#573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More

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Take a look. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then I also do post some questions. Now it's in the time. My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal mental skeleton. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and gers, this is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job every episode to deconstruct

World class performers to try to tease out the habits, mental frameworks, lessons learned. life stories that you can somehow apply to your own lives. And my guest today is a living legend. I have been wanting to interview her for So long, probably more than a decade, Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Dearly, her first collection of poetry in over a decade was published November 2020. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the long waited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. Now an award winning TV series. I believe in 2017 it was the most read book across all of Amazon, at least so Amazon. reports. She's won more prizes than I can possibly list out. Her other works of fiction include Cat's Eye, Finalist for the nineteen eighty nine Booker Prize, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada. And the Premio Mondello in Italy, the blind assassin, winner of the two thousand Booker Prize.

The Mad Adam trilogy in Hag Seed William Shakespeare's The Tempest Retold. Margaret's work has been published in more than 45 countries and she is the recipient of numerous awards, as mentioned, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the Penn Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovators Award. Burning questions, a collection of essays from two thousand four to two thousand twenty one. will be published in March of this year, twenty twenty two, that is.

Practical Utopias, an exploration of the possible an eight week live online learning experience will run later this year, and Margaret is heavily involved. You can find her online at margaret atwood.ca on Twitter at Margaret Atwood on Instagram, the realmargaretwood. That would And without further ado, please enjoy a conversation that turned out even so much better than I possibly could have hoped. With Margaret?

That would. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this today. And I've been looking forward to it.

Well, my pleasure. We're gonna bounce around quite a bit. I will make sure that we touch on burning questions and uh certainly practical utopias, but I have so many questions about just your life and life energy. And we can come at it from so many different directions. I want to begin with a few questions, if it's okay with you, from someone on my team who is a Huge fan of yours. And

It relates to you're writing or if it's a creative process and In the research that I've done It seems like you tend not to outline books before you start writing them. At least the quote that I have here is never map it out, just get into it, jump in like going swimming, is that accurate? That's pretty right.

Yes, you you have to factor in the the going swimming part is about a very cold lake. So we're not talking about Florida here. Or pools. We're talking about screaming. Right and screaming. Right.

When you sit down to write and this is her question, one of her questions, do you know at the start whether it will be poetry or prose or a specific project? Yeah, I do know that. Yeah. I actually do know that and poetry is more Likely to be written on the run.

Or on the fly and not necessarily sitting down. Could you expand on that, please? Well, you know, I I write I always write poetry in in something called cursive. You may have forgotten about that. I know cursive. Apparently they're not always teaching cursive to young people, so we're gonna have a whole generation who don't know how to sign their names. They'll only know how to print their name.

Um Anyway, yes, cursive which we were all taught in school was scratching. Little metal nibs that you dipped in ink wells. You probably didn't do that'cause they probably had ball points by your day. I used ballpoints.

But my grandfather was an actual well, he was in part a calligrapher, so I spent a lot of time around inkwells. Extremely classy. Very classy. Yes, I've bought several Calig Review sets intending to use them, but Tim, I haven't used them yet. But I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to do that. If we look at the poetry and the prose, do they come from different places within yourself? Do they have a different feeling? It's my theory, but you can't ever test it out or without great cruelty.

Well guess what? Cats don't write poetry. Or anything else. So it has to be people that you would practice the great cruelty on. So you would have to wire up their heads.

And you can wire up their heads for novels no problem because you know novels it's Ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. So you actually have to work at writing novels. It's called work. You have to sit down, it's like a job. You have to put in the hours. But with poetry it's exactly the opposite. You don't know. When something may strike you and that's why poets are so annoying.

to people who are not poets because they'll be looking out the window. And you'll say, Could you please mow the lawn and they'll say Don't interrupt. No, no. Go away.

I mean it can be very annoying. We understand why poets often have quite interesting lives, but I was lucky to be able to do both, so people think I'm moderately sane. In the bell curve of poets. And novelists with let's say

Well I don't know. I mean I guess a lot of novelists drank a lot too, but Let us say that. Poets are often Let's say their life trajectory is frequently more erratic. than that of novelists.

How can we put this gently? And especially female poets. I mean, it was just assumed in the in the fifties that they were sort of Crazy. You don't seem crazy to me.

Well, I'm not, but and you know, I'm I'm the living demonstration that this isn't true, but It's my theory that's not. Poetry comes from a different part of the brain and the part that's More closely allied to patterning.

music, mathematics. Like that. Whereas novels come from the part that is more closely associated with um gossip. Gossip. Uh telling stories about people.

Telling stories about just about anything. And narrative. So this happens, that happens, this happens, that happens. And that goes all the way back to, for instance, Homer. So you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, you can see that there's a narrative Approach.

Very useful. The Iliad starts in the middle of things. And tell a lot of novels, so you've got several ways. You can start. You can start at the beginning and go on until you reach the end, or you can start in the middle. Or you can start at the end and then go back and pick it up, but Poetry, lyric poetry is different. Epic poetry is more like novels.

It's got lots of stories in it. So my thing about the Odyssey is that it's you know all those Westerns in which They were holding the fort and the cavalry was riding to the rescue. Yes. So the people in the fort didn't know that. And the cavalry didn't know it was happening in the fort. So you've got a lot of Tension.

So that's the Odyssey. So here comes Odysseus, nobody knows where he's been all these years. And there's Penelope holding out. And just as she's about to give in, he turns up. In disguise. You know, a lot of stories involve in disguise.

Then we go on from there with a a great finale. Do you feel like Poetry. Enables you Or enlivens you in a way that fuels the pro's work.

In other words, is there a synergistic relationship for you between having both of those outlets or vehicles? Yeah, so why do I do that? Because nobody told me not to. There weren't any Once upon a time, Tim, a long, long time ago, and you aren't gonna believe this, but there were no creative writing schools. I believe it. So essentially it was open season. You could do whatever you want you wanted and There weren't people saying you have to do either this or that. There were no people like that.

So we just did whatever. And it seems to have been true that I will have written poems about something and then some years later that will turn up and Some other form. So for instance I wrote

Some poetry and In which this character called Grace Marks makes an appearance and then Some years later I wrote a television play about that. Back when television was still black and white. You don't remember that, Tim?

I do I don't. It's true. There's so many things you don't remember. So it was black and white and I was using only one source for that,'cause this is an historical person. And the person who had been writing about Grace had got a lot of things wrong. So I did the play. For television.

And then years passed. A number of years passed, maybe about twelve years. And there I was In Switzerland.

It would be Switzerland. You know, home of Carl Young. And I started writing this Peace and prose and I thought, so who is this? It's Grace Merks.

And she's dissatisfied with the job I did in that play. She wants me to go back and take another look. So this time we went to a lot of sources, not just the one. And we found this extremely Interesting story because it was it was several stories and there was no resolution.

You know, we never actually found out through the historical record whether Grace Marks had murdered anybody or not. So I'm I wrote a novel called Alias Grace and then that gets turned into a Netflix series, mini series by Sarah Pauley. And Sarah Pauley is an actress.

director, producer, scriptwriter who wrote to me when she was seventeen years old and said, I have to do this. She was seventeen. I said um I'm so cute. But she did it, finally. She said it only took me like twenty years. And she did a great job of it. So that's that's that story. So yeah, started as a poem. Turned into a television play, turned into a novel, and then turned

Back into a television series only this time. A more accurate one. I'm already having so much fun. I have to ask you I'm gonna put all of my questions aside. I have this I have Just pages and pages of notes and plans and research and I'm gonna push it all aside for a second just to ask What are the things that you do

If anything, maybe it's just out of the box genetics, you could speak to that too. Two maintain such a Vital life Energy at eighty two years.

Yeah. because I'm looking for any playbook, and I don't know how much of it is nature versus nurture, but I would just love any Any tips from the field because I've been impressed with watching videos of you certainly. It's entirely more impressive to be having the conversation with you.

What are some of your other activities or things that you do. Let's begin with the genetics. My mom lived to ninety seven. My dad not quite so long, eighty six.

But my Mum was very They were both very curious about things. So there's always something new coming along. And um you may have may have noticed that I

Dabble in those things from time to time. Because I'm interested in them. I I want to know how they work. I want to know There's a good and a bad for every human technology that we make. I wanna know What's the upside and what's the downside?

