Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  Owen Hey / Reading: Do you have any entirely trivial pastimes? Atwood: I watch peculiar science-fiction films. Also—when unobserved—puffball comedies such as Legally Blonde.

  Bonnie Mayers (email): Where do you keep your Booker prize? Atwood: It has a happy home on a shelf near “The Horrible Head,” which is a plaster cast of a sculpture made of my head.

  3636. BROCKES, Emma. “Do Keep It Up: She Is Famously Abrasive, Sardonic and Intellectually Rigorous. Does It All Stem from Margaret Atwood’s Upbringing in a Family of Self-Sufficient Scientists, Or Is She Just a Natural Nit Picker?” The Guardian (London) 12 April 2004: Section: Guardian features: 4. Atwood in feisty interview responds to questions about her.

  Is she a feminist? “First of all, what is feminism? Second, which branch of it? Am I against women having rights? Actually, no. Am I really a puppet of the women’s movement? No, I’m too old for that. I’ve been writing since 1956 and there was no women’s movement in sight at the time. Was I interested in Ger-maine Greer and Betty Friedan? Yes. Do I have a large library of stuff about women? Actually, I do. I also have a large library about war. I used to have them side by side. Does that mean I’m a militarist? Actually not.”

  Is she competitive? No, awards don’t excite her. “It’s an inert position; you’re a pumpkin at the fair. However, I did get second prize in the dolls’ dress competition in grade three.”

  Her proudest moment? “No, I was quite pissed off. I wanted first. Although I had a friend who was Miss Wool USA and she had to carry around a lamb which peed on her. So there’s a downside to winning.”

  3637. CALDWELL, Rebecca. “Atwood Finds Opera ‘Powerful.’” Globe and Mail 18 September 2004: Section: Weekend Review: R9. Atwood’s relationship to opera, especially The Handmaid’s Tale, references her interest as a child when she read librettos to accompany the epics piped over the radio into her television-less home.

  Asked whether her other famous futuristic dystopia, Oryx and Crake, might be given the operatic treatment? “I’m quite keen on doing Oryx and Crake as an opera. I think that would be quite bizarre. You’d have to have a number of uninhibited people willing to scamper around with parts of them painted blue, but that aside, I think it would make a really good opera,” she said. First, however, she said she is waiting for a chance to hear her libretto about Sumerian goddess Inanna set to Winnipegger Randolph Peters’s nearly completed score. Inanna’s Journey, commissioned by the COC, is slated to be staged in 2006.

  She added that she was not about to give up writing novels or poetry for libretto-writing any time soon, however. “It’s not really what I do, I’m a novelist,” she said. “I’m happy to help and it’s fun, but it’s not something I’m likely to devote my entire life to.”

  3638. D’SOUZA, Irene. “Margaret Atwood: Is This the Patch We Want to Be On?” Her-izons 17.4 (Spring 2004): 16-20, 45. Focuses on Atwood as a woman. Some unusual insights about her past.

  3639. DOHERTY, Mike. “A Supportive Message in a Bottle.” Globe and Mail 5 June 2004: Section: Weekend Review: R1, R7. Atwood interviewed in connection with Bottle, a short book she prepared for the Hay-on-Wye festival in Wales that she could not attend that year because she was in Toronto celebrating her mother’s 95th birthday.

  3640. FICHTNER, Margaria. “Atwood’s Bleak Worlds Start in Nature.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 11 April 2004: Section: Cue: 08E. Atwood interviewed in Los Angeles at 8:30 a.m., after staggering off a flight from Japan only hours earlier.

  OK, so why the Jimmy/Snowman character as a protagonist instead of someone more Atwoodian, someone named, oh, Shirley/Snow Woman? I think if you write about Shirley/Snow Woman, it becomes a book about the woman question, and a lot of women’s concerns would get into it. She probably would have been much more upset about the deaths of small children, not that Jimmy isn’t upset, but I think the kind of upset would have been different. So that’s one reason why. The other reason was that I got very tired of people always saying to me, “Why do you always write about women?” So I would point laboriously out that I didn’t always write about women, and I would tell them which men I had written about, but there’s no question about this one. It’s a guy. Therefore, it was also a challenge to do, but as with all my books with anything in them that needs research, I got it checked out. I felt that it should be read by a couple of young men to see how accurate it was, and they gave me a couple of swearing tips, but on the whole they said, “Uuuuu-uuuu, how did you know all this?”

