Introducing Margaret Atwood

October 2nd, 2008

I don’t actually inhabit the same universe as Margaret Atwood. I do live right on the border of one of those multiverses that the physicist John Wheeler thought up the math for, where the universe splits at every decision point and goes its separate ways. She’s in one of them, I’m in another.

I don’t live in the same world, but it seems I’m always introducing her. As I did again yesterday at an “Albertans for the Arts” rally, down in Sir Winston Churchill Square. The organizers asked me to pop up and say a few words to clarify federal spending on culture. This is like clarifying the math for the many-worlds hypothesis, and a bit hard to ask of a poet.

But I felt I should pitch in. I’m not unusually political, but I don’t want to live in a universe where the Canadian prime minister thinks all that artists want is the invitation to glitzy galas. If there is any small thing I can do to change the equations, I’ll do it.

And then, as if the universe was going to pat me on the back for accepting the challenge, the organizer said “Oh, great—and will you introduce Margaret Atwood?” She had gracefully agreed to say a few words at the rally, which was taking place right before her lecture at the Winspear Centre.

The immediate picture of an alternate universe dizzied me. I would make a short, inspiring speech (about budgets? But this was to be another universe, I could do it.) I would deliver a warming couple of paragraphs to summarize her multi-page biography. She would hear it all and maybe even remember my name!

(In the other universe that bubbles immediately and irrepressibly out of this delirious one, she would say, “Oh, Alice Major!¦ Of course. I do like that last book of yours!”)

So I crafted two minutes worth of federal budgetary comment around the snappiest metaphor I could come up with in 24 hours, dressed myself to balance financial expertise and poetic flare as best I could, and went downtown. Where the media cameras were circling like a pod of nervous whales about to be beached by the six o’clock news.

The timing  was supercritical—Margaret Atwood had only five minutes to give us before going on to her lecture. The television news needed to get their feeds in. We delayed for a few moments while scouts scanned the square for our arriving star, but had to start.

I give my remarks. No Margaret. Maria Dunn comes to the stage to sing. In mid-song, the buzz went round—”she’s here, she’s here.” Maria picks it up and cleverly works it into some closing bars. The crowd cheers loudly.

By now there is no practical need to introduce her and the cameras are jostling like breaching whales who desperately need to breathe some air. I leap on the stage, say a single laudatory sentence and jump back into anonymity.

Sigh.

This is not the first time I have introduced Margaret Atwood. I did so when she gave the Anne Szumugalski lecture for the League of Canadian Poets in 2006. This was at a banquet in the Ottawa hotel where the League’s annual meeting took place. As past president, I was to give the introductory remarks about the lecture series and—gasp—sit at the same table.

Well, imagine putting Margaret Atwood in a room full of poets, all of them hoping to live in the same alternate universe. (Oh, yes, Peter X, that last book of yours! ) It’s as though you’ve changed the strength of the gravitational constant when she comes in the door.

“For god’s sake, let’s look as though we’re grown-ups,”I had muttered to Mary Ellen Csamer, then the League president. I spent the whole meal glaring at poets who wanted to thrust poems into her hands, books into her hands, even one member who was handing out samples of non-animal-product body lotion or something like that and wanted to give one to Atwood.

Of course, I had imagined the scintillating conversation that I would have with her. Instead, I spent the whole meal across the round table from her, too far to converse, just glaring at renegade poets beyond her shoulder.  If she noticed me at all, it would have been to wonder who that woman with the sour expression was.

I have found myself beside Margaret Atwood in a cafeteria line-up, trying to make up some intelligent comment about pancakes. I have sat across the room from her during  meetings of the Writers Union of Canada, knowing I’d never have the nerve to say anything at all.

In fact, much as I’d like to live in the same universe, I know that the bubbles of our separate worlds will forever bounce gently off each other and go their separate ways into the foam of the multiverse.

Surely the math could come out better! I can only hope the federal election does.

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