Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  2756. GORDON, Daphne. “Atwood, Crombie Chat.” Toronto Star 29 October 2000: Section: Entertainment: D03. Report on interview with Atwood conducted by David Crombie, a former mayor of Toronto, during the International Festival of Authors. Crombie thanked Atwood for being “so nice.” “I was so nice,” agreed Atwood.

  2757. GRAINGER, Brett. “Margaret Atwood.” Elm Street October 2000: 26.

  2758. GUSSOW, Mel. “An Inner Eye That Sheds Light on Life’s Mysteries: Margaret Atwood on Vision, Sacrifice and Lyrical Complexities.” New York Times 10 October 2000: E1. In the interview, Atwood describes herself as “an old crock,” or rather, as she corrected herself, “an older crock.”

  Asked if she planned to continue writing as long as she could: “Writing is not a necessity. It has been, but it need not continue to be. If I think I’m writing the telephone book, I’d stop….There’s always this tug of war. If you’re writing, you’re not living, and if you’re living, you’re not writing. So which are you going to do?”

  Spotlight Question: “You tend to keep the endings of your novels very open and ambiguous. Why not provide an absolute, concrete ending?” Answer: “Well, partly because I live in the 21st century and we don’t have a lot of faith anymore in ‘This is the happy ending, and this is the only happy ending, and this is the only way the story can possibly end.’ We tend to consider alternatives….We don’t get closure in our society as much as we used to—things are just more open-ended, so it’s partly for that reason. And the other reason is that I like the reader to feel that they can participate in the active imagination that is the novel.”

  2759. ______. “Margaret Atwood on Vision and Sacrifice.” International Herald Tribune [Neuilly-Sur-Seine, France] 17 October 2000: Section: Feature: 24.

  2760. HARVEY, Caroline. “Pop Goes the Writer: She Turned Down Gap, but in So Many Other Ways, Margaret Atwood Has Made Peace with Contemporary Culture.” Vancouver Sun 11 November 2000: E5. Interview to coincide with At-wood’s visit to town. [Atwood was asked to be in a Gap Inc. commercial, but turned it down. “I said no. I’m not a complete idiot. I know my limits.”] Main thrust of interview is Atwood’s acceptance of folks who don’t like to read—you can’t force them to. Other people’s interests don’t offend her; they amuse: “Ever seen Italian TV? A whole bunch of naked ladies with very little on bopping around in front of an announcer in a suit. Completely tasteless.”

  2761. HERBERT, Rosemary. “A Time for Vision: For Margaret Atwood, Author of the Book Club’s Selection, The Blind Assassin, Writing Is a Revelation.” Boston Herald 7 September 2000: Section: Arts & Life: O56. Based on telephone interview. Atwood notes that while she lives in an Edwardian home, built in 1911, she likes to “write anywhere, in places where the phone doesn’t ring—park benches, airports, rented rooms.”

  2762. HUBBARD, Susan. “An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Florida Review 25.1 (2000): 28-36.

  2763. JAY, Sian E. “The Hand-Made Tale.” Straits Times (Singapore) 21 December 2000: Section: Life: 1, 4. Atwood discusses her life as a writer. When a documentary crew asked her Grade 11 teacher, Miss Medely, to talk about her, they were expecting her to say, “She was a genius, I saw it right away, she was brilliant and I recognized her talent.” Miss Medely said, “She showed no particular aptitude in my class.” Atwood: “I thought that was very honest of her, and she was right.”

  2764. MARSHALL, John. “Atwood’s Newest Novel Can Be Tough Going, but Then, So Can the Writer.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 14 September 2000: Section: Life and Arts: E1. Interviewed when she was in Seattle, Atwood was not happy to be queried about the negative review of The Blind Assassin by Thomas Mallon in the New York Times.

  2765. MARTIN, Sandra. “Atwood Interactive.” Globe and Mail 28 August 2000: Section: Saturday: R1, 4.

  2766. MATCHAN, Linda. “Nothing but the Book: Margaret Atwood Is Happy to Talk about Work, but Little Else.” Boston Globe 4 October 2000: Section: Living: C1. Atwood not enjoying her book tour, perhaps because in Boston she suffered her “first book tour injury [she had dropped her heavy suitcase on her foot], perhaps because she was tired of ‘tedious and uninformed questions’ posed by reporters ‘with bow ties and hair products, who follow me around like puppy dogs.’”