  How have readers taken to the switch? I thought the readers might have shifted away from women, but women have always been able to read everything. It’s men who get squirrelly about being caught in public with a book by a woman who isn’t dead. Brown paper covers on Sense and Sensibility. But men, especially younger sci-fi fans, who tend to be male anyway, seem to be reading this book. As well as women, who will read anything.

  3641. FLATOW, Ira. “Margaret Atwood Discusses Science Concepts Used in the Various Novels She’s Authored.” Talk of the Nation: 30 April 2004. Available from Lexis-Nexis. Interview on National Public Radio (5393 w). Program may be heard at http://www.sciencefriday.com/kids/sfk©20040430-2.html#hear (1 May 2006). (RealPlayer required).

  3642. FOX, Matthew. “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret Atwood: Margaret At-wood Discusses Writing, the Flu and Her New Book of Essays.” Maisonneuve: Arts, Opinions, Ideas 11.4 October-November (2004): 11.

  3643. GEORGE, Lianne. “On Opera, Pop and Politics.” Maclean’s 27 September 2004: Section: Music: 21. Atwood interviewed in connection with impending launch of the opera based on The Handmaid’s Tale in Canada.

  3644. GODSEY, Kristin D. “Unlocking the Door.” Novel Writing August 2004: 18-21. Margaret Atwood expounds on finding your voice, the beauty of multi-tasking and what “chick lit” may have in common with Dracula and Frankenstein.

  3645. IKENBERG, Tamara. “Atwood Looks to the Future at Author Forum.” Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) 8 April 2004: Section: Features: 1C. Atwood interviewed while in Salt Lake City. Interviewer notes that amidst all her other honors, Atwood “even has a club created by her devotees: The Margaret Atwood Society.” Interview focuses on Oryx and Crake.

  3646. KARRAS, Christy. “Atwood’s World: Author of Oryx and Crake Which Casts a Wary Eye on Science to Visit SLC [Salt Lake City].” Salt Lake Tribune 28 March 2004: Section: Sports: D1. In town at the invitation of Betsy Burton, owner of the King’s English bookstore. Twice-told tales about the origins and writing of the book.

  3647. KNELMAN, Martin. “The Handmaid’s Homecoming.” Toronto Star 18 September 2004: Section: Arts: J01. On Atwood and opera.

  3648. LIBEDINSKY, Juana. “Margaret Atwood: El Poder Del Odio y Del Deseo.” Su-plemento Cultura La Nación (Buenos Aires) 16 May 2004: 1-2. Interview in Spanish.

  3649. MARTIN, Valerie. “Interview with Margaret Atwood.” 1 December 2004. Available at http://www.lannan.org/lf/rc/event/margaret-atwood (ca. 24 min.) (1 May 2006). Part of Lannan Foundation’s Readings and Conversations series.

  3650. MELNYK, Olenka. “Stick Shifting Margaret Atwood Makes for Uneasy Ride.” The Standard (St. Catharines, ON) 2 October 2004: E3. Focuses on Moving Targets. Excerpt: “Since the publication of her first novel 35 years ago, Atwood’s output has been prolific, formidably so. But she has run aground with two other novels that never got completed and with a number of short stories as well. When you find yourself reading trashy romances rather than working on your book, then you think to yourself, ‘This is obviously not interesting me anymore.’ ‘Facing a blank page doesn’t get any easier with time, but it doesn’t necessarily get any harder,’ says Atwood, who describes writing as wrestling with a greased pig in the dark. Atwood turns 65 in November, but she has no plans of retiring or slowing down. Sixty-five is not the same kind of milestone for writers as it is for people who hold down salaried day jobs. ‘The thing about writers is that they’re basically self-employed,’ she says. ‘As long as they can stagger around at the keyboard, there t
hey are.’”

  3651. O’CONNOR, Shaunagh. “Method in Madness.” Herald Sun (Melbourne) 3 July 2004: Section: Weekend: W29. O’Connor asks Atwood if she believes in the notion of love at first sight, considering her father saw her mother slide down a bannister when the two were at college together and declared that was the woman he would marry. “It’s not a question of whether I believe in it or not. Science has shown that it actually exists,” she says.

