Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health- Chapter Twenty: The Poet As Very Hard Working Icon by Dave Jaffe

Chapter Twenty: Margaret Atwood: The Poet as Very Hardworking Icon- Part One


   "In Toronto you work," a franchise holder of a large chain store said to this blogger in the early 21st century. "My wife and I live in the Toronto area and we work long hard hours. Everybody works hard here."
     Stewart Piddocke, an anthropologist who spent a year teaching in the Toronto area, noted how the work ethic is engrained in the people of central Canada. "Vacations back there," Piddocke noted, "are really preparations for more work."
       And Margaret Atwood, Canada's most famous literary figure works very hard too. Based in Toronto, English Canada's cultural and financial capital, the 76 year-old Atwood has churned out more than forty books. She has writtten poetry, fifteen novels by last count, children's literature, non-fiction anda libretto to an opera. She is a true workaholic.
     A mother of an adult daughter, Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 to an entomologist father and a mother who was a dietitian.
     Atwood has defined Canadian literature in her book 'Survival'. According to her, the central theme in Canadian fiction is  survival. Only one book didn't embody this theme and that was Mordecai Richeler's 1950's novel 'Son Of A Smaller Hero'. But then Richler, like Atwood, was a path breaker too.
     Atwood has not only written many books. She has also been a tireless advocate for feminism, environmentalism and social justice. Her early novels seemed somewhat feminist, though Atwood denies that her earliest novel 'The Edible Woman' was a feminist work at all. Many of her early and later novels show us female characters who are clever and complex.Some of the men on the other hand in works like 'Surfacing' and 'Life Before Man' aren't loaded down with too much intelligence.
     Atwood's later novels like 'Oryx and Crake' she calls 'speculative fiction'.They are dystopias where life has become a nightmare. In the mid-1980's Atwood wrote her first dystopian novel called 'The Handmaid's Tale'. In this novel set in the future, women are owned by the state which is totally male-dominated. When this book came out in 1985, it won the Governor General's award for fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
     "The Handmaid's Tale is more relevant now than when it was  written," Atwood said about the book that is now will be made into a series being produced by a streaming service and MGM Television. "I am sure the series will be watched with great interest."Atwood first came to Canadian notice in 1964 when she won the Governor General's award for her collection of poetry called 'The Circle Game'. She went on to win many more literary prizes but hasn't yet won the Nobel Prize for literature.
    Atwood and her works are known world wide.She has lived in many places including Edmonton, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Sarnia, Alliston Ontario, Alabama, Australia, France and Italy.
 (To Be Continued).