Margaret Atwood profile and interview at Narrative

[kennyc]

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/iss...argaret-atwood

Margaret Atwood
An Interview
with Jo Scott-Coe

Margaret Atwood arrived at UCLA’s Royce Hall during a blitz of international travel for her novel The Year of the Flood. She stepped up firmly onto a box behind a lectern on the massive stage, and her voice filled the hall as she read. Atwood wore tidy but travel-easy black trousers and a blousy black jacket with asymmetric blocks of fuchsia and orange down the center and on the sleeves. During musical numbers that punctuated her narration, she delicately clapped and bobbed her head or bounced her feet. Afterward, not one of her signature silver curls out of place, she spent nearly two hours at a draped table in the lobby, signing books, nodding to fans, and leaning in for the occasional photo. Atwood smiles with her eyes, rarely showing her teeth.

Margaret Atwood is a complex writer who, not unlike Mary Webster, her legendary ancestor accused of witchcraft, finds herself easily misread. Hasty critics who react to Atwood’s interrogations of gender, politics, religion, and science—pegging her as “antiprogress” or “antimale”—overlook the compassion with which she draws character failings and human suffering, not to mention the wry, winking layers of humor found in even her most biting social critiques. Atwood tests the boundaries between whimsy and social commentary, parody and seriousness, the beautiful and the grim. While the timing of her subject matter is often called prescient, it would be more accurate to say that the author is simply attuned to the world around her.....

Rest at link above.
(sorry I just realized you have to have a login to read it -- I'd recommend it though if you are interested.)