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Writer Margaret Atwood plays a game of 'Wild Card'

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

Margaret Atwood is known for writing books like "The Handmaid's Tale," stories about a near future where everything has gone wrong. But at 84 years old, she is also looking to the past these days. She's about to publish "Paper Boat," a collection of her poetry spanning over 60 years. Atwood talked to my colleague Rachel Martin about her early work.

MARGARET ATWOOD: I do look back on it, and I think, no wonder people found me scary, because I was scary. Poems are pretty intense.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Are you less scary now?

ATWOOD: I think simply by virtue of being shorter.

MARTIN: (Laughter).

ATWOOD: Shorter, more white-haired and older.

DETROW: Margaret Atwood joined Rachel on NPR's Wild Card, where well-known guests answer big questions about their life drawn from a deck of cards.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

MARTIN: Your choice - one, two, or three?

ATWOOD: Three.

MARTIN: One, two, three. What's a piece of advice you were smart to ignore?

ATWOOD: Oh, boy (laughter). Well, where do I begin with that?

MARTIN: (Laughter).

ATWOOD: I ignored almost all advice. I'll pick something meaningful.

MARTIN: OK.

ATWOOD: So when I was at university, we were given faculty advisers...

MARTIN: This was at Harvard. Yeah.

ATWOOD: ...To advise us, I suppose, about the direction that our life should take. And by that time, I was already writing and publishing poetry, and I had a graduate student scholarship, and my faculty adviser said, why don't you just forget all this writing and graduate student stuff and find a good man and get married?

MARTIN: Come on.

ATWOOD: How about that?

MARTIN: Truly?

ATWOOD: So this would be 1961. Well, you weren't born, so you don't remember what that was like, but that was a little extreme, even for those days.

MARTIN: Yeah.

ATWOOD: So my usual way of reacting to people's advice that I didn't agree with was my inner voice saying, you're an idiot.

MARTIN: Did you keep that as your inner voice, or did those words...

ATWOOD: You're an idiot?

MARTIN: ...Find their way outside into the public domain?

ATWOOD: Yeah, I'm afraid I've let it out a bit too much.

MARTIN: (Laughter).

ATWOOD: Maybe I should have kept it as an inner voice. But at that moment, it was, you're an idiot and, OK, is this conversation over yet? Thank you very much. Goodbye.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: Three more cards - one, two, or three?

ATWOOD: Two.

MARTIN: How do you manage envy?

ATWOOD: Oh - directed towards me or envy that I feel?

MARTIN: Envy that you feel.

ATWOOD: I don't feel envy.

MARTIN: Do you not?

ATWOOD: I do not. I mean, apart from envying tall people (laughter).

MARTIN: When I asked the question, though, you asked for a definition - envy that you suffered or had to manage or other people's envy of you?

ATWOOD: Yes.

MARTIN: Is that - does that happen a lot?

ATWOOD: It has, certainly. Yeah. So what I said to young writers who had had a sudden success, I said, within a couple of years, you will have three nasty, vicious personal attacks from people you don't know.

MARTIN: What were the attacks that were leveled at you in your first couple years of success?

ATWOOD: (Laughter) Some of them were quite funny. So a lot of it had to do with hair - Medusa hair, frizzy hair, you know, name something about hair. Yes, and one of them wrote a satirical fairy tale in which I bit the heads off men and made them into a pile and turned into an octopus. Figure that out.

MARTIN: So you were a Medusa-haired man hater.

ATWOOD: Yeah. And power mad, ladder-climbing...

MARTIN: Oh, power mad?

ATWOOD: Yes. Power-mad, ladder-climbing witch.

MARTIN: Oh, wow. I mean, that's evocative.

ATWOOD: I thought so too.

(LAUGHTER)

MARTIN: I am curious how you manage that. You were just able to just let it go, or did any of that get under your skin?

ATWOOD: No, I'm a vengeful person.

MARTIN: Are you being serious?

ATWOOD: Oh, yes. I'm quite vengeful. I can't help it. It's who I am. So I make them into idiotic people in fiction.

MARTIN: Oh, that's a sneaky, sneaky way to deal with that.

ATWOOD: (Laughter) Now, she thinks, I better watch myself.

MARTIN: (Laughter) I know. What's going to happen in this new book? This annoying radio host...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: Three more cards - one, two, three?

ATWOOD: Oh, let's do the middle one.

MARTIN: Have your feelings about death changed over time?

ATWOOD: Have my feelings about death changed over time? I'm not afraid of death, death, deathity (ph), death, death. What comes before can be very unpleasant. So I know people who've had horrible hospital and disease experiences. I know people who have ended up in care homes not knowing who they were, things like that. That's what you are worried - what I, anyway - I'm worried about rather than, quote, "being dead." I'm not too worried about being dead.

MARTIN: Right.

ATWOOD: Am I going to write my own funeral? It's creepy. And I've been to ones like that. But it's kind of fun.

MARTIN: Oh, my mom had a great time planning her funeral. And I remember thinking that's so macabre, l ike - and...

ATWOOD: No, it's like...

MARTIN: She didn't think it was at all.

ATWOOD: It's like event planning. You're planning a party for people.

MARTIN: Right.

ATWOOD: You want them to have a good time anyway.

MARTIN: Right, picking the music...

ATWOOD: You want them to have a good time.

MARTIN: Yeah.

ATWOOD: I used to be a great birthday party planner. So I just think of my funeral as a fun time for kids.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: Margaret Atwood, thank you for doing this. It was a real pleasure. Margaret's new collection is called, "Paper Boat: New And Selected Poems: 1961-2023." Congrats on the collection, and thank you so much.

ATWOOD: Thank you - fun.

DETROW: To hear more from that conversation, follow the Wild Card podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.