Margaret Atwood

Booker Award-winning author Margaret Atwood is not new to her works being adapted for the screen. Her celebrated 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale was made into a feature film in 1990. Six of her short stories were turned into the anthology series The Atwood Stories on Canada’s W Network. She even penned a few TV scripts in the 1970s and 1980s. But 2016 is proving to be Atwood’s big year on the small screen. Hulu has placed a straight-to-series order for The Handmaid’s Tale. Netflix and CBC are collaborating on Alias Grace. And Kids’ CBC has commissioned Wandering Wenda from Breakthrough Entertainment, based on Atwood’s alliterative children’s books. The lauded author tells TV Kids about writing for young ones and her role on Wandering Wenda, which is slated to launch in 2017.

TV KIDS: What was the inspiration for your alliterative children’s books?
ATWOOD: Long, long ago I had a friend in publishing who had a company called Key Porter Books. She asked me to write a children’s story for her to publish. I wrote one called Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut. That was some time ago. And then she said, Can you do another one? And I wrote Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes. And then that publishing company disappeared, and those books were acquired by another company, who said, Could you write another one? So then I wrote Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda, and then I wrote Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop’s Wunderground Washery. [The producers] are taking the characters out of them and building them into Wandering Wenda and using not only the letters that I used but other letters as well. Kids find alliteration inherently funny, especially when they’re learning letters that are hard to pronounce. When you read sentences with these tongue-twisting things in them, people frequently get snarled up with them. So the appeal of the books was verbal, although we had a wonderful illustrator, Dušan Petričić. At first I didn’t know how they were going to do it as a television show. With all of the emphasis on alliteration, how are they going to handle that? In fact, they are building the adventures around the letters. It looks great. It will have an inadvertent learning component too. There is going to be a letter of the day featured [in each episode].

TV KIDS: How was your working relationship with the illustrator?
ATWOOD: He’s very good, so he just did it! [Laughs] It was arranged by the publisher. I work much more collaboratively with Johnnie Christmas on Angel Catbird [Atwood’s first graphic novel] because we have to go back and forth. What do these people look like? What are they doing? Should this be more gothic? We’re collaborating on all of the physical parts—that would also include the editor, Daniel Chabon, and the entrepreneurial person who put it together, Hope Nicholson. The four of us look at everything.

TV KIDS: How have you been working with the team at Breakthrough Entertainment on Wandering Wenda?
ATWOOD: I see it in each of its iterations. Like all these things, it’s like the rat in the maze. You go down the tunnel, is there any cheese there? No, go back out, is there any cheese there? Yes! [Laughs] I’ve shot a couple of intros for them in which I’m a character in the episode, meeting with Wenda. When I meet Wenda, she pops out of the book and we have an interaction. It’s pretty nonverbal; in fact, it’s entirely nonverbal! So I got dressed up and put on the wardrobe selected for me and took direction and was an actor in the show. Exactly how they’re going to use that I’m not sure, but I think they’re going to use it to open [the episodes].

TV KIDS: Do children’s books serve as a different kind of creative outlet for you?
ATWOOD: I have in my life spent a lot of time with children, telling stories and amusing them on rainy days and that kind of thing. I’ve had a much younger sister, I taught at a children’s summer camp and various other things like that, and of course I had a child and went through those stages as well. [The books allow me to revisit] how people of different ages imagine things and enter into pretend worlds, how they have different relationships with language. Children are very interested in words and wordplay at certain times in their lives because they’re learning so much. It’s not even things they’re being taught; they’re just picking it up from everywhere around them. And you can make amusing things out of words for children at those ages.

TV KIDS: I’m always encouraging my niece and nephew to read more. They spend an awful amount of time on their devices.
ATWOOD: Get them some audiobooks. They’re at an age of social interaction, so they’re probably communicating with their friends. In the age of the telephone, you’d have these long conversations with your boyfriend, where not much was said but you’d be on the phone. And the parents would come by and with scissor motions say, Cut it off! [Laughs] You weren’t having an intelligent, coherent conversation. You were just hanging out on the phone! Not much is conveyed, except states of emotion. There isn’t what you’d call intellectual content to any of this. Once upon a time it was hanging out on the corner. It was being in the soda shop. Then it was the phone. I can remember back to the days of little notes in school that you’d fold up and pass around. That was before kids had phones. So they’re going to do it one way or another. But it’s not that none of them are reading. There is a huge market for children’s and young adult books and that’s how things like Hunger Games become such a phenomenon. People are reading. Look at Harry Potter. Part of this thing with reading is like what people do around television shows—you have to read it because people are talking about it. So you have to be part of the conversation. And you have to be able to participate at that age. You have to be very cool. You don’t yet have the backbone to say, I’m not interested in this, I don’t care. [Laughs] You’d have to be Jughead to do that.

TV KIDS: Do you think kids today have a different relationship to reading given that so much of it is happening on iPads and eReaders?
ATWOOD: Well [paper] is coming back. We were told nobody would ever read paper books again—untrue. In fact, a couple of years ago, the cool thing to do as a teenager was to say, No, I don’t use those stuffy old eReaders that my parents use, I want paper books! So whatever the parents are doing is something you don’t want to do at that age. There is that cool/not cool factor going on. But I think the market has sorted itself out, and it seems we can’t do without bookstores after all.

TV KIDS: I read a report about how reading is down among kids and tweens. Do you think they have too many other things distracting them from engaging with books?
ATWOOD: These [studies] come out all the time, and they’re all different. We know that in reading it’s very top heavy—the top ten percent of readers read a lot, and the bottom read hardly at all. That has been true for a while, and people have been deploring it for quite a long time. If you go back to the golden age of comics, classic comics were supposed to be a way of getting people who didn’t like to read to read. So we were reading a lot of comics—that didn’t mean we also didn’t read books. For some, it did mean they didn’t read books! [Laughs] There have always been these variations. You always have to ask with these tests, What have they been measuring? What’s their control group? Where are they getting these numbers? Is it self-reporting, library use? The Toronto library system is hugely used by all sorts of people. Are they playing video games on the free computers or are they getting books out?

Because you can get searchable texts of classics online, and cobble together your term paper out of that, there is less poring over as there used to be with marking the pages and things like that. You can find what you’re looking for fairly easily with a searchable text. I’ve even been known to order e-books of my own work because I want to find something that I myself have written! [Laughs] It’s very handy. Where there are shortcuts, people will take them. What it has meant is that a lot of things that were obscure, out of print, lurking in corners of libraries, have now been brought back into print. So that’s made everything much more accessible.

TV KIDS: There is so much television activity around your work right now. Have you considered writing for television again?
ATWOOD: Television scriptwriting is a hotbox, especially with a series where you have a writers’ room. You have to be there, wherever it is. I can do Angel Catbird over the internet. When you’re writing scripts, collaboratively, it is a lot like summer camp. Your parents aren’t going to come and take you home. You hope the weather’s good and you like the people. When you’re in that box, it’s intense, and although I wrote film scripts and worked with directors on television, I never worked on a series. It’s a different experience.

TV KIDS: Is it true that you’re doing a cameo in Alias Grace?
ATWOOD: It is! I was just fitted for my corset. I’m going to be a disapproving lady in a church. And I won’t even have to act!