Cost benefit, but also what are What are people using this for because it it's so frequently that We invent something for one purpose and then People find a whole different purpose for it.

Or lots of purposes. For instance Velcro I invented Velcro had no idea what it was for. But now we know it's for putting on your shoes, Tim.

So curiosity, yep, genetics curiosity. And if you want to go to the astrology, we can do that too. Oh wow. You know, I didn't see that coming, but yes. Let's go to the astrology.

Of course you didn't. Yeah, so what do I know about astrology? Because a long, long time ago Yeah. I was in English literature. And I was a Victorianist.

And uh one of the things that you had to know for the kind of English literature that I was in at that time, which began with Anglo Saxon and ended with T S Elliot was people's world views. And especially as you get into the Renaissance. That's what people believed. They believed in astrology, they believed in palmistry, which is connected. And therefore

It was interesting to know about things because you could see you could for instance look at a Portrait, a Renaissance portrait. And look at the f rings on the fingers. Because what fingers those rings were on meant something. to the people looking at the picture.

And the positions of the hands meant something, so Like this. You see a lot of saints going like this. Let me see if I can show you. Yeah. So it's sort of all facing. Well no, it's the little finger. Oh, I'm a little bit separate from my hand.

I see, I see. We do that too, you know. Oh, this is the the Vulcan We go uh live live well and prosper. Uh

Yes, exactly. Yeah, so our hand gestures still mean things, but Or hand gestures. Have changed. Over the years. Anyway, back into the Renaissance. They believed in astrology.

And that's when the tarot cards arise. So if you were studying T S Elliot, you had to know something about the tarot because it turns up in the wasteland. So lucky me I had somebody called Yetskabisma living below me and when I was living in a

You know, an apartment. And she was from Holland. And she was studying Hieronymus Bosch. The painter. And it was her

Thesis back in nineteen sixty nine that these Funny little figures and Hironimous Bosch's weird paintings. Were not figments of his Freudian subconscious, but they were astrological symbols.

So she said about Demonstrating that and during the long cold Edmonton winter nights. When nobody went out. Because it was very slippery and cold. And people's car tires froze in squares. Yet Sabezman taught me astrology and pomistry.

So I know those things. So if you want to do the astrology, we can go there, Tim. I do. Well th with that type of lead in I can't I can't say no. Okay. All I need to tell you is Gemini Rising.

And you will know what that means. I will not know what that means. I need a footnote. Okay. Very curious, Tim. Very curious. And A bit flighty. Mm. So do you identify then with your Gemini arising assessment? Would you agree with the

astrological read. Well it kind of doesn't matter whether I agree or not. It is what it is. I just throw it out there for you because you wanted an explanation as to why I'm always sticking my nose into things. And what keeps me going. So What keeps me going is you never know.

And the other thing that keeps me going is Don't open that door. Why not? I'm gonna open the door. Is the you never know a reference to why not trying something new? Is that what that means, or does it mean something else? Yes. It means that. Exactly. It means that. So Just to go a little deeper into the astrology, the

Governing Planet of Gemini. Mm-hmm. Hermes. Okay, otherwise known as Mercury.

And what is Hermes the god of I was gonna say handbags, but I don't have my mythology. No, handbags get they get into it. They get into it. There's a reason it's gone. Okay. Thieves, jokes, money, communications. Travel? He's the opener and closer of doors. The garter of sacreds.

also the revealer of secrets and the only one of the gods that can go down to the underworld and return from it. So he is the conductor of souls to the underworld. And as you'll recall Him.

From the end of the Odyssey when uh when Odysseus shoots all these people. It shoots a lot of them, really. Good shot. It is Hermes who conducts these souls to the underworld. He's what we call a psychopomp, a conductor of souls to the underworld.

So people in my Configuration are very interested in plumbing. Yeah. Underwear.

Thieves, criminals. Secrets and anything that's buried. Mm. Like that. So that's where the curiosity comes in. Let's dig this up.

Let's stick this up. Well, you mentioned Hermes and uh you know, aside from the handbag reference, which was only partially joking. That's pretty good. Hermes. Hermese governed money. I mean it all makes sense. Yeah, for those people listening who are offended, or Mace, I get it. But the opening and closing of doors, the opener and closer of doors, it made me think of a book that I really enjoyed called Trickster Makes This World. Great book. I know the author. Yeah. Oh really? Lewis Hyatt. So I loved that book. Well, have you read The Gift? His first book.

The gift didn't grab me in the same way, although I know many, many, many people who would put that up in their top three, five books in terms of influence in their lives. So I should probably give it another shot. Well, I think Trickster makes this world as is more pertinent to you. Oh. As a trickster. Yes. I like this is this is a business that you're in. You're you're in the That side of the Hermes constellation. So the gift on the other hand is very useful for people going into the arts.

Because it differentiates quite clearly the world of commerce. From the world of the arts. Although if you're in the arts You may get your inspiration as a gift, but at some point you have to go through the valley of the shadow of commerce. Um to get to the other side where your your thing, whatever it is, turns back into a gift in the hands of the

Recipient, say the ideal reader. So you write the book that's in the world of gift. It then gets turned into this thing with pages and everything. And it gets something called sold. So it's in the world of commerce.

But somebody who then reads your book on the other hand and loves it doesn't say Uh well I didn't get twenty two ninety five worth out of this book. I mean some people do, but usually they don't say that. They might say that about an automobile that they bought, you know, they're The seat belts don't work. I want you to fix'em. You did that with things that you have bought.

But things that you have received as a gift, you do not do that too. You do, however, have obligations towards gifts. You need to Pass them on, you do not keep them, you need to Either give somebody else a gift. Or pass on the gift that you have received in some way.

So I do recommend it if you want to understand some of the odd ways of artists. I did very much enjoy the sections I did read about gift economies and the circulation. of gift. Exactly. And I I do want to say though that I think Trickster makes this world applies to you as well. And the reason I say that is there's a term used in that book that I very much loved and I highlighted I think the description was related to coyote as one of the archetypes here, but as a boundary walker.

And I view you also as a as a boundary walker between the the present and the possible. I've in the course of doing research for this conversation read about the different ways we could look at the semantics of, say, science fiction. on some other planet with creatures never before seen versus, say, speculative fiction Where you're taking something that exists or is in the process of it becoming and then taking it a few steps out. And you seem to be a master of that, which would make you a master, in my mind, of boundary walking. And I'm just I'd love to hear

What you think has led you and this also made me think of how some people describe you as clairvoyant when you were discussing the astrology and the palmistry because of your adeptness in this boundary area. What types of questions Or what types of structured thinking or observation lend themselves to your ability to write speculative fiction.

Okay. You might say. The lack of the qualities that make it difficult for me to write science fiction. Sure. Which I read a lot of. Plus uh dragons, you know, I'm keen on dragons. Uh but I just cannot do them. So there are some things that you can do that you have the ability to do, and other things that you may admire, but you cannot do

So Dragons outside my range of capabilities in any way or so Lukay Legwin has kind of sewn up dragons. She call it sort of the dragon franchise. That's true I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, so Game of Thrones the the dragons are basically sort of like bazooka's But her her dragons have a great intellect and different powers and other things that Are usually attributed to dragons. In the English tradition, but they are in the Chinese tradition.

We could go on about that, but we won't today. No, you wanted to know. Sort of what's behind it. Yeah, what's behind this becket of fiction? What makes you good at it?

I grew up in the fifties as a teenager and I read a lot of those things. At that time. So I read nineteen eighty four just after it came out. So I read it in the paperback version with the typically sleazy cover of the early fifties they put classics into these quite

What shall we say about those covers? Uh they were um They made you think that you were buying a really trashy book. So I think a lot of people got enticed into reading like War and Peace and things because they thought it was about Ladies and negligence lying on that. Not much really.

