At the very end of their entertaining, informative and occasionally surreal conversation, Margaret Atwood, in Canada, ends up identifying birds from recordings of birdsong that Max Porter plays for her, in England. “It’s small. Some kind of tit ... Is it a blue tit?” Correct.
She doesn’t get the last, a goldfinch, which even Porter acknowledges “doesn’t sound like that. He’s a dud actor.”
Margaret Atwood, novelist, poet, literary critic, essayist, environmental activist, inventor and avid bird-watcher, and the award-winning author Max Porter (debut novel Grief Is a Thing with Feathers) are in conversation in this week’s Spring Series presentation from the Borris House Festival of Writing & Ideas, streamed live online.
The format dips in and out of the Brown Bag of Atwood, a game they apparently started playing at the Borris festival – in real life – in 2019, involving random-ish questions.
“This is from your work,” he says, of a game “that is often psychologically revealing”. We’re all in a lifeboat and the food is running out, he says, asking how to convince everyone else why you should remain in the lifeboat. “Justify your position in the boat”, Margaret Atwood. “Oh, I would jump out immediately. Number one, I can swim. Number two, wouldn’t you rather swim than be cooped up with a lot of people who were thinking of reasons to shove you out the window?”
She would have answered differently 30 years ago, she acknowledges, justifying her presence not on the basis of being a writer but on the basis of her survival skills. “You need me in the lifeboat because I’ll be of help to you, and a lot of these other people know dipshit.”
Atwood has actual survival skills, learned as a girl, such as “how to catch a fish”. She recommends Survivor Man Les Stroud’s TV shows and books, “which are very handy, and when your kids are 12 or 13 you might treat them to him, because they’ll pick up things that might actually come in handy.”
People want to figure out what explains her powers of prophesy, Porter says later. “But there is no ‘the future’,” says Atwood. “ There are multiple futures. You pick the most likely one, and then it happens, and people think you’ve got woo-woo powers. Which in fact I don’t.”
In between they talk about the state of the world since they last spoke – with climate change, wars, social unrest, brutal repressions, totalitarianism, and women doing worse in all that. He asks about migration, and migrants being held in prison conditions, two years after publication of The Testaments, and in the aftermath of Trumpism.
Atwood says the TV dramatisation of her book Handmaid’s Tale is “going there” in the latest season, with characters migrating to Canada.
She observes: “It’s seldom been the case that any nation welcomes all comers”, comparing the world to osmosis. “On this side there’s fresh water, on that side there’s salty water. There’s a permeable membrane, and you won’t get osmosis until both sides are equal. What is the aim of the people in motion? They’re aiming to get out of where they were, because it wasn’t tolerable, and hoping to get to a better place.”
Migration “comes from intolerable conditions in the place of origin. If you really want to deal with the problem, you’re really going to have to equalise conditions.” She uses her hands to draw the world’s wealth imbalance, with accumulation of wealth at the top and deprivation at the bottom. “If we tried to make that more equal, some of these problems wouldn’t exist... But guess what, Max: those with power and wealth usually want to hold on to it.”
They also discuss how Atwood, who is 81, can’t remember what she was actually like aged 39, which Porter is now. “You’ve images and scenes and people you remember, but no fix on what you were like, because that was a reflection in the eyes and minds of others.”
They variously recommend various books and organisations (from Anders Neilsen’s latest graphic novel, to the Soil Society, to Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life).
They started off on the birds, too, comparing their respective garden birdsong, and the enormous rats in Porter’s garden, which steal the birds’ fatballs, despite the presence of a life-sized zebra (presumably not a live one) to deter them.
Borris House Festival of Writing & Ideas' Spring Series of online talks continues on Thursday, June 3rd, with Lemn Sissay and Emma Dabiri
