“Some country, somewhere, should make a monument to murdered journalists around the world. There’s been quite a few of them,” Margaret Atwood told Vanity Fair Sunday afternoon. Atwood was in Manhattan to chat with The New York Times for its TimesTalks Festival, which also screened the first episode of the new season of The Handmaid's Tale, the Emmy-winning series based on Atwood’s seminal dystopian novel. (Star Elisabeth Moss, originally on the bill to join Atwood, found herself unable to attend the event thanks to Toronto’s freak spring blizzard.)

“I’ve proposed it to a few people,” Atwood continued. “Timothy Snyder has a new book called The Road to Unfreedom, and he begins it with a dedication to journalists, the heroes of our time. So many of them have spoken truth to power, and then got killed.”

It’s no surprise this topic is top of mind for Atwood, who’s spent much of her prolific career ruminating about the risks and rewards of speaking truth to power. Now, in the shadow of a president who frequently hurls threatening rhetoric toward news outlets like the Times itself, Season 2 of Handmaid—which premieres April 25 on Hulu—is poised to shed further light on characters who refuse to stay silent or submissive in the face of misogyny and oppression, like Moss’s June (otherwise known as Offred) and Samira Wiley’s Moira.

Though the show’s first season seemed eerily relevant enough, Atwood agrees that this second season might function as something even more culturally significant: a call to action. “I don’t want you all to come to Canada right now, because I want you to stay here and vote,” she told those gathered at the TimesTalk. Atwood also recalled finishing The Handmaid’s Tale in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of one of the largest and most notorious factions of the Ku Klux Klan—adding that she hoped that the electoral defeat of Roy Moore in December marked a small spark of progress.

Though her novel is the series’s source material, Atwood says that she still finds the show grippingly grotesque. “It’s very absorbing and visceral—and it’s very tense,” she told V.F. “Partly because they do such a good job acting it. And the Aunt Lydia character”—a fearsome taskmistress Atwood based on a former grade-school teacher—“is just terrifying,” said Atwood, even though Aunt Lydia actress Ann Dowd “is the nicest person.” Atwood hasn’t yet seen past the first episode of Season 2, which moves beyond the events of her book: Handmaid show-runner Bruce Miller “won’t let me see them until he thinks they’re ready,” she explained.