So my copy of nineteen eighty four had this woman with an enormous cleavage in the foreground and and a guy standing behind her looking down her front. Which does get in there a bit. But that's not the general import. Of the book. So

I mainlined all of those books. I've I read Ray Bradbury a lot. You'll notice that I ended up writing in one of his obits. Like for the guardian. I went to Comic Con for the first time because we thought we were on our way to see Ray. But unfortunately it died before we got there. So we ended up having a memorial service at at Comic Con for

Ray Bradbury, one of the great inventors. In several fields, really. So read all of those things. John Wendham, I was reading In the fifties. And I think what you read as a teenage person often goes on to

influence what you are then Writing when you're able to. You know, when you have the skills. So I think I had it in my mind for a while. I would like to write a A nineteen ninety four only with women.

Like that. So meanwhile along comes Ursula K. And a number of other people that I was Following So really it's partly what you're drawn to and partly what you have the skill to do.

That's why I say I can't do dragons. Well, I can't do dragons or speculative fiction, so you have me beat I can't do podcasts, you know. Well, you know, podcasts are just ephemera in the mist. I think you that your your works will have much more permanence, but I can hope. I can hope that some day the audio will have the same get locked in the amber in the same way that words are. I'm sure it will.

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Terms and conditions do apply. I want to go back in time from your teenage years. I've read about your experience of growing up in a cabin in the woods and some of the benefits of that, the lack of distractions giving you the concentration that perhaps helped you become a writer later and so on. I'm Thinking about having kids in the very near future.

And I fantasize about living in the woods because I feel most at home in the woods. Were there any downsides Would you say? Oh, which ones are you thinking of, Tim? Any word of wood. I like Varied terrain. So I prefer something that isn't flat. So we could think American West. We could think upstate New York. We could think British Columbia in certain locations.

I would prefer not to hear or see any neighbors. I would like to have lots of Uh Trails. that I can explore with my dog or dogs or

Family and running water Of some type. and a lake or a pond, having access to both of those, or one of those at least. That is my I grew up I grew up on Long Islands, more or less in the woods. That's my idealized version, but I don't know what it's like to raise kids in the woods. I'm curious if there are any downsides.

Well, you should ask my mum, except She's not. She is But uh I can tell you what Jay said. Yeah, she's kind of still here. So my mom was an unusual person.

In that she Liked being outdoors most of the time. She was very athletic. She grew up in rural Nova Scotia. She was a big horse person. She loved horses, she had horses.

She rode them hither and thither, and she was also A speed skater. And of course a skier and This kind of thing. So I think she married my dad because he was A merry Vushy guy.

And he grew up in even more rural Nova Scotia, like really rural. So they were so rural that I don't think they got electricity until the late fifties. I was lucky enough to be able to see a nineteenth century firm operating pretty much the way it would have done. So I think she

Who didn't like Hats, little white gloves, tea parties. Uh any of that. He really didn't like it. Didn't fancy it. She liked dancing, like fast and furious waltzing and things like that. Square dancing, but she didn't like the frilly part.

And up in the woods was great for her because she said you didn't actually have to do much housework, you just Swept the dirt out the door. And you didn't have to worry about, you know, all of the stuff that people have in their houses usually like Breaker Brack and China and

Things like that. You don't have to worry about those. No, she didn't. And She doesn't seem to have had

A problem in the woods, except my brother almost drowned once'cause he he got out and fell off the dock, but Apart from that. And a few other Somewhat hairy moments.

Okay. It was probably safer on the whole than being in a city. Anyway. She seems to have managed pretty well, although some of her city friends because they were in cities during the winter. My dad was a forest andologist, it meant.

He was up in the woods when the insects were doing things. But as a rule, you can take it as almost a hundred percent. They don't do much in the winter. Insects. Pretty quiet, insect wise.

In the winter. So he they would go up and say April or so. And they would go back in, for instance, November, but this is I think quite a lot further north than you were thinking of being in the woods. Tim, I think you're thinking of a more southerly location. Yeah.

I think probably not, you know, Baffin Island or anything like that. Uh No, they were not there in the early. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. These were Yeah. It was a forest entomologist, right? So there had to be a forest. There had to be the forest. Yeah, they had running water, but it was out of a pump. And They didn't have electricity.

And they The transportation was by boat, so no roads. There. you could get to I think by nineteen thirty nine there was this horrible road which I remember very well. You'd always get cars going over it.

And then you get to a place where you left the car and then you would get in a boat. So then it was during the war, so there there weren't even a lot of uh motor boats because gasoline was rationed. So good news. I would love to Here you describe

An experience that came up in my reading. In preparation for this. And It relates to А даю фанфакинг.

I don't know if that's enough of of a cue. But I would love to hear you expand on this because I did read about it, but I I feel like there's probably more to the story. So could you please just provide some color and tell the story? Writers make stuff up, Tim. You ask them questions that essentially have no answers, but they make stuff up anyway. So I I'll tell you what I made up. But it it's kind of true. Sounds like my life. Yeah, right. It's like that. It's mostly kinda true.

Yeah, it's sort of true. Your previous question, what did growing up in the woods have to do with being a writer? There wasn't anything to do. Except When it was raining, except reading, writing and and drawing. So there were no other

things to do, like no theaters, no schools, no television, no What else can you think of? None of those things. So therefore I fixated on writing pretty early. And It was a narrative family.

People told stories. And my older brother was a gung ho writer. He wrote of things at at that age. He turned into a scientist but He was very narrative. When he was saying Ten.

Nine. Anyway, back to the football field. There I am. Having written my first novel at the age of seven, it was about an ant Some structural difficulties there, Tim, because ants don't do anything until they're in the fourth stage of their life. So they don't do anything when they're an egg. They don't do anything when they're a larva.

They do nothing when they're a pupa. And it's only when you get to, you know, the last part of the story that they actually have any legs. So I I don't start books that way anymore, Tim. But I did then. So then I stopped writing. I I took to drawing. I drew a lot.

Then I ended up in high school. At slightly too early an age. They skipped people then. I think they've stopped doing that. So I was twelve and some of the people in my class were almost sixteen.

Because they failed people then, Tim. So it was a slightly daunting experience, but things evened out after that. Yeah, so I was quite short. I'm still quite short. In fact, I'm still quite short. Yeah. People got bigger. For a while I was sort of normal size, but that's no longer true. There's all these, you know, enormous kids who drank a lot of Milk with vitamins in it.

Anyway, there I was in high school. I love my grade eleven teacher. That would be One, two, the third year of high school. What do you call that? I guess junior, junior year. What do you guys call? Fifth form. I don't know if you use the British system. I have no idea. Yeah. No, not English.

Yeah, what do you guys call it in Canada. Well, we called it different grades, like nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and in those days thirteen, but they've done away with that. Yeah, we would call eleventh or junior year. Thing. Junior, yeah. So my great

English teacher who I put in a book. She was a Peculiar. People go back and they do documentaries about you, right? And usually the teacher says, Oh yes, I could see instantly great brilliant Sean right out of her head and I could tell she was

you know, slated for greatness, but she told the truth. She said she showed no particular ability in my glass. Which was true. I d I didn't show any particular ability in her class. Uh and I had no idea then that I was uh gonna be a writer. Didn't strike me. Until the next year. When I had a different English teacher who I've

also put into a story because she was a a legend in her own time. She took hold of the people in her class and she Yanked them through the curriculum. No matter what. No matter what she got us through. And her name was Miss Bessie Billings.

And she made the immortal comment'cause I showed her one of my poems. He said. I don't understand this at all, dear, so it must be good. So wonderful. I love that is great. That is great.

Yeah, so I I started writing poetry in in grade twelve And the story I tell about that is that I was crossing the football field and A pink princess line dress that I had sewed myself. A work of art, Tim.

You don't know what that is, do you? Well, I can envision, based on some of the words, what it might look like. Princess one. It had these panels and then it sort of flared out. Anyway, it was great. Loved it. It had a beautiful sort of button on the front, which I still have. I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd gone into home economics instead of The

Secretarial sciences which I should have done. Had I known. I would have done that and then I would know how to touch type. Which I don't. And it's too late now to

So there I was. And my pink Princess line. dress crossing the football field and A poem occurred to me.

Wasn't a very good poem. But it was a poem. I was very excited about it. And this is how these things start. You write some pretty terrible poetry that you're very excited about.