  O’Connor tries a “fun question” for her, then: If you could live as a woman in any other era which would it be? She is told that, to rid herself of such romantic notions, “you should probably read Marilyn French’s three-volume history of women, From Eve to Dawn….So if I was going to be anything I would be a hunter-gatherer…[for] after they invented agriculture and land ownership one of the first commodities that got traded were women. It was probably the template for slavery.”

  In short, O’Connor concludes, Atwood, 65, intellectualizes everything she speaks about. Perhaps asking if she has grandchildren will have her pulling out photos of chubby babies: the soft side of Margaret Atwood? “I have two step-grandchildren,” she says. “I used to have two cats, but they are dead, I used to have dogs but they’re dead, too. I also had sheep that are dead, and had horses— also dead. I also had chickens which we ate….What else do you want to know about my extended family?”

  3652. RYAN, Laura T. “A Fun-Filled Warning: Author Margaret Atwood Comes to Syracuse to Talk about Her Work.” Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY) 11 April 2004: Section: Stars: 22. A few days earlier, the Booker Prize-winning novelist flew from Australia to Japan to Los Angeles to Denver to Salt Lake City to Dallas to Boston. She was on tour to promote her latest novel, Oryx and Crake (Anchor Books), now out in paperback. Atwood would spend a week in Syracuse as a visiting professor at Syracuse University and that would be her second trip to the Salt City in a little over a year (the preceding April, she spoke in the Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series).

  Is it bizarre to travel around and answer questions out loud about worlds you invented quietly in your head? Yeah, it is bizarre, quite frankly. But the celebrity interview, that has been around since the end of the 19th century. Henry James writes about it in some of his short stories. It’s when newspapers got the idea they didn’t have to put in just news. So it is not a completely new phenomenon, but let us say that Mr. Proust probably never had to do it.

  Are you envious of Mr. Proust? No, he was too ill. You can’t be envious of him, because he was really quite ill most of the time. But I do sometimes amuse myself by imagining him on a book tour: “I’m now going to read you 50 pages composed of only one sentence.”

  3653. SANTIAGO, Soledad. “Margaret Atwood: Future Shocker.” Santa Fe New Mexican 26 November 2004: P36. Atwood interviewed by phone in anticipation of visit to Santa Fe as part of the Lannan Foundation’s Readings and Conversations series.

  3654. WHITNEY, Susan. “Margaret Atwood Complex in Writing and in Conversation.” Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City) 28 March 2005: s.p. Available from Lexis-Nexis. Reporter phoned Atwood in Toronto one hour late—and Atwood interviewed reporter as to the reasons, saying this stuff of real life is where she gets her ideas for fiction.

  In the interview, she was willing to describe a normal working day. “When I’m working, the phone rings. I can’t turn it off. My mum’s almost 95. I suppose I could turn it off and be cold about it….But I grew up subject to interruptions.” In her family, she said, “I’m the person with the sign on the door, ‘Do not disturb,’ to which nobody pays the least bit of attention.” Atwood has written most of her novels with a cat on her lap. Sometimes the cat would even try to sit on her hands while she typed. “They know where the attention is focused.”

  She can’t describe the process of writing. “When you are writing, you are not actually thinking, ‘How am I doing this?’ It’s like skiing,” she said. “If you think about it, you’ll fall down. When you are writing you are either in a state of flow or you are not in a state of flow.…When the flow goes away, you think it will never return,” she said. “When that happens, I redirect myself.” She stands up and does something else.

  3655. WITTMAN, Juliet. “Notes from the Underworld: Playing Shaman, Atwood Brings Back Word of a Bleak Future.” Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) 2 April 2004: Section: Entertainment: Weekend Spotlight: 28D. Atwood interviewed by phone from Toronto prior to her visit to Denver. “All our creations, good and bad, come from a human wish list of desires and fears,” says Atwood. “We have wanted some things for a very long time. In the past, we could want them without having to suffer the consequences of actually getting them.” She began listing these desires: “Endless youth and beauty; a guaranteed supply of delicious food objects that would appear whenever we wanted them and be cleared up by invisible hands and servants we would never have to pay. The closest we’ve come to that is fast food chains….We desired cloaks of invisibility so that we could spy on people without them knowing we were there—and we have the Secret Service. We’ve always wanted invincible weapons. A purse that would be filled with gold whenever we opened it….Spouses who are faithful to us and love us very much, and at the same time large supplies of sexually attractive partners and no consequences. We’ve wanted wonderful children who will do exactly what they’re told, but never gotten them. Maybe that’s why we’re working on robots.”

