{"id":10910,"date":"2016-10-05T09:43:11","date_gmt":"2016-10-05T13:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/qa-with-margaret-atwood\/"},"modified":"2016-10-06T13:21:54","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T17:21:54","slug":"qa-with-margaret-atwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/qa-with-margaret-atwood\/","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Atwood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2-Margaret-Atwood\"<\/a>Booker Award-winning author Margaret Atwood is not new to her works being adapted for the screen. Her celebrated 1985 novel The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> was made into a feature film in 1990. Six of her short stories were turned into the anthology series The Atwood Storie<\/em>s on Canada\u2019s W Network. She even penned a few TV scripts in the 1970s and 1980s. But 2016 is proving to be Atwood\u2019s big year on the small screen. Hulu has placed a straight-to-series order for The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>. Netflix and CBC are collaborating on Alias Grace<\/em>. And Kids\u2019 CBC has commissioned Wandering Wenda<\/em> from Breakthrough Entertainment, based on Atwood\u2019s alliterative children\u2019s books. The lauded author tells TV Kids<\/em> about writing for young ones and her role on Wandering Wenda<\/em>, which is slated to launch in 2017.<\/p>\n

TV KIDS:<\/strong> What was the inspiration for your alliterative children\u2019s books?
\nATWOOD:<\/strong> Long, long ago I had a friend in publishing who had a company called Key Porter Books. She asked me to write a children\u2019s story for her to publish. I wrote one called Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut<\/em>. That was some time ago. And then she said, Can you do another one? And I wrote Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes<\/em>. 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<\/em>, and then I wrote Wandering Wenda<\/em> and Widow Wallop\u2019s Wunderground Washery<\/em>. [The producers] are taking the characters out of them and building them into Wandering Wenda<\/em> and using not only the letters that I used but other letters as well. Kids find alliteration inherently funny, especially when they\u2019re 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, Du\u0161an Petri\u010di\u0107. At first I didn\u2019t 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].<\/p>\n

TV KIDS:<\/strong> How was your working relationship with the illustrator?
\nATWOOD:<\/strong> He\u2019s very good, so he just did it! [Laughs<\/em>] It was arranged by the publisher. I work much more collaboratively with Johnnie Christmas on Angel Catbird<\/em> [Atwood\u2019s 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\u2019re collaborating on all of the physical parts\u2014that would also include the editor, Daniel Chabon, and the entrepreneurial person who put it together, Hope Nicholson. The four of us look at everything.<\/p>\n

TV KIDS:<\/strong> How have you been working with the team at Breakthrough Entertainment on Wandering<\/em>\u2008<\/em>Wenda<\/em>?
\nATWOOD:<\/strong> I see it in each of its iterations. Like all these things, it\u2019s 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<\/em>] I\u2019ve shot a couple of intros for them in which I\u2019m a character in the episode, meeting with Wenda. When I meet Wenda, she pops out of the book and we have an interaction. It\u2019s pretty nonverbal; in fact, it\u2019s 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\u2019re going to use that I\u2019m not sure, but I think they\u2019re going to use it to open [the episodes].<\/p>\n

TV KIDS:<\/strong> Do children\u2019s books serve as a different kind of creative outlet for you?
\nATWOOD:<\/strong> 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\u2019ve had a much younger sister, I taught at a children\u2019s 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\u2019re learning so much. It\u2019s not even things they\u2019re being taught; they\u2019re just picking it up from everywhere around them. And you can make amusing things out of words for children at those ages.<\/p>\n

TV KIDS:<\/strong> I\u2019m always encouraging my niece and nephew to read more. They spend an awful amount of time on their devices.
\nATWOOD:<\/strong> Get them some audiobooks. They\u2019re at an age of social interaction, so they\u2019re probably communicating with their friends. In the age of the telephone, you\u2019d have these long<\/em> conversations with your boyfriend, where not much was said but you\u2019d be on the phone. And the parents would come by and with scissor motions say, Cut it off! [Laughs<\/em>] You weren\u2019t having an intelligent, coherent conversation. You were just hanging out on the phone! Not much is conveyed, except states of emotion. There isn\u2019t what you\u2019d 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\u2019d fold up and pass around. That was before kids had phones. So they\u2019re going to do it one way or another. But it\u2019s not that none of them are reading. There is a huge market for children\u2019s and young adult books and that\u2019s how things like Hunger Games<\/em> become such a phenomenon. People are reading. Look at Harry Potter<\/em>. Part of this thing with reading is like what people do around television shows\u2014you 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\u2019t yet have the backbone to say, I\u2019m not interested in this, I don\u2019t care. [Laughs<\/em>] You\u2019d have to be Jughead to do that.<\/p>\n

TV KIDS:<\/strong> Do you think kids today have a different relationship to reading given that so much of it is happening on iPads and eReaders?
\nATWOOD:<\/strong> Well [paper] is coming back. We were told nobody would ever read paper books again\u2014untrue. In fact, a couple of years ago, the cool thing to do as a teenager was to say, No, I don\u2019t use those stuffy old eReaders that my parents use, I want paper books! So whatever the parents are doing is something you don\u2019t 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\u2019t do without bookstores after all.<\/p>\n

TV KIDS:<\/strong> 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?
\nATWOOD:<\/strong> These [studies] come out all the time, and they\u2019re all different. We know that in reading it\u2019s very top heavy\u2014the 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\u2019t like to read to read. So we were reading a lot of comics\u2014that didn\u2019t mean we also didn\u2019t read books. For some, it did mean they didn\u2019t read books! [Laughs<\/em>] There have always been these variations. You always have to ask with these tests, What have they been measuring? What\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019re looking for fairly easily with a searchable text. I\u2019ve even been known to order e-books of my own work because I want to find something that I myself have written! [Laughs<\/em>] It\u2019s 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\u2019s made everything much more accessible.<\/p>\n

TV KIDS:<\/strong> There is so much television activity around your work right now. Have you considered writing for television again?
\nATWOOD:<\/strong> Television scriptwriting is a hotbox, especially with a series where you have a writers\u2019 room. You have to be there, wherever it is. I can do Angel Catbird<\/em> over the internet. When you\u2019re writing scripts, collaboratively, it is a lot like summer camp. Your parents aren\u2019t going to come and take you home. You hope the weather\u2019s good and you like the people. When you\u2019re in that box, it\u2019s intense, and although I wrote film scripts and worked with directors on television, I never worked on a series. It\u2019s a different experience.<\/p>\n

TV KIDS:<\/strong> Is it true that you\u2019re doing a cameo in Alias Grace<\/em>?
\nATWOOD:<\/strong> It is! I was just fitted for my corset. I\u2019m going to be a disapproving lady in a church. And I won\u2019t even have to act!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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