Margaret Atwood’s Lockdown Diary: Life As An Eccentric Self-Isolationist
“How to make firelighters, combat squirrels and conduct a rubber chicken choir … the author shares practical tips from lockdown in Canada.”
Handmaids Rising
Margaret Atwood on what ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,” written in 1984, means in the age of Trump.
Stone Mattress
[Fiction] A woman on an Arctic cruise encounters her past:
“At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.
“Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them. She doesn’t need the cash, not anymore. She’s not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. Surely she has at last achieved this modest goal.”
Ten rules for writing fiction
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don’ts
