Week Three: Update and Check-In #MARM2026 (3 of 4)

Just when I was wondering whether I would spot MA somewhere unexpected in the media this week, yesterday the algorithm heard my query and offered up a short.

Do you watch shorts? Mostly I watch them by accident, slipping across the screen and accidentally clicking along the way, then wondering what I’ve done when the audio erupts. (I’m afraid if I start watching things that are one-minute long, I’ll forget how to watch all my favourite two-minute-long shows.)

Anyway, the short begins with an introduction—“I am Margaret Atwood, I write books”—and moves to discuss a Bart Simpson toy shaped like the Statue of Library which, when squeezed, makes a sound she describes as that of a “screaming chicken” (she demonstrates,  ahem).

The description makes sense when you hear it, which most people must have done back in the summer—the sun’s shining, there are flowers on the patio behind her, and she’s responding to the American administration’s threats that Canada will become the 51^st state (that’s been out of the news cycle for a few months now).

She quips at some American politicians and then introduces the novelist Ann-Marie MacDonald, who lives in the same neighbourhood in Toronto, to explain the concept of “Elbows Up” which has become the slogan of Canadian resistance to the idea of sovereignty threatened (ironic, of course, since our settler ancestors wouldn’t have made it far if the original inhabitants of these lands had had their elbows up). It’s an old hockey term about how you should maneuver if someone’s cornered you on the rink, and we’re all meant to be practicing off on- and off-the-ice. Now you can imagine me typing like that… go ahead, I’ll wait. 

MARM 2026 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Survival: One, Two, Three (November 4)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Survival: Four, Five, Six (November 11)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 87^th Birthday (November 18)
Survival: Seven, Eight, Nine (November 18)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Survival: Ten, Eleven, Twelve (November 25)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

It’s silly, it’s good-natured, and it was fun to watch it on a cool, dark, damp November morning.

In the Zeit-MARMst or MARM-Geist:

• Mme Bibi writes about Fourteen Days.

To Watch #MARM2026:

I enjoy Kara Swisher’s interviews on most topics but, until now, I avoided last December’s with MA: On with Kara Swisher and Margaret Atwood. Foolish of me, as it was quite enjoyable. And I was reminded how the striking cover of Book of Lives came about: they were having fun in the photo shoot, with a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” series (the cover’s speak-no-evil, you’ll have guessed).

She also shares her thoughts about how people become poets and what circumstances lead them through an apprenticeship until they discover their own style, and about how many different kinds of feminism there are (more than 75 apparently), which is why it’s wise to ask someone, who wonders if you are one, to clarify.

Unexpected topics in the hour include the Hungarian Revolution, the eruption of Mount St. Helens; expected topics include the talk of duality in the memoir and birding. My favourite part is not marked in the transcript, at the end of a discussion about her travels in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the early 80s—about 27 minutes in— when KS introduces Cats Eye into the conversation for just one minute. They seem to have a real connection there, and I think we have a glimpse of MA’s empathy for the Cordelias in the world.

Last week I also included updates for the other challenges I’m reading towards, but I have nothing new to add; I’ve read farther in each of those five books (and in the other books in my stack) and, in a busy month like this, it’s best to focus on having done some reading rather than fussing about how much of it you’ve done, eh?