The doors to Rackham Auditorium opened at 6:15 and the reading did not begin until 7:00, but by 6:00 people had already filled the lobby of Rackham. I was aware that this event had sold out, but I only realized the magnitude of this upon entering the auditorium. More than 1,000 people had bought tickets to attend this event–placing it among the larger readings that have taken place in Ann Arbor.
After an introduction by one of Literati’s booksellers, Margaret Atwood came on stage wearing darling skeleton gloves, quipping that they were in honor of our upcoming election. She was here to promote her latest book, Hag-Seed, which is a part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project. Before she read, she explained to us the stages of writing for a project likes this: rash acceptance, buyer’s regret, procrastination, and panic. Interestingly enough, those are the same stages I’m going through while writing this review. However, unlike Atwood, I haven’t been tasked with translating a Shakespeare play (in this case, The Tempest) to novel form.
The book follows Felix, who was a director at a proper theater before being fired and forced to take up a job directing plays in men’s prison. The first scene Atwood read was one describing Felix as he tries to convince an actress to play the part of Miranda in the prison’s production of The Tempest. It was a rather humorous section and showcased Atwood’s wit, but me pulling a line or two from it won’t do the reading justice so I’ll refrain. They’re funny, but only in context. The other section she read was one where one of the prisoners has come to Felix about a rather dry part of the play with some changes he made. What followed was Atwood dryly reading a rap version of the speech Prospero makes in Act 1 Scene 2 of The Tempest, including all claps and snaps. It was not a half-assed section either–Atwood didn’t write a few lines for this rap and move on, though she probably could have gotten away with that. No, she rewrote Prospero’s speech in its entirety and proceeded to read all of it. I can only hope that at some point someone records her reading this rap and leaks it to the internet, because the world deserves to listen to a little ole’ Margaret Atwood read a Shakespearean rap.
Once the reading was over, there was a question and answer section with the audience, which Atwood prefaced with a “if I don’t like your question, I will reformulate it.” Atwood seemed familiar with the questions asked (when do readers ever ask new or interesting questions about books written 20+ years ago?). For example, the first question was about whether The Handmaid’s Tale is intentionally cautionary. To this Atwood broke down the the three backgrounds that led to the book: first, there had been a number of mid-century dystopias, none of which had been written from a female point-of-view; second, it was the Puritans who had laid the foundation for America, not the Founding Fathers, and that none of the events/rules/ways of life in the book were Atwood’s own invention, they had all happened some place, some time; and finally, that the time the book was written, the 1980s, was already seeing the rise of some of this way of thinking, of the religious right, of women who made a living telling other women they should not have jobs and stick to managing their homes. Another audience member asked a question about why Atwood chose to write genre books when she was also a literary author. It was clearly a question Atwood was sick of for she seemed to almost bat it down, stating that she didn’t divide books by genre, but “what I like” and “what I don’t like.” Furthermore, in reference to what she writes about, she said “I did those things because it never occurred to me not to do them.” There were several other questions, ranging from “why is reading important” to “have you scripted the current US election” (she has not), and all in all, it was a lengthy, interesting q&a section. Atwood isn’t just a good author, she’s also a good thinker and one of the more witty writers around. If you are ever given the chance to hear her read or talk–take it.
