Margaret Atwood spoke about her newest release of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, to a packed Hot Docs Ted Rogers Theatre
By: Anna-Giselle Funes-Eng
Legendary author Margaret Atwood discussed her latest release of short stories with journalist Matt Galloway at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema on March 6, 2023. (Courtesy of Gabriel Li)
There are few names more synonymous with the realm of Canadian literature than that of Margaret Atwood, the unequivocally brilliant author whose widely anticipated collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, released on March 7, 2023.
The author spoke with CBC’s Matt Galloway at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Theatre in Toronto, promoting the release of her latest collection. This is her first release of short fiction since Stone Mattress in 2014.
Atwood’s works are known for exploring a far-reaching scope of genres and themes, from speculative fiction dystopias to grief and werewolves. Old Babes in the Wood consists of 15 new stories which, according to Penguin Random House Canada, draw from grief, folklore and fairy tales.
“You publish stories like this and you find out who needs them. As it turns out, quite a few people,” Atwood said at Hot Docs, commenting on the overarching theme of losing people with age.
She said that she didn’t necessarily set out to write on grief for herself, but for the reader.
Many of the stories featured in the collection draw from Atwood’s real-life experiences, including her misadventures with frozen cat corpses and her relationship with aging and grief.
Some pieces in the collection have been published before, such as “freeforall” which was originally printed in the Toronto Star as an alternative sister story to The Handmaid’s Tale in 1986.
Seven of the 15 stories feature Nell and Tig, a fictional couple who have appeared before in Atwood’s work in Moral Disorder. They were based on Atwood and her late partner of over 50 years, writer Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019. Atwood spoke about how Gibson’s presence is still strongly felt both in her writing and daily life.
When asked how Gibson is still with her, Atwood said, “Let me count the ways. He’s finding a lot of this quite funny. He also finds it funny that he’s become kind of a saint,” she said, listing some of the scholarships they’ve named after him. “He’s having quite a chuckle.”
Atwood said she found that writing about her loss came more naturally — rather than painfully — to her.
“I’m not a masochist […] I enjoy writing. Some people do find it very hard to write and some people are writing about things very painful to them. But I’m not one of those people.”
Margaret Atwood spoke on a wide range of topics, including lousy ChatGPT imitations of her work and the COVID-19 pandemic. (Courtesy of Gabriel Li)
Atwood announced that she is currently working on her memoir, though there was not much she could comment on about it. She also made no promises that it will see the light of day.
“I’m not supposed to talk about it […] anything you haven’t actually finished is theoretical, is it not? When I start getting more interested in historical romance than I am in writing, that’s a bad sign,” Atwood said, evoking laughter from the audience.
The author also touched on her writing process and answered some pre-submitted audience questions. Despite the dystopian themes often presented in her works and in the world today, she does still find that her life is filled with hope and joy.
“I am by nature a hopeful person, and no matter how gloomy their work may be, every writer is a hopeful person too. Let me demonstrate: they start a book, they hope they’ll finish it […] that’s a lot of hope.”
Atwood said she is disinterested in writing about utopias and perfect people because she finds them boring. Instead, she said she’d rather write about the hope found in the shadowed sides of human nature that more accurately reflects the world we live in.
“No matter how awful things may seem, we do hope that things will make a turn for the better.”