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CFP: MLA 2025

9-12 January 2025, New Orleans

“A word after a word after a word is power”

We invite proposals on any topic concerning the works, adaptations, and/or career of Margaret Atwood that address the MLA presidential theme of Visibility. What are the purposes and perils of art in unstable times? 250-word abstract and cv are due 3/31 to Lee Frew, York University (lee.frew@gmail.com).

Congratulations to the 2023 winners of the
Margaret Atwood Society Awards!

Best Book on Atwood and Her Work:The Fiction of Margaret Atwood, by Fiona Tolan, Bloomsbury 2023.

Best Article: “The Shape of Your Absence”: Coming to Terms with Loss and Grief in Margaret Atwood’s Dearly” in Canadian Studies June 2023), by Pauline Montassine, Université de Reims

Best Graduate Essay or MA Thesis: “Prelapsarian Ustopias: Reversing the Genetic Fall in Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood Trilogy and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy,” by Maya Hollander, MPhil thesis, Cambridge

Best Undergraduate Essay (tie): “Through Double Doors,” by Maria Dunlap, California State University, Northridge, and “The Art of the Fragmented Narrative in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin,” by Mina Baniewicz, Saint Xavier University (Chicago)

Learn about it here.

Our annual business meeting with be over Zoom, starting at 3:30 PST p.m. on Saturday, 1/9.

Zoom meeting ID: 971 2932 5493.

The meeting requires a password; contact one of the officers if you want to join!

The Guardian recently took votes (which we at Atwood Society participating in, nominating Cat’s Eye as a matter of fact) for which Margaret Atwood book should be their reading group’s pick for April. In their announcement, The Guardian explains their choice, “the 1988 novel was shortlisted for the Booker prize and the Canadian Governor General’s award, and was described in the New York Times as ‘the finest addition to the Best Girlfriend genre yet.’”

Though Cat’s Eye is perhaps not as brutal as The Handmaid’s Tale, do not expect a soft book. There is plenty of betrayal and cruelty to go around, but still a lot of humor and beauty as well. This is a novel you won’t soon forget.

Breaking from previous years, instead of beginning in April, season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale will start on June 5. The later start date is to maintain the show’s high quality, but it is a bit curious, if only because “the late premiere date pushes The Handmaid’s Tale season three out of contention for the 2019 Emmy Awards, with June 1 as the eligibility cut-off date” (THR).

Comments by show runner Bruce Miller indicate that June will continue on her trek of rebelliousness in a major diversion from the original novel, promising “visceral victories” in season 3.