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Kerry Nolan: This is All of It. I'm Kerry Nolan in for Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us, whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand. Here's a taste of what we've got coming up for you next week. We'll learn about the new rules coming to Major League Baseball this season to make the game shorter. Plus, later in the week, we'll hear from poet Clint Smith, as well as Tony Award-winning Michael R. Jackson about his new musical White Girl in Danger. That's in the future, but now let's hear about a new short story collection from Margaret Atwood.

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Kerry Nolan: Canadian author Margaret Atwood's latest book is a collection of short stories titled Old Babes in the Wood with fictional tales but also stories based in real life. The center of the collection includes seven stories about the characters Tig and Nell, a couple that Atwood has been writing about for many years. There were new stories and stories that the Handmaid's Tale author wrote a long time ago, all wrapped into one collection. We were lucky enough to have Margaret Atwood in studio a few weeks back to talk about the book. Alison started by asking Margaret what she enjoys about the short story as a form.

Margaret Atwood: It's short.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:01:24]

Margaret Atwood: More instant gratification, let's put it that way. Yes, so I've been writing short stories since Hold Your Breath, the 1950s. They were some of the first things I got published, that and poems because they were short. I love reading them and all kinds, so ghost stories, strange tales, sci-fi stories, Kelly Link. I don't know how you'd classify that. All different kinds, and I like writing them too.

Alison Stewart: Do you edit your short stories heavily or do they just come out and they're short and here they are?

Margaret Atwood: I edit everything because I'm a downhill skier as a writer. Some people want to get the first page perfect. I'm not that person. I get through to the end as fast as I can and then I go back and see what I did wrong. I work with editors, and I work with a very good copy editor, she said of Oryx and Crake, "Okay, you sent Jimmy out with five jolt bars to eat, and he eats one here, one here, one here, one here, one here, and one here, so you're either going to have to give him one more or have him eat one fewer." She's very meticulous, and I love her a lot.

Alison Stewart: How do you know when your short story is done?

Margaret Atwood: You never know. I think you know when you can't do anything more to it, but you're not done then because then comes the editing, and it's called revision for a reason. It's a new vision of what you've done. Then you have to pretend to be a reader and say, "Does this make sense to me if I'm a reader, just a reader coming upon it cold? Am I telling them enough? Am I telling them too much? Does it hold together?"

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting to have to put on the different hat and pretend like you don't know what the story is about.

Margaret Atwood: I think you kind of have to do that. Otherwise, you're going to excuse yourself for too many things because you know the answer. You just haven't told the reader.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Margaret Atwood. The new collection, the short story collection, is Old Babes in the Wood. The collection is bookended by these groups of stories about this couple Tig and Nell, and you've been writing about them for some time. What's kept you returning to Tig and Nell?

Margaret Atwood: More stuff.

Alison Stewart: Things keep happening to them?

Margaret Atwood: Well, I keep remembering stuff that happened to them. Yes, a lot of stuff happened to them. I barely scratched the surface of stuff that happened to them or that they did, the naughty creatures.

Alison Stewart: The first story First Aid is about Tig and Nell. They take this first aid course and then later on they're thinking about the many times they were near death. I understand you and your partner at one time took a first aid course.

Margaret Atwood: We absolutely took a first aid course that extremely closely resembles that one.

[laughter]

Margaret Atwood: Yes, and we laughed a lot because we were by far the oldest people in the room. I think a lot of people had been sent there by their companies, so they would have been in their 30s, in their 20s, and they were a bit more flexible than we were. Kneel on the floor for half an hour doing the chest pushes a bit easier for them, I have to say, but we made it through, and I even bought one of the little appliances you should carry around with you should you come upon somebody who needs the mouth-to-mouth. I also bought an anti-fib kit, which I suppose I should get checked out to see if it still works.

Alison Stewart: Or the battery is [crosstalk].

Margaret Atwood: Yes, exactly. I think I better just check that out.

Alison Stewart: When you take a course like that, do you come home at night and think, "Huh, that could be interesting for a story," you take down notes, or as you're writing the story, it's from your memory of that time?

Margaret Atwood: I didn't take notes. I just remembered it at one point. Then I thought back to my own childhood up in the woods with no phone, no anti-fib kit, no nothing. I thought, "What if we had had an actual serious accident up there? What would we have done?" I don't know. It would've involved a motorboat.

