from the Writer's Almanac
Nov. 18th, 2005 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sun_set_bravely(emphasis mine)
It's the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939). Her father was an entomologist who spent every year from April to November studying insects at a forestry research station in Northern Quebec. Atwood said, "At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown." She had no access to television or movies, and few children to play with. So she spent all her time exploring the woods and reading.
She only began to attend full-time school in Toronto when she was 11 years old. She wrote, "I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls—their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten."
Atwood decided she wanted to be a writer at a time when there was almost no such thing as Canadian literature. There was actually a year in the early 1960's when a total of only five Canadian novels were published in the whole country.
Atwood's first novel The Edible Woman came out in 1969. It's about a woman who finds that she can no longer eat after her boyfriend proposes marriage. It would have been published three years earlier, but the publisher had lost the manuscript. Atwood published several more novels, becoming a cult figure in Canada and among feminists. Then, in 1978, she took a trip to Iran, where women were being forced to wear veils and to take subservient positions in all areas of society. That experience got her to thinking about what would happen in America if there were a similar cultural revolution. And that gave her an idea for her novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which became an international best-seller.
Margaret Atwood said, "Women see me as living proof that you don't have to come to a sticky end—put your head in an oven, stay silent for 30 years, not have children—to be a good and serious writer."
It's the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939). Her father was an entomologist who spent every year from April to November studying insects at a forestry research station in Northern Quebec. Atwood said, "At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown." She had no access to television or movies, and few children to play with. So she spent all her time exploring the woods and reading.
She only began to attend full-time school in Toronto when she was 11 years old. She wrote, "I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls—their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten."
Atwood decided she wanted to be a writer at a time when there was almost no such thing as Canadian literature. There was actually a year in the early 1960's when a total of only five Canadian novels were published in the whole country.
Atwood's first novel The Edible Woman came out in 1969. It's about a woman who finds that she can no longer eat after her boyfriend proposes marriage. It would have been published three years earlier, but the publisher had lost the manuscript. Atwood published several more novels, becoming a cult figure in Canada and among feminists. Then, in 1978, she took a trip to Iran, where women were being forced to wear veils and to take subservient positions in all areas of society. That experience got her to thinking about what would happen in America if there were a similar cultural revolution. And that gave her an idea for her novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which became an international best-seller.
Margaret Atwood said, "Women see me as living proof that you don't have to come to a sticky end—put your head in an oven, stay silent for 30 years, not have children—to be a good and serious writer."
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Date: 2005-11-18 01:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-23 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 03:40 pm (UTC)