What are the odds of getting sick during MARM? One month’s worth in a twelve-month.

Fortunately, I was well for treats on the 18th to mark Margaret Atwood’s birthday (evidence below) and now I will simply resume, standing contrary to the calendar, declaring it week four for all MARMers.

Back in Week Three, Rebecca U. had shared this fall 2020 interview, with Tom Power on CBC’s Q, as an antidote to the Take 30 interview.

In particular, I like the part where MA says that writing poetry was just something that happened to her in high school but, in general, I like the conversational tone, the natural give-and-take on such a variety of topics.

It’s twenty-eight minutes long; if you’re looking for something shorter, consider last year’s Lviv BookForum where, in less than five minutes, MA shares her thoughts on why a television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale was successful.

Did you know the costume designer considered 50 shade of red before lighting upon the perfect shade? I wondered about that, it really seems perfect.

MARM 2023 PLANS

Each week I’ll share links to some online sources, so that anyone with a few minutes can join in the celebrations. Some poetry and flash fiction, some interviews and reviews, some fresh reads and rereads: mostly reading with a little viewing and, in particular, short stories.

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Rape Fantasies” (November 3)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Dancing Girls, “Hair Jewellery” (November 10)
Old Babes in the Wood, “First Aid” (November 12)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Dancing Girls, “A Travel Piece” (November 17)
Margaret Atwood’s 84th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Two Scorched Men” (November 19)
Dancing Girls, “The Resplendent Quetzel” (November 24)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Morte de Smudgie” (November 26)
Wrap-Up (November 29-30)

Thanks to Madame Bibi for the nudge to read “Winter’s Tales”, the eleventh in The Tent which is a collection that it’s exceptionally hard to slow.

Each piece is only a page or two long, incisive and often darkly funny. You could imagine then on the back page of a magazine, like an after-dinner mint.

The eleventh is about the imagined tales told to the young about the time before (“How young are the young, these days? It varies. Some of them are quite old.”) and they cover everything from germs to tattoos, girdles to meat loaf.

And to Bill for steering me towards “Salome Was a Dancer”, the thirteenth, which opens with an illustration grimmer than meat loaf: a woman in a floor-length gown holding aloft a tray with a copy of her own head on it.

What is within a woman’s grasp: it’s a spicy vignette, spanning Salome’s earliest years as a child beauty pageant participant to her violent end.

I imagine Salome losing that pageant at five years old, taking her seat in the lunchroom of The Edible Woman with Marian instead of applying (unsuccessfully) to ballet school, but that would be quite another story.

Growing up in the bush, I’m guessing that MA hadn’t heard of children’s beauty pageants. She reminisces about her childhood in this Harper’s BAZAAR interview with Jane Goodall, noting that the two of them shared an interest in the “animal watching department”. JG was born in 1934 and MA in 1939, with “books books books” and no television but, besides their similar ages and conservation efforts, does it seem a little random for these two women to engage in a conversation? Perhaps, but good naturedly they proceed.

Goodall is occasionally funny, too, joking that she fell in love at age ten with Tarzan, but then he married the “wrong Jane”. They discuss the nature of hope (the alternatives—none exist), where they’ve found meaning in their lives, the advantages of having nice legs in a pre-feminist era, how they’ve faced adversity (presumably in the absence of nice legs), whether Mars or an isolated island paradise offers an escape from planetary decline (nope, but see hope), and possible developments with the pandemic.

I’d planned to reread one of MA’s essays from In Other Worlds this week but, instead, because we were in Stratford, Ontario for her birthday, I read an essay from Burning Questions in which she describes writing the poem “Dearly” on a backstreet in that vibrant theatre town, “Caught in Time’s Current”.

She was there in-season in 2017, partly she recalls to give a talk on Hag Seed, but also as part of an annual tradition to attend shows and musicals there, and she describes how that scribbling of a poem fit with other writing and other concerns occupying her that summer.

We were there off-season, partly for some visiting nearby but also to enjoy the river and the town when it’s not so bustling. Although on an off-season Saturday night in Stratford, the only empty tables in restaurants and cafes—on the square, on the highways, on the quiet streets surrounding them—display little “Reserved” plinths. We ate very early or very late, and marvelled at the ease of finding vegan options on these menus, in a town with a population of thirty thousand-ish, coupled with the difficulty of finding parking.

There was also a ghost, about which I remain skeptical, but there really seems to be no practical explanation for the footfalls in that hotel corridor. I missed the second-hand bookstores that were once the reason I knew so many side streets, but one new bookstore remains (though once there were three). If you want to have bookstores in which to browse, you must buy books there.

A few days later, back in Toronto, we got super sick super quick and reading about poor Smudgie’s death had to wait. And wait it has. It will wait another day or two yet.

MARM Quote-of-the-Week

Margaret Atwood:

“There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”