Margaret Atwood’s Dancing Girls, “Lives of the Poets” #MARM2024

Julia is lying on the hotel bathroom floor with a nosebleed, a few hours before her literary reading, from her book of poetry, at an event in northern Ontario.

She jokes that she’s a “promising” poet, which means that her fee is lower than that paid to poets who have made good on their promise.

But she’s not laughing at her sub-standard accommodations with the clanging radiators running at full blast, and she wishes she was in the Holiday Inn instead.

There are two reasons why her location matters. First, she blames her nosebleed on the dry air in the hotel, but she also quips about the alien nature of Sudbury Ontario, a city in a crater formed by the impact of a meteor.

Sudburians didn’t appreciate all the jokes about the barren landscape. It had been “mining country” for nearly a hundred years by the time Julia describes it as the “nickel-smelting capital of the world” but, then, they got famous via their NASA connections. Astronauts in the Apollo 16 Moon Mission training program spent time in Sudbury in 1971, and you can still see the mark from the 1968-1970 Observation Site near Lake Laurentian.

First Photograph: The white painted X is a relic of the NASA era; the circular concrete platform, partially visible, provided stability on the rugged land. The site is about a fifteen-minute hike sloping upward on a dirt trail, but the shrubs and trees in these photos obscures the rise. If you know it’s there, you can tell by the treelines that there’s a chasm, but otherwise all the trees seem to blur together.

Second Photograph: This rock outcropping is also in the city’s South End, but not near the NASA site. It’s in the Moonglow Subdivision (not kidding!), and shows the terrain more clearly, and how it erupts throughout the city. There is a tiny bit of someone’s roof in the bottom LH corner, so between that and the smokestack near the top RH corner, you have a hint of scale. Bonus points if you can spot the heron, in silhouette, not far from the stack…the actual star of the photo.

Back in the story.

So, her location matters because Julia feels like she’s in the far-flung regions of the solar system, unable to breathe the air there.

But the second reason to note her location is where she is not: not at home in Toronto with her live-in boyfriend Bernie, who doesn’t answer their phone at the agreed-upon time and, instead, a woman whom Julia knows answers instead.

“Rock bottom in this room among the slagheaps, outer space, on the dead moon,” she observes, on this day in the life of a poet. You can hear the irony of the story’s title, the intentional snicker at the ordinary details of Julia’s life, against the backdrop of the Samuel Johnson 1781 classic (excerpt at the Poetry Foundation). Jess Walter had fun with this in his novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets too, poking at ideas about art and capitalism along the way.

This is one of the shorter stories in this collection—just fourteen pages long—and it begins and ends with blood, in a cold and bloodless landscape.

It’s possible to read it as a commentary on how women betray other women (Marika had been very friendly with Julia), on how men betray their lovers (Bernie took half of Julia’s arts grant to keep afloat the art gallery he’s opened, the same gallery where he spends time with Marika), and how we betray ourselves by overlooking the snags and instinct (from the point at which Marika told Julia she’d read her book, Julia felt something was up).

It’s possible to read this story as a thank-you note to all the betrayals in the world that inspired fiction, from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to Bergen’s The Matter with Morris.

And it’s possible to read the whole story as a fabrication in the mind of a lonely woman, with the habit of searching for stories in the everyday and feeling most alive in that moment of their imagining, whose boyfriend actually did have to leave town unexpectedly.

MARM 2024 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Training” (November 5)
Old Babes in the Wood, “My Evil Mother” (November 7)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 10)
Dancing Girls, “Lives of the Poets” (November 12)
Old Babes in the Wood, “The Dead Interview” (November 14)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 18)
Margaret Atwood’s 85^th Birthday (November 18)
Dancing Girls, “Dancing Girls” (November 19)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Impatient Griselda” (November 21)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 24)
Dancing Girls, “Giving Birth” (November 26)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Bad Teeth” (November 28)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

I like the idea of the multiple possibilities, but some readers are looking to fiction for resolution and the kind of security that comes with a declarative point.

Which do you prefer?

Aside: MA’s relationship with Sudbury expanded in ways likely unimagined when she wrote this short story, as this 2014 article summarises. Interesting to note that the dismantling of the Superstack (also visible in the photograph), which seemed imminent in their discussion, has not yet begun.