Narrative Magazine Interviews Margaret Atwood 7-25-21

 You might think I have posted enough on Margaret Atwood, but I find her her and her works too interesting. Narrative Magazine (an site for interesting writers) interviewed her back in 2010, Speculative fiction, bio-ethics, religion, Her novel Year of the Flood and writing are some of the topics touched upon with humor and intelligence.

SCOTT-COE

The hymns are one of the voice strands organizing The Year of the Flood, marking our progress through the text, and you also use women’s stories—one told in third person, one in first—as centers of the narrative. Repeatedly, women’s voices are a powerful force in your work. In your latest collection of poems, The Door, you have a wonderful poem about Sor Juana de la Cruz in the garden being struck by lightning and the syllables pouring out of her. I think back to The Handmaid’s Tale, where the journal kept by the narrator becomes an artifact providing evidence that her society existed, that we don’t want to repeat its mistakes. Why are you interested in the role of writing in societies—these questions of voice and permission? What’s important about that to you?

ATWOOD

Black marks on a page are like a musical score. And because those letters on a page are just a score, they don’t come to life until they are being played. A score for violin is not actualized until somebody takes up a violin and plays the music. That’s when it turns back from paper and ink into music. Pages are like a magic freezing mechanism whereby you take a voice and you put it into a score on a page—it’s a score for voice, it always is—and it becomes actualized again when somebody reads it and turns it back into a voice.

It’s a very magic thing, when you come to think of it. That’s why, when it was first invented, it was regarded with great superstition and awe. Because the king can write down his voice, on a thing, send it hundreds of miles away, and have it read out. And that was his voice. It was like teleportation. What I’m interested in about writing are the aspects that we always overlook because we take writing for granted. But it’s magical, this system of symbols that you can use to take a voice, freeze it to a static, physical state, and then, in the hands of somebody else—far, far away, or maybe very distant in time—they can transmute it back into a voice. I can read John Keats’s letters, long-dead John Keats, and I feel Keats is speaking to me.

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