  2767. McGLONE, Jackie. “Boxing Clever.” Scotland on Sunday 15 October 2000: 12. Interviewer starts out stressed and ends up charmed.

  2768. McNAMARA, Mary. “Canada’s Sardonic Goddess of Dark Insightful Stories: Margaret Atwood Speaks of Her Ambitious New Novel and of Being a Successful Women in What Is Still a Man’s World.” Los Angeles Times 26 September 2000: Section: Southern California Living: E1. Story based on questions asked during the author’s recent appearance at UCLA (University of California–Los Angeles). Her usual quirky comments:

  On her early teaching career: “I taught grammar to engineering students in a Quonset hut at 8:30 in the morning. I made them read Kafka. I thought it would come in handy in their later lives.”

  On Canadian nationalism: “Canada is such a peculiar country that if you say ‘Canada exists’ people think you hate the United States.” The next morning, at her hotel, she told the interviewer that, during book signings, people tend to present her with their entire Atwood libraries: “One dear sweet man had got a hold of an edition of my books for which I had done some watercolors. He wanted me to sign every one.” And did she? “Of course not. Not one of my characters would have done such a thing. But I’m much nicer than any of my characters.”

  2769. METZLER, Gabriele. “Creativity: An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 277-286. Interview took place in March 1994. Chapter is a slightly shortened version of the interview first published in the Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 15.1 (1995): 143-150.

  2770. MEYER, Carla. “Atwood as Complex as Her Latest Novel.” San Francisco Chronicle 20 September 2000: Section: Daily Datebook: C1. In interview Atwood notes she pulled the idea of incorporating the ’30s adventure-fantasy pulp genre into The Blind Assassin from “the huge filing cabinet” of historical and literary tidbits that is her brain. She says, “The stuff is all in there. I’m just not thinking about it all the time.” She laughs, adding, “I’m a walking footnote.” She also didn’t like the “feminist author” tag. “I’m too old to be formed by that (feminist) school….I started writing in 1956, and it wasn’t even on the horizon.” “Do I write about women? Sure, so did Tolstoy.” In the interview, she wondered why she isn’t referred to as “the environmentalist author.” “Think what progress could be made if the feminists and the environmentalists could get together and make all the women buy more energy-efficient washing machines.”

  2771. MILNE, Kirsty. “More to Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddle-Duck Than Meets the Eye.” The Scotsman 10 November 2000: 17. In a cryptic press conference after the Booker ceremony, Atwood explains why her biggest literary influence was the tales of Beatrix Potter, “especially her dark period.”

  2772. REHM, Diane. [Margaret] Atwood The Blind Assassin. [Sound recording]. Washington, DC: WAMU, American University, 2000. Cassette tape, 1 sound cassette (ca. 60 min.). Interview originally broadcast 27 September 2000.

  2773. ROSS, Val. “The Elusive Margaret Atwood: Canada’s Foremost Literary Star Talks about Fame, Politics and the Nature of Buttons.” Quill & Quire 66.9 (September 2000): 18-19.

  2774. ROSTON, Elana. “Canadian Author Margaret Atwood Answers Questions and Discusses Her New Novel within a Novel.” New Times [Los Angeles] 14 September 2000: Section: Calendar. A short interview that also promotes Atwood’s appearance at UCLA’s Royce Hall on 15 September.

  2775. SMULDERS, Marilyn. “Our Margaret: Don’t Believe the Negative Hype.” Halifax Daily News 10 September 2000: 23. Atwood doesn’t claim The Blind Assassin is her best novel. “There’s a dance in the old dame yet….Just remember, Robertson Davies was just getting wound up at my age. I can only hope I won’t have a great big white beard sho
rtly.”

  2776. STEINBERG, Sybil. “PW Talks to Margaret Atwood.” Publishers Weekly 247.30 (2000): 68. An interview about her writings, her response regarding the formats she uses, and an explanation of the secret elements in her writings.

