Margaret Atwood’s brain just doesn’t work like anyone else’s, to the everlasting benefit of all her readers. In this selection of short stories she explores, variously– *herself communing with George Orwell through a snoring medium (a little heartbreaking, I found this one) *an alien member of an intergalactic-crises aid package who is also an out…
Read more But as you say, half an oblong wheat-flour product is better than none.
...I've never had a turn, not one! I haven't even been given a name; I was always just the ugly sister; put the stress on ugly...As for the prince, you think I didn't love him? I loved him more than she did; I loved him more than anything. Enough to cut off my foot. Enough to murder...But all my love ever came to was a bad end. Red-hot shoes, barrels studded with nails. That's what it feels like, unrequited love. She had a baby, too. I was never allowed.
# Permanent link to “I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.”
All ten here. My favorite: 7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is…
Read more Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
In March 10, 2017’s New York Times Atwood writes in “What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump:” [Women] are not an afterthought of nature, they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations would die out. That is…
Read more “The control of women and babies has been a feature of every repressive regime on the planet.”
Habitation by Margaret Atwood Marriage is not a house or even a tent it is before that, and colder: the edge of the forest, the edge of the desert the unpainted stairs at the back where we squat outside, eating popcorn the edge of the receding glacier where painfully and with wonder at having survived…
Read more Learning to make fire
I open the gallery door, walk in with that sinking feeling I always have in galleries. It’s the carpets that do it to me, the hush, the sanctimoniousness of it all: galleries are too much like churches, there’s too much reverence, you feel there should be some genuflecting going on. Also I don’t like it…
Read more The smell of blood on the wall.
