Atwood describes her writing path

Author Margaret Atwood spoke recently at Davidson College. Photo by Katie Scarvey, Salisbury Post.

By Katie Scarvey

kscarvey@salisburypost.com

Margaret Atwood spoke before a sold-out audience at Davidson College last Thursday as the school's annual Conarroe Lecturer.

Atwood was the eighth writer to be part of the school's "annual celebration of world-class writers," an apt description of the series by Joel Conarroe, the 1956 Davidson graduate for whom the series is named.

With her appearance, Atwood joined the ranks of Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Michael Cunningham, Annie Proulx, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Chabon and Russell Banks.

It seemed appropriate for the series to highlight a Canadian author during a year that the Winter Olympics are drawing plenty of attention to our neighbors to the north.

Atwood is from Ottawa, Ontario.

Among Atwood's most recent novels are "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood," apocalyptic works set in a future that has been diminished by human behavior.

A certain darkness permeates much of Atwood's fiction, but her sobering vision is always wrapped up in a cracking good story.

Her early fame came with the publication of "The Handmaid's Tale," a chilling feminist fable.

(I found it amusing that when Conarroe referred to it several times as "The Handmaiden's Tale," the woman surrounding me — most in Atwood's 70-ish age group — tut-tutted in disapproval. Atwood, when she took the stage, graciously ignored the error.)

Atwood told her audience in the Duke Family Performance Hall that she would speak about something she'd never spoken about before: "influences you didn't know were influences while you were having them."The first such influence she mentioned was her 11th grade English teacher.

Although this teacher, when asked about her former pupil's early promise, had replied, "She showed no particular talent," Atwood remembered her fondly. She was mesmerized by this woman, who had long, thin, floating hair and would recite Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn" with her eyes shut and arms outstretched.

She included the poem in "The Blind Assassin" (2000) as a kind of tribute to her teacher, Atwood said.

Unafraid to poke fun at her younger self, Atwood shared her early life plan: to churn out money-making stories during the day and devote her evenings to crafting works of staggering genius.

She tried her hand at writing True Romance stories. She described the typical True Romance cover: a woman crying, and in the background, another woman in the arms of a man.

The plots were "not difficult to devise," she said. One man might work in a shoestore while "the other rides a motorcycle." The woman makes the wrong choice and then "something happens on the sofa."

"It was done with dots," Atwood said. "'And then we were one, dot dot dot ...'"

"I could do the plots," Atwood said, "but I could not do the dots."

After that, she decided she wanted to be a journalist, but her parents "dredged up a real journalist," a distant family member, who told her that she'd be relegated to writing "ladies pages" and obituaries.

She decided to get a degree and teach English. After that, her plan was to run away to France, "become an absinthe drinker," get tuberculosis and die young like Keats, having written works of staggering genius in a garret.

She was talked out of that, she said, by one of her professors, Northrop Frye, the famous literary theorist, who said, "Why don't you go to graduate school? You would probably get more work done that way."

He turned out to be right, she said.

She went to graduate school at Harvard. She pointed out that at the time the Harvard English department didn't hire women, and that female undergraduates were not allowed to use the Lamont Library, which housed the modern poetry collection. An aspiring poet, she discovered a tiny cache of Canadian poetry volumes in the library females were allowed to use — which happened to be adjacent to the witchcraft and demonology sections.

"My lifelong interest in the Salem Witch Trials was born in those stacks," she said.

As she talked about the trials, some of her political views filtered in, as she remarked that as questionable as the trials were, the Puritans at least conducted them "in a regular manner."

"They did not allow torture to elicit confessions," she said — her implication clearly that a certain country to the south of Canada had actually devolved in certain ways from the 17th century Puritans.

She pointed out that the floor plan of the building she lived in while in graduate school — 6 Appian Way — showed up later in "The Handmaid's Tale," she said.

When "The Handmaid's Tale," came out, Harvard became "quite sniffy" and printed a disapproving review of it, she said. Eventually, though, they "came around."

Atwood also spoke about Canadian literature. In 1972, she wrote a non-fiction book called "Survival," with the goal of letting Canadians know that, yes, in fact a Canadian literature did exist.

During the question and answer period, a student asked her about social media, since Atwood is well-known for Twittering and blogging.

"You have no idea who your readers are, and no idea who people on Twitter are," she said.

That world, she said, "is like having fairies at the bottom of your garden," who pop up and make themselves known in unpredictable and mischievous ways.

She admitted that she couldn't "do that thing with my thumbs" and spoke disparagingly of her phone.

"I have a bad relationship with my phone and it has a bad relationship with me. We live in a state of mutual hostility."