  2777. STRUCKEL, Katie. “The Human Nature of Margaret Atwood.” Writer’s Digest 80.10 (2000): 34-35.

  2778. TILLOTSON, Kristin. “Blind Faith.” Star Tribune (Minneapolis) 29 November 2000: Section: Variety: 1E. Atwood interviewed before her appearance in the city. When asked to explain the differences between Canadians and US residents, she said: “We have to think about you. You don’t have to think about us. That about sums it up.” Tweaking her involuntary status as a Canadian icon, she remarked “Icons inspire iconoclasm. I can always count on a few people in my native land to throw horse buns.”

  2779. Van LUVEN, Lynne. “Blind Assassin’s Illusions.” Edmonton Journal 27 August 2000: E13. Pre-publication interview.

  2780. VINER, Katherine. “Double Bluff: Atwood Can Enter the Mind of a Murderer or a Child Bully with Ease….” The Guardian [London] 16 September 2000: 18. An extensive personal interview.

  2781. WERTHEIM, Margaret. “Northern Exposer.” LA Weekly 17 November 2000: Section: Features: 49. Atwood as a fantasy writer.

  2782. WILLIAMSON, Dave. Author! Author! Encounters with Famous Writers. Winnipeg: Great Plains, 2000. Includes “Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson: A Provencal Lunch.” 190-195.

  2783. WITTMAN, Juliet. “Time Pieces: Acclaimed Author Margaret Atwood Delves into the Past to Make Her Stories Stick.” Denver Rocky Mountain News 1 October 2000: Section: Books: 1E. Atwood on the importance of memory: “A man goes to the doctor. The doctor says, ‘I’ve got two pieces of bad news.’ The man says, ‘Oh dear. That’s awful. What are they?’ The doctor says, ‘First of all, you’re just riddled with cancer.’ The man says, ‘That’s horrifying. What is the second piece of bad news?’ The doctor says, ‘The second piece of really bad news in that you’re in the terminal stages of Alzheimer’s disease.’ And the man says, ‘At least I don’t have cancer.’”

  2784. WONG, Jan. Lunch with Jan Wong. Toronto: Doubleday, 2000. 11-15. Atwood started off the series on 7 September 1996 and, after publication in the Globe and Mail, Atwood tried to get the interview zapped from the newspaper’s electronic database, apparently because it mentioned the name of her daughter.

  Scholarly Resources

  2785. ALAIMO, Stacy. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell UP, 2000. See especially Chapter 6, “Playing Nature: Postmodern Natures in Contemporary Fiction,” 133-170, which includes some discussion of Surfacing.

  2786. ANDREWS, Jennifer. “Humouring the Border at the End of the Millennium: Constructing an English Canadian Humour Tradition for the Twentieth Century and Beyond.” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 140-149. In the works of Margaret Atwood, Stephen Leacock, Thomas King, and Lionel Stevenson, Andrews examines the question “Where is here?” through critical treatments of the 49th parallel by Canadian literary scholars. Shows how comic writers reveal their critical biases shaping conceptions of humor and nation and how they anticipate some important directions for this area of study in the 21st century.

  2787. ARMITT, Lucie. Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. See especially “Vampires and the Unconscious: Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Bessie Head,” 66-101, and especially the subsection: “Freud, Dora and Alias Grace,” 91-101, plus “Ghosts and (Narrative) Ghosting: Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Toni Morrison,” 102-129, and especially the subsection: “Apparitional Geometries: The Robber Bride (1993),” 107-115.

  2788. BACCHILEGA, Cristina. “Atwood, Margaret.” The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Ed. Jack Zipes. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 29. Entry includes some bibliographical citations.

  2789. ______. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. Reference to Atwood in discussion of “Bluebeard Plot.” 133ff.

  2790. BACCOLINI, Raffaella. “Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler.” Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 13-34. The Handmaid’s Tale.

  2791. BARZILAI, Shuli. “Accountable Malignity: Three Kitchen Scenes in Atwood’s Fiction.” Newsletter of the Margaret Atwood Society 24 (Fall 2000): 1-5.

  2792. ______. “‘Say That I Had a Lovely Face’: The Grimms’s ‘Rapunzel,’ Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’ and Atwood’s Lady Oracle.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 19.2 (Fall 2000): 231-254.

  2793. ______. “Who Is He? The Missing Persons behind the Pronoun in Atwood’s Surfacing.” Canadian Literature 164 (2000): 57-79.

  2794. BECKER, Susanne. “Celebrity or a Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and the Media.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 28-40.

