Reading Like a Writer: the World of Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, essayist, critic, poet, and activist, a writer accomplished in both literary and "speculative" fiction. She has received numerous national and international honors, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Booker Prize, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. In this six-hour intensive course, we will explore the nuances of Atwood's craft—her narrative timing, how she creates sensory settings, and how she builds and retains tension—as well as recurring themes of the female experience, environmentalism, alienation, and dystopia. Along the way, we'll glean lessons for our own work. Students will be assigned readings from Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid's Tale, and Cat's Eye before class, with in-class exercises from The Edible Woman. The instructor will email these readings to registered students a week before class.

Part of GrubStreet's Reading Like a Writer Series, dedicated to the exploration of craft through the lenses of specific writers. For more classes in this series, click here.