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**Author Spotlight** Margaret Atwood by Prof. CG FEWSTON

Atwood studied Moodie, wrote about Moodie, and both Atwood and Moodie lived and wrote about the Canadian wild and the female who is transformed by it. However, Moodie is not the only Canadian writer to have influenced Margaret Atwood and the short story “Death by Landscape.”

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, “Peggy”, is a Canadian critic, essayist, lecturer, novelist, and poet. Atwood is also “one of Canada’s major contemporary authors” who has won a multitude of awards, including the Governor General’s Award for The Handmaid’s Tale (Godard Web).

Wilderness Tips, having the short story “Death by Landscape” in 1991, was the winner of the 1992 Trillium Award and the Book of the Year of the Periodical Marketers of Canada (Godard Web).

However, it can clearly be identified that Atwood would not have won all her awards if it were not for the heavy influence from other Canadian writers and poets, namely P.K. “Patty” Page and Susanna Moodie.

This essay is going to make specific connections between Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” with Page’s The Sun and the Moon and Atwood’s perception of Moodie’s personae and life in The Journals of Susanna Moodie.

cg fewston
Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist (born 1939)

In addition to the two other Canadian authors, the same connections may be found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown.”

Also, Coral Ann Howells found three themes as “central to Atwood’s work” which are “gender studies; nationality; and genre” (Widdicombe 285).

However, the main connections I tend to focus on in this essay consist of how through the wilderness and individual’s survival in nature with retrospection all lead to a metamorphosis of the main character.

cg fewston
Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist, in 1966 (born 1939)

Susanna Moodie was an English author who moved to present day Ontario, Canada in 1832. Atwood worked on the life and history of Susanna Moodie and produced The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), a book of poetry, which describes the personae of characters having “difficulty accepting the irrational” (Godard Web).

cg fewston

In Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” (1991) the main character, Lois, also has trouble accepting the irrational moment of when her best friend Lucy simply vanished in the forest while in the Canadian wilderness during a camping trip. Susanna Moodie also experienced the overwhelming influence of the Canadian wilderness after moving from England to the upper-parts of Canada.

In addition, the relationship between Atwood and Moodie has “intrigued a number of critics” (Hammill 48). Furthermore, Moodie influenced the Gothic nature found in “Death by Landscape” and “focus on the traumatic experience of a white female in an alien forest setting” (Hammill 54).

cg fewston
Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist, in 1984 (born 1939)

Atwood commented in Strange Things about Moodie’s books: “[Moodie] emphasizes hardship and catastrophe… people in her books go mad, commit murder, get lynched” (Atwood in, Hammill 48). Lois can also be representative of one of Moodie’s characters who develop a form of madness from the Canadian landscape.

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Lois in “Death by Landscape” secludes herself in her apartment surrounded by landscape paintings, buying them because “looking at them fills her with a wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people in them or even animals, it’s as if there is something, or someone, looking back out” (Atwood 25).

Lois is haunted by the paintings which hold Lucy’s spirit: “Everyone has to be somewhere, and this is where Lucy is” (Atwood 36).

cg fewston
Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist (born 1939)

The connection between Moodie and Atwood is defined by Heather Murray by suggesting that the camp setting in “Death by Landscape” is the “twentieth-century equivalent of Susanna Moodie’s bush cabin” (Hammill 56).

Moodie and Atwood were both experienced with living in the Canadian wilderness; Atwood’s childhood was spent in the wilderness with her father who was an entomologist, and she grew up with pets, like a preying mantis and a cabbage butterfly, which died quickly and she kept in a shoe box and probably both the wilderness and the constant death of the insects led to the Atwood’s Gothic appeal combined with the spine-chilling power of nature (LaMarsh Web).

cg fewston
Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist (born 1939)

Finally, Atwood’s Moodie is much like Atwood’s Lucy. Both characters are transformed and become amalgamated into the wilderness.

Moodie did suffer from dementia at the end of her life and Atwood portrays her in poems as a person who “loses her conception of herself as a rational being, she feels herself becoming part of the amoral, non-rational natural environment:

“my skin thickened
with bark and the white hairs of the roots…
and the sun here had stained
me its barbarous colour

”Hands grown stiff, the fingers
brittle as twigs”

(Atwood in, Hammill 51).

cg fewston
Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist (born 1939)

In the selection of the poem Moodie is becoming a tree, slowly being transformed into a part of the wilderness which she fears.

In “Death by Landscape” Lois imagines Lucy doing the very same thing, becoming lost, becoming one with nature itself:

“Who knows how many trees there were on the cliff just before Lucy disappeared? Who counted? Maybe there was one more, afterwards” (Atwood 36).

Here Atwood ascertains that Lois believes that Lucy might have vanished into thin air by becoming a tree, much like the poem about Moodie and her fear of the wilderness.

cg fewston

Atwood studied Moodie, wrote about Moodie, and both Atwood and Moodie lived and wrote about the Canadian wild and the female who is transformed by it. However, Moodie is not the only Canadian writer to have influenced Margaret Atwood and the short story “Death by Landscape.”