  2795. BEYER, Charlotte. “Feminist Revisionist Mythology and Female Identity in Margaret Atwood’s Recent Poetry.” Literature and Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism and Culture 14.3 (2000): 276-296. Focuses on Interlunar (1984) and Morning in the Burned House (1995). Winner of the Atwood Society’s award for best article of 2000.

  2796. BLOOM, Harold, ed. Margaret Atwood. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Individual articles, all reprints, indexed in this section.

  2797. BONHEIM, Helmut. “Models of Canadianness.” New Worlds: Discovering and Constructing the Unknown in Anglophone Literature. Ed. Martin Kuester, Gab-riele Christ, and Rudolf Beck. Munich: Vögel, 2000. 51-71. Irving Layton’s poem, “Butterfly on a Rock,” set against Atwood’s “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” and George Johnston’s “War on the Periphery.”

  2798. BOUSON, J. Brooks. “The Edible Woman’s Refusal to Consent to Femininity.” Margaret Atwood. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. 71-91. Reprinted from Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood (1993).

  2799. BRIN, David. “Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled with Idiots…Or Why Fiction Routinely Depicts Society and Its Citizens as Fools.” Extrapolation 41.1 (Spring 2000): 7-20. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale used as an example: “When Margaret Atwood posits a world dominated by screeching misogynists, in The Handmaid’s Tale, she sets up a glorious straw man to protest male oppression. Never mind that 80 percent of the men and the great percent of the women in North America would have fought to their dying breath to prevent Atwood’s scenario from ever coming about in the first place. Likelihood is not an issue in the art of polemic, which is useless at persuading your opponents but provides a self-righteous rush to the already committed. (Can you name one person whose pre-established opinions were changed by Atwood’s book?)” (Author).

  2800. BROWNLEY, Martine Watson. Deferrals of Domain: Contemporary Women Novelists and the State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. See especially Chapter 3: “Fantasies of Power, Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm.” 67-96.

  2801. CAVALCANTI, Idlney. “Utopias of/f Language in Contemporary Feminist Dystopias.” Utopian Studies: Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies 11.2 (2000): 152-180. Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale compared to Lisa Tuttle’s “The Cure” and Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue.

  2802. COHEN, M. “A Dystopia of Silence: Atwood’s Anti-Censorship Arguments in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 37 (2000): 113-135.

  2803. COHEN, Matt. Typing: A Life in 26 Keys. Toronto: Random House, 2000. Autobiography includes snapshots of friends such as Atwood.

  2804. COOKE, Nathalie. “Lions, Tigers, and Pussycats: Margaret Atwood (Auto)Biographically.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 15-27.

  2805. DAVIDSON, Arnold E. “Future Tense: Making
History in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Margaret Atwood. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. 21-28. Reprinted from Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, ©1988.

  2806. De ZORDO, Ornella. “Larger Than Life: Women Writing the Excessive Female Body.” Textus: English Studies in Italy 13.2 (2000): 427-448. Lady Oracle compared to Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989).

  2807. DEER, Glenn. “The Handmaid’s Tale: Dystopia and the Paradoxes of Power.” Margaret Atwood. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. 93-112. Reprinted from Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority, ©1994.

  2808. DEERY, June. “Science for Feminists: Margaret Atwood’s Body of Knowledge.” Margaret Atwood. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. 223-236. Reprinted from Twentieth Century Literature 43.4 (Winter 1997): 470-483.

  2809. DEYOUNG-PATRIE, Bettie Jo. “Unpopular Gals, a Murderess, and a Bitch: Margaret Atwood’s Wicked and Ambiguous Feminism.” MA thesis. Northern Michigan University, 2000. 66 pp.

  2810. DJWA, Sandra. “‘Here I Am’: Atwood, Paper Houses, and a Parodic Tradition.” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 169-185. On Surfacing.

  2811. ______. “‘Nothing by Halves’: F. R. Scott.” Journal of Canadian Studies 34.4 (1999-2000): 52-69. Notes that poetry of F. R. Scott (from Montreal) has had “an acknowledged influence on the later work…of Atwood” and that as early as 1950s, Scott isolated “survival” as a Canadian paradigm, two decades before Atwood emphasized this quality in Canadian political life and writing.

  2812. DUGAN, Stephen M. “Spectacle versus Surveillance: Panopticism in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Handmaid’s Tale.” MA thesis. University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2000. 37 pp.