Alison Stewart: You would've done something. Just wouldn't [crosstalk]--

Margaret Atwood: Well, [crosstalk] a motorboat may not be--

[laughter]

Margaret Atwood: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Was First Aid always going to be the first story in the collection?

Margaret Atwood: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, you collect these things. They sort of pile up and then you lay them all out on the floor just like a deck of cards and you start shuffling them and then these people called the editors get involved. There are a bunch of them because they're in different countries.

I've said, "I want you to all have your conversations amongst yourselves and then channel it through one person, because I don't want to get into fights you're having. I don't want to be in the middle. I don't want to have to choose favorites amongst you because you're all wonderful, so just pick the most Mary Poppins-like amongst you, and that person will be the English one called Becky." Becky Hardy channels all the editors and then tells me what they have mutually agreed upon.

Alison Stewart: Becky Hardy sounds like a character in a short story, doesn't it?

Margaret Atwood: Yes, extremely crack the whip. "Behave yourselves."

Alison Stewart: My guest is Margaret Atwood. The collection is called Old Babes in the Wood. We talked about some things that are very real, near-death experiences, first aid classes. On the completely fantastical side, you riff on this 14th-century folk tale about Griselda, a meek woman who has her children taken away. In your story, it's called Impatient Griselda. Our narrator is this alien who we find out looks a little bit like an octopus.

Margaret Atwood: Looks quite a lot like an octopus.

Alison Stewart: Has arrived on earth to help out, entertaining human beings who are quarantined during an illness, that's plague-like pandemic. I'd love if you'd read a little bit of this and then we can talk about the language on the other side.

Margaret Atwood: Okay. The ask was pick a story from Boccaccio's Decameron and do a modern update of it. In the Decameron, these people are sequestering from the Black Death and telling each other stories. The last one in the collection is called Patient Griselda, which appears here and there in various forums and other folk tale compendiums.

Patient Griselda is extremely patient and the man who marries her is obviously an evil sadist. I have no time for him, and for that reason, I felt the story needed an update in which things turned out somewhat differently. It is an alien entertainer who has been sent on an intergalactic mission to help out these poor human beings who are quarantining, and it begins like this.

"Impatient Griselda. Do you all have your comfort blankets? We tried to provide the right sizes. I am sorry some of them are washcloths. We ran out. Your snacks, I regret that we could not arrange to have them cooked, as you call it, but the nourishment is more complete without this cooking that you do. If you put all of the snack into your ingestion apparatus, your, as you call it, mouth, the blood will not drip on the floor. That is what we do at home.

I regret that we do not have any snacks that are what you call vegan. We could not interpret this word. You don't have to eat them if you don't want to. Please stop whispering at the back there and stop whimpering and take your thumb out of your mouth, Sir-Madam. You must set a good example for the children. No, you are not the children, Madam-Sir. You are 42. Among us, you would be the children, but you are not from our planet or even our galaxy. Thank you, sir or madam. I use both because quite frankly I can't tell the difference. We do not have such limited arrangements on our planet.

Yes, I know I look like what you call an octopus, little young entity. I have seen pictures of these amicable beings. If the way I appear truly disturbs you, you may close your eyes. It would allow you to pay better attention to the story, in any case. No, you may not leave the quarantine room. The plague is out there. It would be too dangerous for you, though not for me. We do not have that type of microbe on our planet.

I'm sorry there is no what you call a toilet. We ourselves utilize all ingested nourishment for fuel, so we have no need for such receptacles. We did order one what you call a toilet for you, but we are told there is a shortage. You could try out the window. It is a long way down, so please do not try to jump. It's not fun for me either, Madam-Sir. I was sent here as part of an intergalactic-crises aid package. I did not have a choice, being a mere entertainer, and thus low in status. This simultaneous translation device I have been issued is not the best quality. As we have already experienced together, you do not understand my jokes, but as you say, half an oblong wheat-flour product is better than none. Now the story."

Alison Stewart: When you get to play with language like that, it sounds like, one, you're having a lot of fun, but how did you decide what would cause the translation machine difficulty? You said it's not the best quality.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What kind of words--? [crosstalk]

Margaret Atwood: For a carnivorous being such as this alien, vegan would be very difficult. They wouldn't have any equivalent.

Alison Stewart: Did you think about objects that just seem like, how would you describe a toilet? How would you describe a-- [unintelligible 00:12:36], a vegan.

