When Margaret started writing, it was open season for her

Nobody was there to tell her what to do; there were no writing schools. She wrote both poetry and prose

Novels are 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Writing novels is work, you have to put in the hours

For poetry, it’...

Margaret Atwood is 82 years young. Is longevity determined by genetics? Margaret’s mom lived to 97.

Curiosity is a big factor; her parents were always curious. She is curious about new technologies. She is also a big fan of astrology, she reads palms and does horoscopes.

She got into ...

Margaret was always an avid reader and she read a lot as a teenager in the 50s. What you read as a teenager has the biggest influence when you start writing

She wanted to write something like 1984, but with women, It’s all about the people you are drawn to and the skills you have at the mom...

Nature does not deal in closed boxes. Everything in nature is on a bell curve, some forms cannot be put into closed boxes (liminal beings) e.g. the platypus

We all contain multitudes; just because Margaret is a woman and a writer, it doesn’t mean that’s the end of the story.

People la...

Hope is built on a very fundamental level

How to find hope in the face of the climate crisis?. The climate crisis is real, but we are inventing a lot of new things. We are looking at the problem, and coming up with answers. The 19th century was a century of utopias: “They wrote a lot of the...

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“Practical Utopias” is a problem-solving enterprise

• Practical world-building: What to eat? What to wear? What houses will we live ...