And luckily there's nobody there to tell you this is really terrible poetry. And then you go on from there. What did it feel like when this poem came to you. I mean the the lie Now you can tell me how much of this is uh revisionist history and storytelling and how much of it is a reflection of your experience, but quote, a large invisible thumb descended from the sky. It's the Eureka moment, Tim Yeah, big thumb came out of the sky.

You believe that? What else would you like me to tell you? That you will also believe. I already asked about astrology, so you got me. Uh Yeah, you can tell me anything. It was very interesting to me. And uh I had been trying out these potential careers, like I was gonna be a

a painter and then I revised that. I was gonna be a fashion designer and then I revised that and I went into home economics. Because in the Textbook that was called Guidance. In grade nine you were supposed to decide what your career was gonna be. Can you imagine? Who knows anything? When they're that old. Oh yeah. Um so the guidance textbook had had five things that that girls could do.

And they did not include astrophysicists. Let's see if you can guess what they were in nineteen fifty two. I think I can, but I'm cheating. Nurse secretary, school teacher. Airline stewardess, as they were known, and home economist.

I know I'm a bad cheater. I am or a very good cheater. That's what was on offer and being a mercenary child, I I looked up what they made. Because I did grow up in a family in which it w it was expected that you would support yourself. So The home economists made the most, believe it or not.

So I went into that. But then I decided no, this is not for me. I'm gonna be a biologist. was gonna be a botanist'cause I was actually quite Good at it. But then along came this writing.

Much to my parents' dismay, but being the bite your tongue kind of parents. I think they just hoped it would be a phase. It's been a long phase. Who would see him. Okay. Yeah. Well they did say the very practical thing right off the bat. They said, Well, how are you going to support yourself? I said, You know, I'll get a job. Which I did. I got lots of jobs.

And then my mother said rather caustically. If you're gonna be a writer, you better learn to spell. And I said, Others will do that for me and you know they have Yeah.

Now we have spell chart. You know, all good things come to those who wait, I guess. You were right. You were right. I had to wait a while, but it's it panned out. So you you wrote if I'm getting the chronology right, you wrote for sixteen years before you could make a living out of it. You had all these different jobs as you mentioned, as a cashier and a coffee shop and many others. Were you maintaining the belief that someday it would pay the bills and You would be able to make a living out of it, or was it just a labor of love while you did these other things? Oh, the writing? Yes. You mean did I ever think I would make a living out of it? No.

People in my age group in my country at that time didn't think that way. They might have thought that way in the thirties. And even in the forties where there were a couple of best sellers written My people in our country but right after the

war during the fifties. A couple of things had happened. And one of them was that the paperback book industry had taken off. I think it started with the penguin in the UK and then it was Pocket books.

And Canada didn't have It had some nascent book publishers, but paperbacks were not included in them. So The

Glossy magazine. market was also drying up. So a writer like Morley Callahan, who wrote a lot of short stories in the twenties and thirties made a living out of selling two glossies. That was dwindling by that time. Some of them still existed, but not in the same way that They had

So we weren't really thinking in those terms and there there were no agents in Canada at that time. We we didn't even really quite understand what they were. There were some publishers, but they didn't publish very many Canadian books because it was thought there wasn't a market for them.

So if you wanted to publish a novel Your publisher would say, Well, we have to get a partner, you know, either in London or in New York. And that was easier. Said than done. So the The book publishing that had been going on in the thirties of cheap hardbacks

Kind of dried up. In fact, let me just be A little more certain about that. It was gone. Having had paperbags take its place. So it was hardbacks.

And I've always been interested in the underpinnings to all of these things. In fact I was associated with a Small publishing company. In the Late.

Sixties and early seventies. And a lot of it was about money. Like how many can we sell? What can we publish? To support these works of

Cutting edge experimental fiction that nobody's gonna buy. What can we publish? So we we did. We published The first book on venereal disease. It was called V D. You know idiots guides. These were sort of idiots guides before there were idiots gods.

We got as far as Wart. But we didn't get to AIDS because nobody knew about it yet. So So let me let me hop in for just a second. When you're writing for sixteen years, not thinking you can make a living from it. What did you get from the writing and did you share your writing with anyone?

Oh absolutely. We were all uh sharing our stuff around. Because we were Editing each other's work. We were publishing each other's work. We were

All of the the poets were connected through this kind of spider web network of little magazines. Uh Yeah, both in Canada, the US, England, there were these little magazines. that published uh poetry and people

Knew each other through them. So they Poets knew one another before the novelists did in our country. Oh, the poets were m more peripatetic. They would get on the Greyhound bus and turn up at your door. And uh sleep on your rug.

And you in your turn might And turn up at somebody else's door and sleep on their rug. So it was a sort of a Rug exchange. Of poets.

They would turn up here and there and give readings in out of the way places and Some of them Do you remember No, you don't, sorry. Coffee shops. Coffee shop readings. No, I I know coffee shops. No I I do. I do. I have been to a coffee shop reading. Well, a different kind of coffee shops. Let me not say shops, that's it should be houses.

So They didn't have liquor licenses, so basically people brought flasks in their And bags. Pocket's and Things like that. And you had the usually

Condemned. Warehouse or something and The little Tables with the Checkered tablecloths, the little

Uh wine bottles with the candle stuck in them. And the open mic. So poetry night, usually on a Tees Day. Sounds great. Sounds like a lot of fun. Well the folk singing and Jazz went on on other nights of the week, such as Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

That's how they, you know. Supporting the poetry meetings. So we did that in the Early sixties. And then the poetry reading spread to

universities, some of them, and then to bookstores. They decided that they could do that too. And the big festivals didn't start happening until the Mid seventies, I would say. All of these festivals that you see proliferating like mushrooms all around or you did see it before Covid.

They didn't exist yet. They sprang up out of the subculture of coffee houses. This is neither here nor there, but I am fascinated actually by the history of coffee houses, especially in the UK, where you have Lloyds of London coming out of one coffee shop and all of this incredible History that I had really. Uh that that interchange of ideas and this sort of interstitial tissue in the in the societal fabric of the time. But

What I'd like to ask you about next is teaching. And uh it's clear reading about your life that you have taught a lot. What type of teaching did you most enjoy? If any of it. I always enjoyed it.

I think the most intense year of teaching that I did was in Montreal. I thought it's a place that doesn't exist anymore because it's been amalgamated with another institution, but it was called Sir George Williams. And it was a downtown city establishment. You taught your subject to Nineteen year olds in the day.

And then in the evening you taught the same subject to returning adult students. That was very instructive. For me. The nineteen year olds weren't too sure why they were there. Except their mom and dad wanted them to.

And really they would rather be drinking beer or going to hockey games or something. And the adults were there because they wanted to be. couple of reasons they wanted to be there. They wanted to up their credentials. But also they were very

Engaged and they would argue with you. object to things and not really really give you the old run through and and that was pretty stimulating. So I taught uh nineteenth century Novels to those.

people and I also taught American romanticism. And it was they who gave me a a button that said Moby Dick is not a social disease. So they had a sense of humor. I

I liked them a lot. And it was very instructive because the things that the Nineteen year old liked frequently the grown ups would not like and the things that the Nineteen year olds really didn't like the grown ups thought We're terrific.

So middle march by George Elliot, the nineteen year old said We don't like this book at all because the people in it make wrong decisions in their careers and they marry the wrong people and we're not gonna do that. And the adult said. This is the a great book. They make the wrong decisions in their careers, they marry the wrong people, it's just like life. So a big difference in experience and what's the lesson. The lesson is that you bring to any book who you already are.

Yeah, the age that you are and the experience that you've had. And it's the same for Everyone. So Talking about books, of course. I'll segue to a book that I've not read and I'd love to ask you about because you you've recommended that young adults should read The Future of Life by Edmund Osborne Wilson.

If the internet is to be believed, unfortunately has just died. Yeah. As did uh Yes, exactly right. He Yes, that's right. I've actually put a quote of E. O. Wilson, I guess is I as I better know him. In uh

My newsletter, in fact, I guess two weeks ago. Yeah. And Why do you recommend The Future of Life? That book in particular.

He's a biologist. Yeah, he's a biologist. I was familiar with his work from him From an early Period, because of course he was an entomologist. He was He was an ant guy.

