Lately I’ve been reading Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead:  A Writer on Writing. For those of you not familiar with Atwood, she is a Canadian novelist, poet, critic, and essayist, though she is perhaps best known for her novels - The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Alias Grace (1996), among others.

Dead developed out of the Empsom Lectures at the University of Cambridge, where Atwood was invited to speak in 2000.  Neither a book about how to write nor an autobiography, the book is  instead six essays ruminating on writers themselves, their relationships with their work, and their relationships with their readers and society. continue reading…