Dual passions lead noted novelist down different literary path
PELEE ISLAND, Ontario — Canada’s most celebrated author was in the middle of Lake Erie last week, eager to talk about dystopia — but not the one attracting most of the attention from her fans recently.
Margaret Atwood, whose books include the bestselling 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” lives in Toronto but has a cottage on quiet Pelee Island, just
a stone’s skip across the border from Ohio’s Bass Islands.
The avid conservationist had just wrapped up
Springsong, an annual bird-watching and authors event she founded 15 years ago to benefit the Pelee Island Heritage Centre.
Pelee Island, Atwood noted, is a major stopover for birds migrating across Lake Erie.
“Birds, especially migratory birds, are like an early-warning radar system,” she said. “When things are going wrong with their habitats and their numbers are declining, that’s a wake-up call.”
And, according to Atwood, everyone should be wide awake about threats to the environment.
“Why?” she said. “If they don’t get interested in it pretty soon, the oceans and soil will be dead and we will cease to breathe — in a nutshell.”
In other words, an environmental dystopia.
A much different dystopia is portrayed in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in which a theocracy has taken over the United States, reducing women to the role of servants and slaves. A popular TV series based on the novel premiered in April on the streaming service Hulu and has been renewed for a