And My dad started out as a bee guy. And as you will know from your deep study of entomology. Those are both Hymenoptera. So my dad was was very interested in his

work on ants and I read it pretty early on. I followed him along and I was in fact the reviewer For his only novel. And you can probably find that review in the New York review of books. And

I was well equipped to do it because I knew about ants. And uh the The central section of that book, which is the life and death of an ant colony, is the most gripping one, you think. Wow, this is so

Epic. Uh what is going on here? It's like the sack of Troy. I actually knew him a bit. I'd met him. I thought he was very interesting. And he was a huge advocate for the future of life on earth.

and an early an early advocate and a lot of the early advocates for the kinds of things that we are now very concerned about now. Oh, they came from the world of biology. So my parents, for instance, were early Sierra Club. And early environmentalists and

Very clear. From any study of biology. Life is interconnected. So you contain multitudes, Tim. Just telling you. Thank you. I'm still I'm still investigating. But yes, I tend to I tend to agree with you.

Maybe not in the way you think. Almost certainly not in the way I think. I'm thinking more of your microbes. But never mind. You could not exist without them. Now that is actually something that I spend quite a bit of time thinking about, the microbiome and the the exobiome. I do, yes. It's uh and So the knowledge has percolated out from the biologists into the podcasts.

Somehow. Yes. I d I'm not gonna be writing any books about it, but somehow these things do happen. I would love to chat with you about Something that's I think a lot of my listeners will be very interested, and certainly I'll be interested in exploring a bit. And that is the uh What seems like a

Predilection to resist. labels or being labeled, being claimed for causes And uh you wrote an essay titled On Being a Woman Writer, which got a lot of attention. Is it fair to say that you resist labels being labeled, and if so

Why is that? How would you explain that? I resist closed boxes. Mm-hmm. Okay. The reason I resist closed boxes is that

Nature does not deal in closed boxes. Yeah. Uh Yeah, it doesn't. If it did, there wouldn't have been any evolution. If it did, you and I would not exist.

So everything in nature is on a bell curve. There are a lot of Liminal beings. Or let's say Forms that cannot be put into closed boxes.

Such as for instance the platypus. So I I just don't like closed boxes and labels are a way of filing people. Oh, you're a this. We're gonna file you there. Under this. Letter.

Your your box is gonna go there and that's who you are and that's all you are. And I don't think that's true of anyone. I I do think we all contain multitudes. So that's probably why I you can say Sure I'm a woman writer.

I'm a woman, I'm a writer. But that's not the end of the story. There have been a lot of women writers. And not all of them are exactly like me. So we we don't You can put a general heading over something just as you can put a general heading over Science fiction.

Speculative fiction. Stories about werewolves. Dracula, Frankenstein, ghost stories, they're all wonder tales. You can call them all wonder tales, or you can call all women writers women writers, but that's not the end of the story. There's a lot of other things.

That can be added to that. So Dracula is not the same as More of the world. They're both wonder tales, but they're very different.

Like that. So sure, let's say Woman writer. Eighty two. Generational.

Okay. Country. City? Height? Hair.

Curly? That's important, him. Uh So like that. So you you can you can build up the picture. You can you can start with a few labels, but it it's not the whole story for anybody.

And if you're a novelist, of course you deal in individuals. So you're not just doing types. Does that make any sense to you? It makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. You know, I think that Labels are also dangerous because if you assume them for yourself.

You're more inclined, if you get attached to them, to want to defend those labels as uh facet or as the sole entirety of your identity and that's I think how we end up in a lot of the places where we find ourselves collectively now. Yeah, well people attach labels to other people and then they attack the label.

And that has been going on for at least, you know, five thousand years. As far as we know. Uh Yeah, quite a few years. So that's

That's a thing that if we wish to live in a multiple democracy. We should Attempt to go beyond Labels.

And of course what people then go is Well you're a feminist and then I always have to say what kind of feminist? Are you talking about? Because there's at least seventy five different kinds. So am I the kind that thinks all men should be rounded up and shoved off a cliff? Except for ten percent kept for breeding.

No, I am not that kind. You will be happy to note him. Yes. Yes, thank you. No, I said you want to be kept for breeding, do you? I want to be kept for breeding, yes. Please keep me for breeding. No, you don't. Maybe not. Maybe not. Depends on the it really depends on how that's all organized. You know, I should probably think more before I answer these types of things. But

You strike me as a very joyful person. Before we started recording, I said I didn't want to bore you and you said I'm never bored. Yeah. One might say, and again, this is applying a label, but that you've long been interested in what people might consider dystopian literature. You seem to be

A connoisseur of Possibly dystopian speculative fiction. Utopian too. Yeah. Utopian. Do you consider yourself and and I am asking you to use a label, so pardon me, but generally speaking, an optimistic Or hopeful person. I think hope is built in.

on a very fundamental level to human beings because We get up in the morning and If we thought it was gonna be a horrible day every day, we probably wouldn't bother doing that. So Some people are afflicted, you know, they are they've got depression and it's just a horrible thing to live with.

So there is a difference between sad and being depressed. So of course I'm sad. About various things, but I'm also I'm hopeful about our species. In the

Although we have lots of downsides. Which we know about Through history and looking around you and reading dystopian fiction, we know we're capable of really awful things. We're also capable of really

Pretty wonderful things and were smart and inventive. So yes, we're facing a climate crisis. It's real. We're also inventing a lot of things. having to do with that. We are looking at the problem and we are coming up with the solutions.

And that's very interesting to me and it's why I'm doing this. program called Practical Utopias. So the nineteenth century was a big century of utopias. They wrote a lot of them. because they had made so many improvements already in the nineteenth century that they thought what this is just gonna go on and it's gonna get better and better and better. But then along comes.

The first world war. Bloodshed, slaughter. mustard gas and all kinds of awful things. And then along come various totalitarianisms and the

Second World War. So people are writing Utopia's much in the twentieth century. They're writing a lot of dystopias. Things could get much worse instead of things could be a lot better. So I'm doing practical utopias.

to bring together a lot of this thinking. that's been going on about not how to make a utopia in which everything is perfect. We we don't get to have that. Human beings are Different. fallible and they don't always agree on what is better.

But we're going to have to think of different ways to live if we are going to overcome the crisis that is Facing us. And short form is the oceans die we're gone. Sorry.

We're gonna have to deal with that, too. Let's expand on practical utopias. So practical utopias And then the subheading or description and exploration of the possible. This is an eight week If I understand correctly, live online learning experience. How did you choose this project of all of the things that you could spend time on? Why is this important to you?

I think it's important to to us. I think it's important. In the general scheme of things and at the point at which we are now finding ourselves. And we know what the problems are because we carp about them endlessly. It's important to

Turn people's minds to what can be done. Apart from blanket statements like we all have to not use gasoline anymore. So There is gonna have to be a transitional period about that, Tim. Right.

So getting people together, gathering People who know something about these fields. putting them together with people who are knowledgeable in other fields. And constructing You know Lego.

Making a Lego village, you know, Minecraft. So world building In a practical way. What are we gonna eat? What sort of clothes are we gonna wear? What are they gonna be made out of?

What sort of houses will we live in? What about vertical firms I'm really interested in vertical firms right now. How about mushrooms? Did you know you can make Bricks out of mushrooms.

Would you like to have a mushroom coffin? I did not. Yeah, yeah, you better join up. You know you can three D print houses out of compressed earth. In two days. You know that there are now prefab houses.

That you can erect That Create more energy than they consume. So all of these ideas. brought together and

Or the practical utopia is gonna have to be The solutions will have to be green. They'll have to be cheap enough. And they'll have to be scalable. This is a problem solving

Enterprise. And we can look at some of the things that went hair shaped about previous attempts to make utopias. And we're gonna have to build in the social component to try to keep that from happening. How do you take something with great

Idealism attached, like the early stages of the Russian revolution. And keep it from turning into stalin show trials. Like that. You know a lot about

The Russian revolution. What might be some of your observations with respect to the example you just gave? Well, it's not just the Russian, it's the French. The American one is a bit of an anomaly. Because it was It was not conducted in a confined space, as it were.

