Editor’s Letter
M at The Walrus is sorted into folders including “Politics,” “AI,” and — as with many Canadian editors, I suspect — one marked “Atwood.” The latter is devoted to our country’s best-known writer and includes news of her latest ventures and ideas for stories about her. The folder also contains correspondence with the author herself on a surprising range of issues, from civil rights to mythology; often, her emails draw attention to the work of lesser-known artists or community organizations. Inevitably, she also points out mistakes she thinks we’ve made. Simply put: to her, it all matters.
It’s amazing that Margaret Atwood nds the time to write emails, what with a new novel, a hit TV show, nearly 2 million Twitter followers, and initiatives like the Pelee Island Bird Observatory — the conservation organization she founded with the late writer Graeme Gibson, her partner of almost fty years. Being the cofounder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada and with her heavy involvement in the Canadian chapter of , the international human rights organization, Atwood also takes an ongoing interest in Canadian publications. I’ve come to see her personal outreach as coming from the same source that fuels her writing — what led her, over thirty years after publishing the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, to follow it up with a sequel, The Testaments. In Atwood’s universe, one’s roles as a writer, as an activist, and as a citizen are interchangeable — and the work is never complete.
For Atwood’s eightieth birthday this November, editors Tajja Isen and Daniel Viola spoke to some of her contemporaries about their encounters with a gure, though ubiquitous in our national culture, few of us really know as a person. The resulting oral history (“The Making of Margaret Atwood”), with contributions from George Saunders, Thomas King, Adrienne Clarkson, Charles Pachter, Eleanor Wachtel, and more, is not just the portrait of an artist at the height of her career; it also o ers rare insight into one highly successful creative person’s strategies — for everything from dealing with critics to curing a hangover.
Atwood’s new Booker Prize–winning novel, The Testaments, re ects her lifelong interest in social change and storytelling. The book is written as the ctional history of a future state, and with its emphasis on authoritarianism, xenophobia, and misogyny, it’s hard not to see it as a metaphor for what gave rise to Trump’s America and similar movements worldwide. One of the book’s main characters is Aunt Lydia, whose deadpan delivery (to me, anyway) is a close ctional approximation of the author’s own voice. “I, too, was once like you: fatally hooked on life,” she quips, to a presumed future reader, about the risks of attachment to earthly things. What emerges from the book’s theme of insurgency is the sense that an original doesn’t owe anyone anything.
A number of stories in this issue re ect Atwoodian themes of authority and ethics. For the visual feature “Who Owns Colombia’s Gold?” photographer Roger Lemoyne and writer Rémy Bourdillon documented the battle over land rights between Gran Colombia Gold, a Toronto-based mining company, and traditional miners who have worked in Colombia’s mountains for generations. In “ Mess,” Curtis Gillespie details rising mistrust of the Montreal-based global anti-doping agency, which works closely with the International Olympic Committee. As he writes, when the highest authority on cheating is compromised, what recourse is there for athletes who play by the rules? And “Make the Verb Work,” Dale Hrabi’s pro le of his late friend and mentor Elizabeth Smart — a poet and commercial writer best known for her 1945 book By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept — explores the costs and rewards of defying social convention.
One of the iconic contributions of The Handmaid’s Tale — repopularized by its TV adaptation, now three seasons in — is a message from one Handmaid as a form of support and inspiration to others: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (translated, roughly, from the Latin, as, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”). That’s a tting attitude when facing many of the challenges of this time on Earth — and a ne introduction to this issue. As Atwood has taught us, every act — whether reading or picking up a pen to create something new — is tied to bigger things.