Margaret Atwood - Burning Questions : Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021

Burning Questions is my third collection of essays and other occasional pieces. The first was Second Words, which began in 1960, when I started publishing book reviews, and ended in 1982. The second was Moving Targets, which gathered materials from 1983 to mid-2004. Burning Questions runs from mid-2004 to mid-2021. So, twenty years, give or take, for each volume.

Each of these time periods has been tumultuous in its own way. Occasional pieces are written for specific occasions and are thus tightly connected to their own time and placeor at least mine are. They are also linked to my age at the time of writing, and to my outward circumstances. (Did I have a job? Was I a student? Did I need the money? Was I already a well-known writer, indulging my interests? Was I doing a freebie in response to a cry for help?)

In 1960, I was twenty, single, unpublished in book form, and a female undergraduate of limited wardrobe. In 2021, I was eighty-one, a fairly well-known writer, a grandmother, and a widow, also of limited wardrobe, having learned through failed experiments that there are some things better left unworn by me.

Naturally I have changedmy hairs a different colourbut so has the world. The past sixty-odd years have been a roller coaster, with many shocks and upheavals, many uproars and reversals. The year 1960 was only a decade and a half after the end of the Second World War. To our generation, that war felt both very closewed lived through it, our families contained veterans and casualties, some of our high-school teachers had been in itand very far away. Between 1950 and 1960 had come both McCarthyism, giving us a peek at the fragility of democracy, and Elvis, upending song and dance. The clothes too had changed radically: the 1940s were sombre, durable, military, boxy; the 1950s, frothy, strapless, bouffant, pastel, beflowered. Femininity was lauded. The cars had gone from the dark, enclosed sedans of the war years to chrome-trimmed convertibles in flamboyant colours. Transistor radios were among us. Drive-in theatres popped up. Plastics arrived.

Then, in 1960, there was another change. Among the earnest young, folk songs replaced formal dances. In the tiny artistic circles that then existed in Toronto coffee housesinclined as they were to French existentialism rather than Beatniksblack turtlenecks and equally black eyeliner were in vogue.

Still, the early 1960s were the 1950s, in essence. The Cold War was on. Kennedy had not yet been assassinated. There was no birth control pill generally available. There were no miniskirts, though there had just been short shorts. There were no hippies. There was no second-wave womens movement. It was in this period that I wrote my first book reviews, my first collection of poems, my first novelstill in a drawer, happilyand my first published novel, The Edible Woman. By the time it came outin 1969the world it describes was already gone.

The later 1960s brought uproar. The big civil rights marches in the United States, the antiVietnam War protests, the hundreds of thousands of American draft dodgers pouring into Canada. I myself was constantly in transit: for some of these years I was a graduate student in Cambridge, Massachusetts; for others I held minor academic positions in such places as Montreal and Edmonton. I moved sixteen or seventeen times. This period saw the formation of a number of new publishing ventures in Canada, many of them connected with the countrys post-colonial struggle to figure itself out. My involvement with one of them gave rise to much essay writing, both at the time and later.