And It was a particular kind of revolution that was not so much overthrowing a ruling class from within as ejecting a ruling class That was coming in from without.

So that's a different kind of thing. So With the French and the the Russian they were toppling A ruling clause from within. And

the way that both of those things went is is very interesting. To me. And then you find'em you reach a point where it all falls apart. I mean the other example of course is Hitler and Mussolini on on the right. The French and the Russian, I guess you would say, were from the left. So how do you keep those things from sort of falling apart and

Turning into the terror and the show trials and uh The Cultural Revolution and things like that. Oh, in fact one of these books no and it's not under there anymore, it's around here somewhere. It's over here. Great book on the um

Chinese Cultural Revolution by a Guy Who Was There. What's the title? The world turned upside down. Mm-hmm. The World Turned Upside Down, it's by Yang Ji Sheng. Mm. Yeah.

The most interesting part for me is is how they went about toppling the gang of four. They actually did meet in houses and write things on little pieces of paper which they then burned. Because they were convinced their houses were bugged. Which they were. Hm. So high drama.

My drama, sort of George Smiley. Territory. You know what? There have been multiple times when you have said, Do you remember that? And then you said, Of course you don't because I was not alive. Who is George Smiley? I'm gonna admit ignorance on this one. George Miley is John Le Carey's uh Tinker Taylor Soldier's By Uh

Got it. Guy who sets out to catch a mole. A mole from within the intelligence service. What was the uh the film? It's a it's a T V series starring um Alec Guinness who's very good at it too. From about the seventies.

Early seventies. You can find it. With the cursory search. Um Web streamers.

There's a there's a f fantastic film. Depths of the Cold War. That's the Cold War. There's another film that might sort of tie into that example. One of my Favorite films actually, certainly for a long period of time, called The Lives of Others, which was about the monitoring of East Berlin residence by the Stasi. Incredible fellow. So I lived in uh West Berlin in nineteen eighty four and went across to It's just

Berlin and also Czechoslovakia and also Poland. Very instructive. You had to be quite careful. How you talked to people if they would talk to you. And those three

Countries are very different. So the one that was sewed up the tightest was East Germany. The one that was quite loosey goosey was Poland. So you're gonna be bringing Your life experience, your study of history.

to bear on practical utopias. How many other people are involved? What does the structure look like are there. Disco. Which is an interactive live learning platform.

It's structured so that They give you the tools. Tell you what substack is. I do. So Substack gives you the tools to basically publish your own newspaper and and Disco gives you the tools

To do your own live learning experience. There are other kinds of learning experience which are like TED talks and things and Master class which I did one of And they're more like Films.

Mm. In fact the background of the master class people was in film production and they do a beautiful Job of film producing. Your class. The Disco one is interactive in that

People join you. And there's a to and fro, so The ideas that people will bring their ideas to add to the building of their version of A better way to live. that will be green, scalable and and affordable.

And they're gonna have to make practical decisions. They're gonna have to say, Okay, which is better. Is it better to get your corpse disposed of by Very carbon producing. Is it better to put it in a mushroom coffin? Is it better to

do this new thing that has started up in Seattle called recompose. In which you get turned quite quickly into compost. And they're gonna have to do the Cost and money and the cost in carbon. And figure out.

which choice they're going to make because there's there's ups and downs to all of these choices. So what you're gonna eat? Are you going to eat Um The hundred mile diet? Are you going to grow

Things in vertical gardens quite close to you. It's gonna be nothing but Brown rice it wasn't. About nineteen seventy three. That was very bad for people. Oh so you're gonna have to do the nutrition plus where are you getting these things?

And we are so used to going into the supermarket and everything is just there. Yeah. So how long can that continue? And all of these things, what are you gonna do with old people? Yeah, what are you gonna do with the old people? Are you gonna sort of shove them out the window at some point, or what? Well, I'll make you a deal. If I am kept as one of the ten or twenty percent of males for breeding, I will prevent them from throwing you out the window. So I will

We can strike a bar again. Uh now you have a lot going on. You also have Burning questions. collection of essays from two thousand four to two thousand twenty one, which will be uh published in March of twenty twenty two. Could you tell us more about burning questions? So it's the the third in the series and Oh, there's to been two other collections of

L says. The first one was called Second Words because it was mostly Booker is Did a lot of book reviews. At that time.

The second one was called Moving Targets. And that took us up to two thousand and four. And then we have burning questions and To do these collections we have to weed through an awful lot of stuff. Because it turns out that I write about

On an average of thirty five short pieces a year. So you can see that adds up. Now when you say short pieces, what do you consider short? What is the range on shirt? Well anywhere from four pages to Two twenty five pages. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Well some of them are speeches, you know, they they can they can dribble on for a while.

But some of them are You have to condense them, you have to take out the repetitions. Increasingly, of course. They're obituaries of people that I have known. I didn't write any of those in the first part of my life'cause nobody died.

That I knew. So there are some of those I I did Well, we won't go into all the people that have died, but I have written some of their own bits. I wrote actually two for Ursula K. Le Gwyn, I wrote one for The Guardian, I wrote one for the

Washington Post and they both had to be different. But these things are very sudden. You know somebody is suddenly dead and they want you to write it right now. So I I wrote one of those on a plane. So that's what it is. And Quite a lot about

conservation issues which have come increasingly to the fore. as usual gender issues. And other Things that you might not Thanks.

Fact. Mm. Nor did I. I didn't expect them either, but suddenly there I was writing about them. Is burning questions Taken from one of the pieces that was included in the collection. Otherwise where did the title come from?

Oh, I think it just came out of the air like like a lot of titles. Like that big thumb in the sky. Like that. Exactly like that. It's suddenly just there. I think the issues that we are facing Although we have been in these very tight spots before. I can remember sitting in

Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, thinking that we were all gonna get atom bombs dropped on us. At any minute. That didn't happen, but I think it came pretty close. So like that. Things that that almost

Happened but but didn't. And I'm hoping that the climate crisis Although it's already uh underway. I'm I'm hoping that it can be at least installed. Enough for people to get a a grip on it. That's certainly a subject area.

And a research area that I'm spending a lot of my time on as well, right now. So I'd like you are well you should join Practical Utopias. Come and join us. You probably by this time have gathered a lot of things. Every day there's something new. That comes into view. For instance, I hadn't been thinking at all about about vertical firms and now I am. I'm suddenly doing a lot of thinking about about how And there's a number of companies putting this together for you. There's a bunch of kids out there.

Hm. Things like that. Did you know you can make fabric out of algae? I did not know about the fabric. Example but No, neither did I, but now I do. But but it's so funny that you mentioned algae. I was just going to say as one of my examples in the last six months is aquaculture, so vertical sea farming.

And uh specifically Algae. I didn't know about the application of clothing. So no, I did not know that. It's the hemp of the sea, I guess. Well the clothing and you're growing cotton, growing Stuff that you make fabrics out of is pretty consumptive. of of energy and materials and and water. So

So how do we deal with with these things? I wanna push back on a quote that I read from you. at some point when prepping for this and it was related to I believe an interviewer or uh someone profiling you saying that you were prolific and you said, I believe, and this could be a a misquote, but

Joy Carroll Oates is prolific. I'm just old. No. You have a great sense of humor, so I can see it now, especially having spent some time together, how you would say something like that. I would say that you are most certainly prolific, but Yeah, but it mounts up, you see, it just accumulates.

So you know, John Keats was probably more prolific, but he died young. So there's two things. There's the accumulation which makes you look prolific, but then there's the speed, the rate, which can actually be quite slow, but if you're This old and it all sort of adds up. As you're writing Cadence or your writing habits changed much over the last

A few decades or have they remained fairly constant? Of course. No no, of course they change. So when you have a job

You ride at night. Yeah. So when you have a job, when you're a student Those kinds of things, you're gonna be a night rider. When you have a child When the child is small.

If you still have a brain at that point. And it does come back. Mm-hmm. You are going to write when the child is asleep. when the child goes to school, you're gonna write when the child is at school.

When the child Sniffle, sniffle, sniffle goes off. on its own grows up and goes off on its own Then you're probably and you're getting quite Dare I say middle aged?

Yes, I'm gonna say middle aged, Tim. Yeah. You're probably gonna be Writing in the daytime. Then there's another thing that happens.