P.K. “Patty” Page was a Canadian writer, poet, and visual artist who also influenced Atwood. Much like Atwood’s Moodie who transforms into a tree, Page writes of her own experience in the poem “Reflection” which states:

“In the noon of yesterday I saw a tree
pretending it was a woman,
bending over a stream,…
and I bent over the water beside it,…
and I was a tree… ”

(Page in, Djwa 15).

Page likely was inspired by Ezra’s Pound’s poem “A Girl” which is also about a tree-like transformation and Page penciled in the poem’s margin about her own tree-like experience (Djwa 15).

But it can be certain that since “Reflection” was published in July 1939 it was far before Atwood’s writing-time who was born that same year in November.

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In addition, Atwood would grow up to work and edit Page’s novel The Sun and the Moon in 1972, which was published before Atwood’s Wilderness Tips in 1991 which holds “Death by Landscape.”

In Page’s novel, there are two main characters which have the same initial K (Karl and Kristin); in “Death by Landscape” the two main characters also share the same initial, albeit the next letter in the alphabet: L (Lois and Lucy) (Djwa 17).

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The novella, The Sun and the Moon, also ends much like “Death by Landscape” where the natural landscape consumes the entire focus of the story:

“On the far side… the trees marched, unchecked, right down to the water’s edge” and according to Sandra Djwa, “we as readers incorporate Kristin-as-tree into this landscape” (17).

The metamorphosis Page writes about is much like Atwood’s Moodie and Lucy:

“[Kristin] could hear the wind again, pulling at the trees… And she felt part of it… She knew only an instinctive desire to stay standing… to dig her roots into the earth” (Page in, Djwa 16).

cg fewston

Certainly it can be found that Kristin becoming a part of the landscape at the end of The Sun and the Moon ties closely in with Lucy becoming one more tree at the end of Atwood’s short story “Death by Landscape.”

Just as Moodie influenced Atwood’s work, it can also be seen that Page’s writings played an important role as well.

Moodie and Page both were influences on Atwood’s literary career.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” incorporates some of the similar themes that Atwood does in “Death by Landscape.”

In “Young Goodman Brown” Goodman Brown ventures into the wilderness only to be transformed by his experiences, much like Lois in “Death by Landscape.”

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Both stories present nature as a dangerous and fearful place.

Hawthorne writes:

“The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds- creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank from its other horrors” (Hawthorne 645).

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A similar feeling can be taken in Atwood’s description of nature in “Death by Landscape”:

“Out on the lake there were two loons, calling to each other in their insane, mournful voices. At the time it did not sound like grief. It was just background” (Atwood 31).

And the unnerving description of Indians:

“Looking back on this, Lois finds it disquieting. She knows too much about Indians: this is why. She knows for instance, that they should not be called Indians, and that they have enough worries without other people taking their names and dressing up as them. It has all been a form of stealing” (Atwood 29).

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Both Hawthorne and Atwood inject Indians into the enervating wilderness.

Lastly, both Goodman Brown and Lois exit from the wilderness as changed individuals who have experienced something beyond their own understanding.

It is quite possible that Atwood was also influenced by some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, just like she was influenced by Moodie and Page.

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In sum, Margaret Atwood has been a formidable writer in Canada’s history.

However, this essay has clearly illustrated how other Canadian writers such as Susanna Moodie and P.K. Page have influenced Atwood’s literary career as well as her short fiction in “Death by Landscape.”

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Furthermore, Atwood also resembles the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne in his short story “Young Goodman Brown”; all of the above mentioned writers focused on the mystical world of the wild and how that magic changes an individual.

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Regardless of the influences on Atwood, any reader can emerge from her work in complete understanding of her unique, artistic prowess at finding new ways to haunt and echo the ages and minds through her writing.

Bibliography:

Atwood, Margaret Eleanor. “Death by Landscape.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 7th edition. Eds. Richard Bausch and R.V. Cassill. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 24-36. Print.

Djwa, Sandra. “P.K. Page: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.” Journal of Canadian Studies 38.1 (2004): 9-22. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 27 July 2010.

Godard, Barbara. “Atwood, Margaret Eleanor.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Web. 27 July 2010.
[Link:http://thecanadianencyclopedia.c… ]

Hammill, Faye. “‘Death by Nature’: Margaret Atwood and Wilderness Gothic.” Gothic Studies 5.2 (2003): 47-63. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 27 July 2010.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 7th edition. Eds. Richard Bausch and R.V. Cassill. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 639-648. Print.

LaMarsh, Judy. “A Precocious and Creative Child: Margaret Atwood Interview.” The CBC Digital Archives Website. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Interview: Broadcast Date: Nov. 4, 1975. Last Updated: June 2, 2008. Web. 27 July 2010.
[Link: http://archives.cbc.ca/programs/322-1… ]

Widdicombe, Toby. “Margaret Atwood. Second ed.” Utopian Studies 18.2 (2007): 284-288. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 27 July 2010.

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cg fewston

CG FEWSTON

cg fewston

The American novelist CG FEWSTON has been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (Italy), a Visiting Fellow at Hong Kong’s CityU, & he’s a been member of the Hemingway Society, Americans for the Arts, PEN America, Club Med, & the Royal Society of Literature. He’s also a been Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) based in London. He’s the author of several short stories and novels. His works include A Fathers Son (2005), The New America: A Collection (2007), The Mystics Smile ~ A Play in 3 Acts (2007), Vanity of Vanities (2011), A Time to Love in Tehran (2015), Little Hometown, America (2020); A Time to Forget in East Berlin (2022), and Conquergood & the Center of the Intelligible Mystery of Being (2023).

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He has a B.A. in English, an M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership (honors), an M.A. in Literature (honors), and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Fiction. He was born in Texas in 1979.

cg fewston
cg fewston

Conquergood & the Center of the Intelligible Mystery of Being is a captivating new dystopian science fiction novel by CG Fewston, an author already making a name for himself with his thought-provoking work. Set in the year 2183, Conquergood is set in a world where one company, Korporation, reigns supreme and has obtained world peace, through oppression... The world-building in the novel is remarkable. Fewston has created a believable and authentic post-apocalyptic society with technological wonders and thought-provoking societal issues. The relevance of the themes to the state of the world today adds an extra wrinkle and makes the story even more compelling.”

cg fewston
cg fewston

“A spellbinding tale of love and espionage set under the looming shadow of the Berlin Wall in 1975… A mesmerising read full of charged eroticism.”

Ian Skewis, Associate Editor for Bloodhound Books, & author of best-selling novel A Murder of Crows (2017)  

“An engrossing story of clandestine espionage… a testament to the lifestyle encountered in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War.”

“There is no better way for readers interested in Germany’s history and the dilemma and cultures of the two Berlins to absorb this information than in a novel such as this, which captures the microcosm of two individuals’ love, relationship, and options and expands them against the blossoming dilemmas of a nation divided.”

~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

A Time to Forget in East Berlin is a dream-like interlude of love and passion in the paranoid and violent life of a Cold War spy. The meticulous research is evident on every page, and Fewston’s elegant prose, reminiscent of novels from a bygone era, enhances the sensation that this is a book firmly rooted in another time.”

~ Matthew Harffy, prolific writer & best-selling historical fiction author of the “Bernicia Chronicles” series

“Vivid, nuanced, and poetic…” “Fewston avoids familiar plot elements of espionage fiction, and he is excellent when it comes to emotional precision and form while crafting his varied cast of characters.” “There’s a lot to absorb in this book of hefty psychological and philosophical observations and insights, but the reader who stays committed will be greatly rewarded.”

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GOLD Winner in the 2020 Human Relations Indie Book Awards for Contemporary Realistic Fiction

FINALIST in the SOUTHWEST REGIONAL FICTION category of the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence 2020 Awards (NIEA)

“Readers of The Catcher in the Rye and similar stories will relish the astute, critical inspection of life that makes Little Hometown, America a compelling snapshot of contemporary American life and culture.”

“Fewston employs a literary device called a ‘frame narrative’ which may be less familiar to some, but allows for a picture-in-picture result (to use a photographic term). Snapshots of stories appear as parts of other stories, with the introductory story serving as a backdrop for a series of shorter stories that lead readers into each, dovetailing and connecting in intricate ways.”

~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

“The American novelist CG FEWSTON tells a satisfying tale, bolstered by psychology and far-ranging philosophy, calling upon Joseph Campbell, J. D. Salinger, the King James Bible, and Othello.”

“In this way, the author lends intellectual heft to a family story, exploring the ‘purity’ of art, the ‘corrupting’ influences of publishing, the solitary artist, and the messy interconnectedness of human relationships.”

“Fewston’s lyrical, nostalgia-steeped story is told from the perspective of a 40-year-old man gazing back on events from his 1980s Texas childhood…. the narrator movingly conveys and interprets the greater meanings behind childhood memories.”

“The novel’s focus on formative childhood moments is familiar… the narrator’s lived experiences come across as wholly personal, deeply felt, and visceral.”

cg fewston
cg fewston

American Novelist CG FEWSTON

 

cg fewston

This is my good friend, Nicolasa (Nico) Murillo, CRC, who is a professional chef & a wellness mentor. I’ve known her since childhood & I’m honored to share her story with you. In life, we all have ups & downs, some far more extreme than others. Much like in Canada, in America, the legalization of marijuana has become a national movement, which includes safe & legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use & research for all.

“This is a wellness movement,” Nico explains. The wellness movement is focused on three specific areas: information, encouragement, & accountability.

In these stressful & unprecedented times, it makes good sense to promote & encourage the state or condition of being in good physical & mental health.

To learn more you can visit: Americans For Safe Access & Texans for Safe Access, ASA (if you are in Texas).

The mission of Americans for Safe Access (ASA) is to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use and research.

Link: https://www.safeaccessnow.org/

TEXANS FOR SAFE ACCESS ~ share the mission of their national organization, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), which is to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use and research, for all Texans.

Link: https://txsafeaccess.org/about-1

Stay safe & stay happy. God bless.

 

Nico Murillo Bio ~ Americans & Texans for Safe Access ~ Medical Cannabis

 

 

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