was also just as Covid was starting to feel real. This talk now feels like a lifetime ago in a completely different world. I wish I had taken more notes. I wish I had Willams’ ability to do so!
Part of her final tour with her husband is in the documentary film about her, A Word after a Word. Beautifully done. (It’s streaming on Hulu now, apparently, though I’m not sure if that streaming service operates in Australia?) I used to attend a number of events locally (it was one of the main draws for me to move to Toronto, the literary scene) and always took notes, but sometimes it was a marker of a very good and engaging event to not have many notes!
That Williams essay sounds wonderful! And isn’t Rankine’s book fantastic? Library Journal sent it to me before it was published and I had to write a no more than 200 word review about it. That was a challenge!
Oh my, that would be very hard to summarize in that number of words. My shortest regular gig is 350 and I have a hard time with that. And apparently LJ doesn’t pay reviewers? Looks good on a librarian’s resume though? And, well, you get a copy of the book which, in this case, would be a real pleasure to have at hand for rereading.
Tom Power has made me realise what a tiny island I live on – basically I could move anywhere and expect my belongings delivered in a day, two at the most. Four to eighteen days and I’d think they were bringing it by hand 😀
Good point! Poor service aside, it’s a journey that takes just over 40 hours to drive (via the northern part of the United States, which means fewer mountainous and lakeish delays, I believe) and a distance of approximately 4400 kilometres. Apparently at its widest, England is about 500 km across. There’s my fact learned for the day!
Happy birthday, MA!
*offers slices of celebratory cake*
Disorientation sounds wonderful, although the move does not!
I should likely have clarified that, in time, his belongings are delivered!
Thank you! I will pop over and check the video out!
Something to watch whilst tidying your bookshelves!
I find the people-ness of authors to be distracting, and to be honest, annoying. Which of course is dishonest of me, because I expect their fiction to be autofiction, and their autofiction to be authentic, and how could I know unless I knew, or knew of, authors as people. But for those people to then be expected, not least by us, to be performers is beyond bearing.
I admit I do read Margaret Atwood’s bio into her books and her books into her bio, and I suppose she might say she has the right to present that bio to me personally in person. But I don’t do person to person, not even via the screen. Ms Atwood I know you’re out there, I’m sure you do good works. I’ll read about them just as soon as I have time.
It’s convenient that you so handily point out the contradictions yourself. Not saying that you’re the only contradictory person, of course-we all are. Part of me likes the 19th-century idea of author-ship, scribbling alone in a garret and, if female, submitting and publishing under a male-sounding pseudonym. keeping a distance. But another part of me has found the public appearances of authors very encouraging, sometimes offering a sense of kinship (as hearing Nalo Hopkinson read from her debut, Brown Girl in the Ring, in the ’90s, when it was unusual for a woman living on the margins to put such a character at the heart of a sci-fi story) .or, useful advice even, like Welwyn Wilton Katz talking about the importance of resilience, being able to go forth in the face of regular and seemingly relentless rejection (though she was talking about rejection of her work writing for children, I found that very comforting as a young writer, to know that an established author who’d won some major CanLit prizes had been rejected often).