When you pass a certain moment which you you seem to need less sleep. So right now I'm a procrastinating nighttime writer. In other words, I'm back to doing what I used to do in about nineteen sixty four. What does it look like when you write at night? Is it uh a set block of time, a set number of pages? I know that you, as I understand it, don't have any sort of magical talismans. You don't have a particular writing setup that you require. But what does it in the last just say handful of years, what does your night writing look like?

So many pages is usually how I do it. So not so much time. That's motivating. Because if you write the number of pages that you think you should be writing that day. You can then go off.

And watch. Really silly murder mysteries, Tim. Sign me up. I was just doing it on Netflix the other day. Although I was watching In the Dark. Which is a series about a very attractive blind woman who is attempting to solve a murder mystery. And it's very funny. Oh, that's the Audre Hepburn plot from uh

Long ago. What is that movie that she was in? Boy. I don't know. I don't know. Uh wait until dark. There we go. That's what it is. Wait until dark. She's blind. A guy comes in the house is gonna murder her and she shuts off all the lighting.

Uh. Can get around better than he can. Oh wow. And uh that goes back to I think an H G Wells story called In the Valley of the Blind, the one eyed man is king. Which is a sci fi story. In which he was

Guy who thinks he's pretty You wanna hear the plot? Yeah, I do. I do want to hear the plot. Yes, he strays into a valley in which everybody is blind. In fact, they don't even have any eyes. They they just have sort of blank spaces there. And not even any sticky out things. And he

He decides that he can be king of this'cause he can see. And he falls in love with a woman who says, um Yes, yes, we can get married, but first we have to get rid of those ugly bumps on your face. Wait a minute. I'm gone.

It makes me think of that uh that Twilight Zone episode. I can't recall the name of the episode, but the sphery sort of Antisocial, I guess this is sort of a redundant way to put it, but misanthrope, this man who survives the end of the world and now he can be alone and read all of his books and he steps on his own glasses at the end of the episode. Uh sad Christmas. Yes. Margaret, this has been so much fun. People should certainly

Check out practical utopias, an exploration of the possible. We'll link to that in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. So people will be will be able to find that very easily. We had to move along to to launching in September because we got too much There's too much input. So we we just needed a bit more time and We also decided to add a low cost

NF Mm. You don't know what an N F I do know what a energy is. You do. Well we're doing a At first they said, Let's do one of those and I said we can't do that because they consume too much energy.

Mm-hmm. Like a lot. So they went out and they found one that doesn't. It's consumes the same amount of energy as a tweet. And it is called a P E Z O S.

Oh Tezos. Yes. Mm-hmm. You do. What do you know about it, Tim? Well, I know that many creatives, artists of different types decide to use Tezos and by extension, some of them use a marketplace called Hen. They're different tools and platforms related to this, but

It is an alternative for those who are seeking a less energy intensive way of Engaging with the NFT. Non fungible token. Space. So what we are doing, we're hiring

Graphic Illustrators. To draw the utopias. Mm-hmm. So each of our interactive groups is going to make choices about how their utopia is going to be and these illustrators are going to Illustrate them. And I'm going to do some illustrating of them too because

One of my background things is uh graphic design and comic book writing, pretty elementary kind. So we're we're going to get some wonderful illustrators and they're going to make five illustrations for each of our utopias. And we're gonna put them into these NFTs. And this is a whole new world for me. But one of our team members knows quite a lot about it.

In fact, he is an N F T artist himself, so he Just gave us a crash course last week on How this works. what it could look like and How it's all gonna come together.

So I think that part is pretty exciting and I have worked with Graphic artists before. They live in a w wild and wonderful world. You probably know that I did what is essentially a Bird conservation project called Angel Cat Bird.

Yes. And that was so much fun. And we exchanged ideas through through drawing them and sending them over the internet. So he would send me one and I would say, Make the ears bigger Mm.

No, I I send him a cat skeleton. You know, this is a cat skeleton. You have to look at the skull. It's very narrow at the bottom. So he he did a wonderful job. And I'm looking forward to seeing uh which Graphic artists, our team member. Rick manages to

Talk into doing this. And they will all be in these nif NFTs. N of T's at Low energy cost. That's the idea.

It's a fascinating space. I think it's also wonderful that you're experimenting with some of these alternative Platforms and drawing some attention to different options that people have. In the space. Yeah, well I'm keen on um

Allows people who aren't in a physical space To participate. In an experience that That usually people only had in

In physical spaces. And that goes way back. To the beginning of the twenty first century when I was trying to think of a way to Make.

Book signings and author appearances. Available to places that normally wouldn't have them. We did succeed in doing that. Enterprise was called Long Pen.

But the publishing industry couldn't get their heads around it, so now it's segued into A business tool. With a different name. It's called S Y N G R A F I I. It is um

Biometric Digning within a video signing room. But because we started it so early. We've got all these patents, Tim,'cause nobody else was doing it and people thought we were nuts. You've heard the story before. Sort of the Velcro story. Like what is this good for?

Well, that's how that's how a lot of things start. You know, post it notes would be another example. Was it they thought it was a flawed Doomed. failed adhesive because it didn't work. Didn't it keep things stuck in one place. And then somebody said, Well, wait a second here. Maybe we can actually change the positioning and there is an application. It's just not the application that we're used to. It's actually the opposite of what we would normally look for. I use them a lot in novel writing post it notes.

With words on them. How do you use them in novel writing? Well, you know, there's my thing that I'm writing and then I have an idea, so I stick it on the table. Oh yes. The idea on the table. Well I have

been taking notes as we've been talking. I've so many things that I'm going to be following up on the Ranging from the world turned upside down to of course practical utopias, Burning Questions, this collection of essays from two thousand four to two thousand twenty one, coming out March twenty twenty two. I feel like we could talk for many, many hours. And for those people who didn't catch it And not only have you Produced.

work and written in every possible format or genre imaginable. Because why not? Right? Why be constrained. I do. Uh because why not? You also are an inventor. Because I think people may have not uh just in case they didn't get the underscoring on that with patents with this long pen, originally long pen technology allowing I guess it would be remote robotic Writing?

The physical longpen, of course, that has we have an entirely digital service now, but the physical longpen still exists and people still want to have them. Because you write on your end. And The pen holder on the other end duplicates that exactly. With real ink.

Yeah. So yes, it it's bizarre but It came out of the requirements of the book signing industry because book collectors would not accept anything that wasn't perfectly your signature. And we did these events. You know, from Australia to

North America from You know, back and forth from from England, we were able to do it. People didn't know how to scale it. But as it is now. That has all been solved so you can you can do the digital version, but if you need the physical one with ink that can be produced.

But it's not like an auto pen. An auto pen is of is like a sewing machine designed. This is every Remember cursive? I do. Your signature. Every every time you sign your name, it's it's different from the last time you signed it. So I've just two more questions for you. One, I'm gonna warn people ahead of time. This has a bit of a spoiler, so fast forward thirty seconds if you don't want a spoiler of sorts. This is on behalf of my employee I mentioned who loves your work. And here's her question.

When you wrote The Handmaid's Tale decades ago, did you plan Aunt Lydia's role as a double agent, which the rest of us didn't find out until the testaments or Did she evolve as a character in the space between the two books? She evolved. For sure. She's a secondary character in the

Handmaid's Tale, then she becomes a primary character in the Testaments. The thing about Characters who speak for themselves. You're always a lot closer to them and and they're always more complex than somebody that you're just seeing. You know that some sort of across the room.

And as you know from what I've Already said. Everybody is more complex than Than just to sort of Cardboard cut out. So

Once we Get inside Aunt Lydia's head. She turns out to have quite a few more dimensions and also it's further along in the plot, so The Testament's is Approximate fifteen, sixteen years after the handmaid's tale.

Things have happened to Aunt Lydia. Since that time. I always base Things on stuff that's happened. And one of my

go to's for Aunt Lydia was was people who had been believers within a system and then changed their minds. And there are a number of those in history. They're pretty interesting. And how do you go about doing Research for

characters like those in history or were those already examples you had in mind and therefore you didn't have to go digging for them? Were they already references in your head or did you do research? Okay, so remember what I said about being old. Yes. And stuff accumulating. Yeah. So Did you have a a granny who had an attic? I did.

