Wednesday Writers Write

Award winning Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has written novels, poetry, short stories and essays. She is beloved by general readers and by literary critics. Over forty books and thousands of articles have been published about her works. She is a favorite writer of Book Club Extraordinaire. We have read more of her works than any other writer beginning with The Handmaid’s Tale (1983), Cat’s Eye (1988), Wilderness Tips (1991), The Robber Bride (1993), Alias Grace (1996), The Blind Assassin (2000). 

In her book, Negotiations with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, she includes story ideas and readings from a multitude of writers including Alice Munro and Henry James. Her essays reflect an interest in understanding what it means to write, what is the role of a writer: is it about art or money, and is it about the writer or the reader. She explores the idea of literature as construction and destruction by reviving previous texts to reclaim buried treasure. She writes, “All writers… must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending on how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more”(178). 

Whether Atwood is pouring old wine into a new bottle or putting the flesh back on history’s skeleton, we will eagerly await her next offering.

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