By STEVE PAUL
With Margaret Atwood coming to Kansas City soon for a library talk (Sept. 24), I thought I’d dredge up a couple of related old pieces. I had the opportunity to meet and interview Atwood in 1993 at the annual American Booksellers Association confab (now Book Expo) in Miami. Her novel The Robber Bride was coming out that fall and her publisher had sent me an early copy of the book—so-called advance review copies were not yet ready, so they sent me a dupe of the typed manuscript. I’ll concede that my reading of Atwood was rather conventional if not underwhelming from today’s perspective. Then again, the interview with her remains enlightening.
In talking about the essential status of mythology in contemporary story-telling, one of the driving forces of her writing, she illustrated:
“One of the founding stories of U.S. culture is the biblical quotation ‘by their fruits they shall know them.’ It was originally intended spiritually—you know good people by how they behave. But it was interpreted by the Puritans to mean you can tell good people by how rich they are, which is with us today. It underlies so much literature in this culture—the idea of sin and redemption.”
Find reproductions of the two pieces, published Nov. 14, 1993 in the Kansas City Star, in three images below.
In more recent years, I had the pleasure of encountering Atwood at the Key West Literary Seminar. She spoke again about myth and fable. In my memory she talked about the movie “Aquaman” as a product of myth. The movie had just recently come out and she suggested that she watched it so we wouldn’t have to. (I still haven’t gotten around to it.) One morning in Key West, we ended up at a Duval Street CVS at the same time, where I met her husband, the writer Graeme Gibson. He would die just months later, as I recall.
Atwood happens to make a cameo appearance in my biography-in-progress of William Stafford. This goes back a ways to Atwood’s years as an emerging poet and fiction writer (her first novel was published in 1969). Shortly after being named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress for 1970-71, what we now call the U.S. Poet Laureate, Stafford put Atwood’s name on a short list of writers he would like to host during his tenure. He wanted to make sure women were represented on what was very much a male-dominated field. Sure enough, one of the first reading programs Stafford hosted in the fall of 1970 brought together Atwood and Galway Kinnell.
In 2022 I wrote to Atwood to see what she might recall of the event and/or Stafford. She kindly replied, hand-writing her response on my original letter and sending it back to me:
“I was 30! A very minor figure! …I love Wm Stafford’s poetry in book form—but he was a big cheese and I was a very small cheeselet.”
And here’s a blog bonus: An audio recording of the reading can be found at the Library of Congress website. Find it here and enjoy:
