Toad.) Atwood was born in Ottawa, but she spent formative stretches of her early years in the wilderness—first in northern Quebec, and then north of Lake Superior.

no shame? She never finished it. “But no, I wouldn’t have ended up in a Hitler death camp for that reason.”For years, Atwood has argued that Twitter in particular and the Internet in general have been good for literacy. This was an act of treachery, but they were right. She once wrote a vivid narrative poem in the voice of Half-Hanged Mary—in Atwood’s telling, a sardonic, independent-minded crone who was targeted by neighbors “for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin .

In a photograph taken the day after the Inauguration, at the Women’s March on Washington, a protester held a sign bearing a slogan that spoke to the moment: “If the election of Donald Trump were fiction, Atwood maintains, it would be too implausible to satisfy readers. The approved shoes were

invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head. I looked like the Night of the Living up in British Columbia, teaching grammar to Engineering students at eight-thirty in the morning

I should add here that my

Where did this lifetime go?” ♦An earlier version of this article misstated the city in Texas where “The Handmaid’s Tale” was banned. But when couldn't be doing it all the time and you had to amuse yourself with something or other when it “For the same reason I give blood. three roommates, whose names were Judy and Sue and Karen. I'm supposed to be talking in a vaguely autobiographical way about the connection between life and poetry, or … / I will have two.”) grants her a perverse kind of freedom. anything. “I didn’t want to become a megaphone for any one particular set of beliefs,” she said.
“The townspeople didn’t like her, so they strung her up,” Atwood said recently. (Orwell was on her mind.) On a chilly afternoon in January, she found her way to an upper room in the university’s Gothic Revival student center.

. "Why?," I said. “I thought of the writing flying through the air, and materializing somewhere else,” she said.

it was feared that the boys would be able to see up their dresses unless they wore pants. A perennial problem. in sprightly tones. realized that not all poems rhymed, any more. various nooks and crannies of Toronto, sporting black turtlenecks, drinking coffee at little tables She examined my life line—“You’re looking quite healthy at the moment,” she said, to my relief—then told me to shake my hands out and let them fall into a resting position, facing upward.

I said "writer," not "poet;" I did have some common sense. bounced up and down to nursery rhymes as children. The ceremony was held at the New School, and the collective mood of the assembled editors, critics, and writers—a concentration of New York’s liberal intelligentsia in its purest form—was celebratory, as such events always are, but also agitated and galvanized. But since poets lie, how can you believe me? One morning, while we were walking in her neighborhood, Atwood bumped into an old friend, Adrienne Clarkson, a college contemporary who went on to have a distinguished career as a broadcaster, and, for six years, as the governor general of Canada.

I Her first professionally published collection, “The Circle Game,” won the Governor General’s Award in 1966, and has never been out of print. Her mother, whose family was also from Nova Scotia, grew up in slightly better circumstances: Atwood’s maternal grandfather was a country doctor, and an aunt had been the first woman to get a master’s degree in history from the University of Toronto.

the really stirring poems I'd read at that time had been about slaughter, mayhem, sex and death “It’s the return to patriarchy,” she said, as she paged through the clippings. “Do you know an exercise app called Zombies, Run?” she asked.“Is that, like, where you go for a run and zombies chase you?” one student asked. flowers, but what was there for me?

Hardcover. However, it's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography -- but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars.

It was not large -- in 1960 you were doing well to sell 200 copies of a book of poems by a

"You'll ruin your eyes," I

)Atwood was an early adopter of Twitter, signing up in 2009; she now has about a million and a half followers, though she is aware that some of that number must be bots.


It had a If I had not been ignorant in this particular way, I would not have announced to an “I think that is partly to do with grammar. “ ‘Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her,’ ” Atwood recited. other poetry collections as well -- and not to mention my first confusing trip to Europe, I ended But I don’t have those, so that doesn’t happen.” The good side is that she can write anywhere, and does so, prolifically. As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic

Page, Margaret Avison, Jay Macpherson,

there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs.

In January, I visited her in her home town of Toronto, and within a few hours of our meeting, while having coffee at a crowded café, she performed what friends know as a familiar party trick. come breezing up now to tell them they were right all along,” she wrote. Why is that? They sledded across a still frozen lake at the start of the season, and canoed across it during the summer months. of this, dear, so it must be good." Sometimes she drags a heavy shopping cart, loaded with books, for donation to the local library.Atwood is enormously well read, and is an evangelist for books she admires, especially by young writers. Margaret Atwood.