Walk to the moon

This spring the uni hosted, among other luminaries, Margaret Atwood and Eleanor Catton. And somehow I managed to hear both of them speak from quite close up. And though that was in itself a wonderful thing, my biggest takeaway was not from what they said, specifically, about writing, but who they are as writers.

Craft books go on at length about subverting expectations, but Margaret Atwood did so in the flesh. She led the conversation places that the interviewer obviously had no idea they would go. She brought a rag doll a fan had silkscreened her face onto, to answer the questions that she as a writer did not want to answer. She sang a hymn from Year of the Flood. We had, through the course of the Literary Festival, become accustomed to hearing Writers speak, each time with all the dignity and gravitas of the capital W, but she did not perform to our expectations. She was unapologetically who she had decided to be, with the fire-hardened edge of a person that has probably discovered through experience that this is simply the only way to be.

I want to be Margaret Atwood when I grow up because I adore the complexity and skill of her writing, and I feel a biographical familiarity with her wilderness upbringing and hope that I can also turn the feral aspects of my nature to good use.

Eleanor Catton I want to be for different reasons. She has gone down in record as being the youngest person to win the Booker, the first New Zealander to win the Booker, and the author of the longest book to win the Booker. Which, in light of the prize being opened to Americans the year that she won the Booker, sounds surprisingly like a gauntlet bouncing across a stone floor to me. Hopefully when I turn twenty-eight and some other American is the first American to win the Booker my dangerously competitive streak will bed itself down until needed.

It seems, when you look at it, an impossible thing, the position she is in now. But there is, as there is to everything, a logical progression of events.

In conversation during the Literary Festival, Eleanor Catton explained how she had gotten where she has gotten. She had no television as a child, so she spent her time reading long Victorian novels. Her parents encouraged this, and she got into University. She did well in University, so she did a Masters. The Masters required her to write a book, so she wrote a book. Having written a book, she had a book to sell, and, being in New Zealand's tiny literary market, she was able to sell it directly to a local publisher. Because she was published in New Zealand, an English agent who loves Kiwi fiction found her book, signed her on, and sold her in the rest of the world. Because she had a successful book, she was accepted into the Iowa Writer's workshop. Because she was in the Iowa Writer's workshop she had the space and the tools to begin writing the book that would win the Booker. Yes, massive amounts of discipline, skill, and hard work were also involved, but the point is that she didn't go from being a teenager reading three-volume novels to touring the world talking about The Luminaries in a single step. There were many steps, and when they occurred they were logical steps, not to the ultimate outcome but in a general direction. So what I learned from Eleanor Catton is that, with enough small, logical steps, you can walk to the moon.