Atwood’s alliterations inspire animated series
TORONTO — When Margaret Atwood’s daughter was young, the acclaimed author would tell her an alliterative story filled with “P” words while getting the tangles out of her long, curly hair.
“You could just make it up as you went along,” Atwood recalled in a recent interview. “So it was different every time until I wrote it down.”
Atwood eventually published that story, Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut, as well as three other alliterative books for children.
On Saturday, the CBC will première Wandering Wenda, an animation series inspired by those books.
The show follows the globetrotting adventures of red-headed Wenda and her two best friends, Wesley Woodchuck and a bookish boy named Wu. Each episode runs about eight minutes long and features wordplay with one letter of the alphabet.
Alliteration allows parents to teach their kids “without being overly didactic,” said Atwood.
“Kids think it’s funny and when the parents read the books, they often get mixed up and kids think that’s funny too,” said the Torontobased novelist and poet, who appears in the opening and closing credit sequences.
“The Bs and Ds are particularly difficult for kids with dyslexia, and the Rs are particularly difficult with some people from other countries who are learning English. So in fact the R book has been used as a teaching aide in language classes for that reason,” she added.
“The P letter is just funny, kids think it’s funny for obvious reasons. W is quite a difficult letter for kids to write because it can make so many different sounds like what, where, why, when.”
Atwood — whose 1985 Governor General’s Award-winning dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted into a TV series debuting Sunday on Bravo — has been telling stories to children since she was a teen.
That’s when she and her highschool friend had a business putting on puppet shows for children’s birthday parties. They even made their own puppets and the stage.
“We were such a deal, we did everything — we greeted the little children at the door, we supervised the unwrapping of the presents, we dried the tears of the jealous children who weren’t getting those presents, we passed around the sandwiches, we supervised the cake and then we put on the puppet show,” said Atwood, 77, noting she still has the puppets.
“The mothers thought we were wonderful because they didn’t have to do it. They were out in the kitchen drinking the martinis. They had to make the sandwiches and supply the food and we just turned up and we did it all.”
Atwood and her friend adlibbed their puppet shows based on the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs and Hansel and Gretel.
The tales had no more than four characters onstage at a time, which was perfect for their four hands.