Atwood Retold

The Goddess of Dystopia is at her very best on the craft of writing

I 8217;M WORKING ON MY OWN life story,8221; writes Margaret Atwood in 8220;Life Stories8221;, the first piece in this new collection of es-says. 8220;I don8217;t mean I8217;m putting it together; no, I8217;m taking it apart. It8217;s mostly a question of editing.8221; And edit she does, in these brief, witty prose poems and savage contemporary fables that take on her favourite subjects: na-ture, history, women, and writing itself. The Tent is a small book, just a hundred and fifty pages, but it is packed with imaginative pieces in a range of forms including dia-logues, poems, parodies and an invocation, accompanied by Atwood8217;s own witty and in-telligent illustrations.

Writing itself forms the subject of several of the essays collected here, including the ti-tle piece. These reflections include retellings of the Salome story 8220;If anyone8217;s head was go-ing to roll it wouldn8217;t be hers8221;, Helen 8220;Hubby8217;s pissed as hell, he8217;s talking about a posse8221;, Procne 8220;He cut out my tongue8230; he knew I8217;d tell stories8221; and even Chicken Little.

And more: a definition of the post-colonial; Horatio8217;s version of Hamlet8217;s story; and an imagining of the paper tent in which the writer crouches, writing away, with a howling wilderness outside.

Atwood sometimes alludes ironically to her own stature as a writer emeritus. 8220;I have decided to encourage the young,8221; she begins in onepiece. 8220;OnceI wouldn8217;t havedonethis, but nowI have nothing to lose. Theyoungare notmyrivals. Fish arenottherivals of stones.8221;In another piece, she writes aboutthe demands of the writing voice:8220;We8217;ll attend a luminous occasion, the two of us, chained together as always8230;We8217;ll descendtothe foyer, glittering like ice, my voice attached like an invisible vampiretomythroat.8221;

In the poem 8220;Bring Back Mom8221; she in-vokes the mother figure before feminism happened: the gingham-apronned, bread-baking, pot-roast-making woman who ig-nored her own aspirations all her life.

Animals get their due in Atwood8217;s fantasy worlds. In 8220;Our Cat Enters Heaven8221;, the cat finds a balanced universe for the first time8212;8220;Our heaven is their hell,8221; says God. In a poem entitled 8220;The Animals Reject Their Names8221;, the dictionaries untwist, sweaters wind back into wool and turn into sheep, squashed mice race out of traps, time moves backwards8212;and God bites his tongue.

Finally, this collection also contains At-wood8217;s black humour and the chilling dystopian vision of works like the Handmaid8217;s Tale and Oryx and Crake, as in the closing piece, 8216;But It Could Still8217;: 8220;Things look bad: I admit it. They look worse than they8217;ve looked for years, for centuries. They look the worst ever. Peril looms on all sides. But it could still turn out all right.8221;

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The Tent is a collection of miniature gems from one of our most accomplished writers. It is also a warning from someone who has long cared passionately about the state of the world and has spent a lifetime writing about it. 8220;Listen, the leaves no longer rustle, the wind no longer sighs, our hearts no longer beat. They8217;ve fallen silent.8221;