Margaret Atwood: Yes. Well, this is the problem. The person or the alien is not able to describe these things because there is no equivalent. That is true of a lot of languages on our planet. There are things that you just have a lot of difficulty describing because your language doesn't have that concept or those words, so you would have to use quite a few words to give an idea of what that one word means. For instance, there's a Japanese word, which means in one word the color of white silk that has been bleached on the snow. Try doing that in one word.

Alison Stewart: Wow. It sounded like, when I read that, you were having an immense amount of fun with that introduction.

Margaret Atwood: I had fun with the whole story, and it was a great satisfaction to do away with the bad duke.

Alison Stewart: I asked you how to say this before we turned on the microphone. I don't want to pretend like I knew beforehand. Metempsychosis or the journey of the soul. In this story, a woman becomes convinced that she has been inhabited by the soul of a snail or maybe the snail has inhabited the woman, just taken her on as a shell. Of all the creatures to undergo this change, why a snail?

Margaret Atwood: Well, they haven't had enough attention paid to them. There are a lot of shape-changing stories you know about werewolves, you know about seals in Scotland. You can be a seal who is a woman. You've seen Swan Lake. There is a North American version in which it's geese. Bear walkers are well known in North America, people who can change into bears. They even turn up in Lord of the Rings. That's the character called Beorn.

Lots of possibilities here, but there is a Chinese folk tale in which a man realizes that his quiet and slow wife is spending half of her life as a snail in the water bucket outside the door. That too can be a shape-changing story. Oh, I forgot snakes. There are ones in which the woman is a snake. It's frequently women, but if it's a sort of threatening carnivorous creature, it's often a man. For a long time, werewolves were male, but now we've been given female werewolves too. With gender equality, there's female werewolves.

Alison Stewart: Seemed that you did a quite a bit of research into snails.

Margaret Atwood: I already knew quite a lot about snails.

Alison Stewart: You did?

Margaret Atwood: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why? [laughs]

Margaret Atwood: Well, think how old I am. I mean, you don't get to 83 without knowing a lot about snails. I'm a gardener.

Alison Stewart: Oh, there you go.

Margaret Atwood: Snails[unintelligible 00:15:39]. Also slugs, they're close relatives. I've always been very interested in snails because of their ability to withdraw into their shell and just close the door. They seal themselves up. Yes, why not a snail is the question one may ask.

Alison Stewart: The story ends with a paragraph, "I must stay positive until my present skin-and-tissue host wears out. Then my small bright spiral soul will rise and fly through the iridescent clouds and minor-key music of the intermediate spirit realm, to embody itself once more, but as what? Any husk other than this one. Any shell other than this." What does the snail understand about humans? That "That was fine for a short time. I don't want to go back and be in a human again."

Margaret Atwood: It wasn't even fine for a short time. She has a lot of difficulty with it. [laughs] Yes. Her boyfriend doesn't understand why she wants to eat slightly decaying lettuce all the time.

Alison Stewart: He has brought Pinot. He doesn't even--

Margaret Atwood: He doesn't get it.

Alison Stewart: Margaret, there's a bird on the cover of the book, and you've been tweeting about our owl Flaco, I believe.

Margaret Atwood: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Are you a birder? I know your late partner was a birder.

Margaret Atwood: Yes, we were both heavily-- and I still am in the bird world. This eagle-owl, they're quite big, and I wonder if there's going to be a subscription movement to import a female eagle-owl for Flaco.

Alison Stewart: Wow. That would be interesting.

Margaret Atwood: Don't you think he needs a friend?

Alison Stewart: I do. I think it's interesting that so many people have become invested in Flaco. In doing my research for interviewing you, I saw your interview with Jenna Bush Hager on The Today Show, and you mentioned you were working on a memoir. Is that true?

Margaret Atwood: I know, my publishers F-R-E-A-K-E-D out.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I'm so glad it was that word that you said, that F word. I got worried--

[laughter]

Margaret Atwood: Yes. They went slightly ballistic, "You shouldn't be talking about this yet" so here I am not talking about it.

Kerry Nolan: That was the great Margaret Atwood in studio speaking with Alison about her latest short story collection Old Babes in the Wood.

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Kerry Nolan: Next, we continue our show speaking about an important first lady, Edith Wilson, who helped run the country after her husband Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke.

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