Okay, what was in it? I wasn't allowed up there, so I don't know. Oh, darn. You weren't allowed up there. Well, that's very bad. Everybody should be allowed up into their granny's attic once. Because it's basically like a a collection of stuff that just

It's there. You put it up there because you can't think of what else to do with it. But you don't want to throw it out. So The inside of my head is like that, him.

No there's just A lot of stuff. In there. And um There's also a lot of books in this house and and one of

The sections is devoted to wars and totalitarianism. And spies. And really interesting things like programs of deception. In wars.

I mean, I find those fascinating. The British hired a lot of theatrical set designers. To design illusions in the desert. Make it look as if there were people where there weren't people. Hide their oil drums.

Disguise trucks as tanks and tanks as trucks and then they switch them at night. Oh, so theatrical illusions. Yeah, so I had a lot of it. Already in the Junk shop of my brain.

Some of it in the War spies totalitarianisms. Section of my Library. And some of it of course in Shakespeare. You always go to Shakespeare, so Richard the Third.

A villain. A villain who tells us right off that he's really bad. And now we can watch him being bad.

Margaret, I I don't even know how to how to begin to Close up this conversation and you contain multitudes. Oh, you've impressed me. Uh I think you haven't confused me. You have I think you've just outranked me. But there's I need to do a lot more reading. Okay, so let's have a little bit about you. How did you get into this? What what put it into your head to do a podcast?

Well, the truth is I wrote books before the podcast, nonfiction books. So I I wrote three of those, and I found the third book to be particularly difficult and it really took a lot out of me. And in the process of launching that third book. I ended up on a number of podcasts and I really enjoyed the long form

Conversation and I decided that I would take a break From writing. to do six to ten episodes of a podcast with my friends. to get better at asking questions because with the nonfiction books I was writing It all came down to asking questions of experts.

at the end of the day. So it seemed like something that would transfer. So I decided to have fun, long conversations with friends to hopefully get rid of some lazy verbal ticks and some lazy mental habits as a consequence. And I just fell in love with Doing it. It was for me The uh fun part of the research process without the writing. And I know that sounds terrible, but at the time I I was just so

battered and bruised from my experience with this third book. And that's how the podcast started. And now we're almost six hundred episodes in, and it's something that gives me incredible nourishment and energizes me. I was having such a If I'm being honest, terrible day before we had this conversation. I was I was just having a brutal day, and the last week has been very difficult. And I feel great right now. Well, that's wonderful. And I think that's why I do the podcast.

Well, I think that's a really good reason. Yeah. So have you ever This is completely Off topic. That's okay. Um Do you know anything about dictation apps in which you talk into the

Microphone and then it turns into text. I would like to start using such a program because a friend of mine, a new friend named Noah Feldman, who's a professor at Harvard Law School. is uh a he's a just a prodigious talent and an incredible writer and he uses I want to say dragon, which might have been Previously known as Dragon naturally speaking. to draft everything that he writes, articles, books, and so on. Why do you ask?

Well, you know, typing is hard. Typing is hard. Especially if you can't touch type. Especially if you can't touch tight, which I can't, I have to look. So you know that they said said of Henry James there were three

Henry James's James the first, James the second, and the old pretender. But Late Henry James dictated.

Hm. Did you know that I'm not going to be able to do it? Yeah. So people used to dictate to stenographers, but I I don't think those people exist anymore, but And also it would be a bit inhibiting'cause there'd be another person in the room. Um Don't you think it would be inhibiting, yes. Yeah, we knew a person a long time ago who who wrote romance novels and also drank and and she used to sit behind a screen and dictate her romance novels to a stenographer.

Like a confessional. And she would be dictating away and she would say, You know, no, no, she was dictating romance novels. Oh yeah, like the confessional. The voice would come from behind the screen and she would say and and Letitia with her flashing green eyes and these stenographer say Um Couple of pages ago her eyes were blue. Well change them. So maybe I need a person like that. Yeah. So you're saying I should drink and use some dictation software. Is that if I'm hearing no, not you. No, no, no, no. You're not writing flashing eyed romance novels. No, no, you don't need to do that. Um But I think if you have an iPad, I think you can do this, right? Yeah, oh for sure.

I've been meaning to test the software. Have do you use dictation? Software or anything like that? Not yeah, that's why I'm asking you. Well I'll tell I'll test it out for you. I'll test it. Noah Noah is a true believer. And uh he is extremely smart. He says it takes a little while. We were just texting about this the other week, in fact.

to work out the kinks and get comfortable, but he has I believe it's carpal tunnel or some type of issue with his hands and his lower arms. Whereby he he really can't sit and type for long periods of time. But he's a true believer. with the dictation software. So I I give you my word, I will test it out and I will let you know how the experiment goes and what my what my pro and con

Evaluation is. Yeah. So I d I do write a lot in in long hand and I could just Read the long hand rather than having to Transcribe it. Oh yeah. I think that's a brilliant idea.

I'll test the software and let you know because I need someone to hold me accountable, so I will I will do that. I'll make that commitment. It's gonna be me calling you again. I know that I've made a promise and now even if you forget who I am tomorrow, I will still feel badly if I don't do it. So I will uh Download some form of of transcription. Software and I will test it out and let you know how that goes. And is there anything else you would like to to say, share, questions you'd like to ask, requests to my audience, complaints about the podcast, you'd like to lodge publicly.

If uh I would love to, but I don't think I'm terribly close by If I were closer by, I would be happy to do that. Where are you, Tim? I am actually in the mountains and there is quite a bit of snow. It's gonna start snowing again very soon.

And I just love it here. Are you there to go skiing? I'm absolutely skiing. I'm going on a backcountry trip tomorrow for my first time to learn how to skin, which I have never done before, which is putting on almost like a shark skin condom on your skis so you can go uphill and then you take them off and you have alpine skiing. I'll be doing that for a few days.

And uh I find the Geography and the ecology here to be Just stunning. It is uh Unlike any place I've ever spent an extended period of time, my girlfriend's family

is here. She grew up here. So that's another reason that I'm here. And It's spectacular. Just being immersed in the Enormity of nature here is calming for me. I'm reading a book right now called Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.

He was a he was a friend. Oh he was. Yeah, so one of my little One of my little write ups and burning questions is is Barry. Um he passed away so recently and I was so sad. Imagine that. I was so sad to hear that I had been gifted of wolves and men. And it absolutely

Blew my mind. It was such a beautifully written, meticulously researched book. And Arctic Dreams. Of course was was recommended and recommended and recommended and I'd never spent time near the polls, but

recently had my first trip. I was invited by a friend to go to Antarctica. and became fascinated by these polar regions. And so Only in the last few weeks have I started Arctic Dreams and the permanence that he writes about in And the vastness of some of those spaces.

reminds me in a sense of the the Western United States at altitude. And they're very different. Very, very, very different. But you can get a taste of what he's referring to in places like Montana, certainly in Alaska, you can get that feeling. So I'm I'm happy to be here. I'm very, very happy to be here. And where are you at the moment? I'm sitting in my Study. Which you can see in the background. In Toronto, but I I made it down from the woods just in time for this

interview. We had a blizzard yesterday, so I was supposed to come down yesterday. But we did not Take that chance. And made it down passing twelve. Stuck buses.

On the way. And uh He made it. Made the interview. Hooray. Well thank you for thank you. Thank you for putting in such an uh incredible effort. And this was uh this was wonderful. I encourage people to really do a deep dive on everything that you're up to, including practical utopias and burning questions. People can find you online at margaretatwood.ca on Twitter at Margaret Atwood Instagram, the real Margaret Atwood.

And this has just been such a joy to spend time with you this afternoon. So thank you. Very much, Margaret, for for carving out the space to have this conversation. And thank you. It was a real pleasure. And uh enjoy your skiing. Thank you. I will. And to everybody listening. You contain multitudes, do not be contained by closed boxes that do not conform to the greater beauty of nature, and be just a little bit kinder than you have to be. And until next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out. every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 80,000 Hours. You have roughly 80,000 hours in your career. That's 40 hours a week.

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