  Scholarly Resources

  3657. BARR, Marleen S. “Introduction: Textism—An Emancipation Proclamation.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 119.3 (May 2004): 429-442. A critique of the review of Margaret Atwood’s science fiction Oryx and Crake by Sven Birkerts (New York Times Book Review 18 May 2003: 12).

  3658. BARTLETT, Sally A. “The Female Phantasmagoria: Fantasy and Third Force Psychology in Four Feminist Fictions (Toni Morrison, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf).” PhD thesis. University of South Florida, 2004. 164 pp. This dissertation illuminates the ways in which both fantasy and mimesis combine in 20th-century feminist representations of reality including At-wood’s Lady Oracle. For more see DAI-A 65.02 (August 2004): 501.

  3659. BENET-GOODMAN, Helen Charisse. “Forgiving Friends: Feminist Ethics and Fiction by Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood.” PhD thesis. University of Virginia, 2004. This dissertation uses the representations of women’s friendship found in Sula by Toni Morrison and Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood to frame an interrogation of contemporary ideas about friendship. For more see DAI-A 65.01 (July 2004): 169.

  3660. BJØRHOVDE, Gerd. “When Foreignness and Familiarity Become One: Defamil-iarization in Some Canadian Short Stories.” The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis. Ed. Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004. 128-137. Includes discussion of Atwood’s “A Travel Piece.”

  3661. BJORNSON, Kathryn. “Pink Tickets and Feathered Frocks: Sexual Politics in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. MA thesis. Dalhousie University, 2004. 151 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (2005). “Dystopian novels generally depict totalitarian or oligarchic societies that undertake to control the individual through the manipulation of sexuality, procreation, family life, and gender roles. This thesis compares the sexual motifs and gender implications of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, two dystopian novels written near the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, respectively.” (Author). For more see MAI 43.06 (December 2005): 1935.

  3662. BLANC, Marie Therese. “Another Face of Justice: Interpretative Debates within the Canadian Trial Novel after 1970.” PhD thesis. McGill University, 2004. 264 pp. This study examines Canadian works of fiction that contain historical trial narratives and that enact an adversarial trial of their own for an implied reader who acts as appellate judge. Included are four Canadian novels published after 1970 that fictionalize the circumstances leading to notorious criminal trials: Margaret Atwood�
�s Alias Grace (1996), Lynn Crosbie’s Paul’s Case: The Kingston Letters (1997), and Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), and The Scorched-Wood People (1977). For more see DAI-A 66.01 (July 2005): 183.

  3663. BLODGETT, Harriet. “Mimesis and Metaphor: Food Imagery in International Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing.” Papers on Language & Literature 43.3 (Summer 2004): 260-295. Blodgett examines how 20th-century women’s novels, short stories, and poems use food imagery. She argues that women writers use such imagery to address, among other things, psychological problems, sex, and domesticity. Among the works she discusses for their references to food are The Bone People by Keri Hulme, The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

  3664. BLOOM, Harold, ed. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Includes a Biographical Sketch of Margaret Atwood, The Story Behind the Story, Summary/Analysis, and a Descriptive List of Characters. Individual chapters indexed in this section.

  3665. BOUSON, J. Brooks. “‘It’s Game over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3 (September 2004): 139-156.

  3666. BRUHN, Mark J. “Margaret Atwood’s Lucy Poem: The Postmodern Art of Otherness in Death by Landscape.” European Romantic Review 15.3 (2004): 450-461.

  3667. CAMINERO-SANTANGELO, Marta. “Marta Caminero-Santangelo on Resistent Postmodernism.” Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. 88-89. Excerpt from “Moving Beyond ‘The Blank White Spaces’: Atwood’s Gilead, Postmodernism, and Strategic Resistance.” Studies in Canadian Literature 19.1 (1994): 20-42.

  3668. CHEN, Qiuhua. “The Analysis of Atwood’s Novels from an Ecological Perspective.” Foreign Literature Studies 106 (2004): 56-62. In Chinese.