Category: Margaret Atwood

Pandemic Journal 27/3/2020 – only connect

janice williamson2 Comments

This pandemic, like a dark bird of history pierced the thin membrane of our personal world. Ripped open we feel the call of friends lost and and found. Their voices sound in our dreams. We bear witness to our loss. Our bounty. And reach across to others. ...In this new era, COVID-19 time, this impulse to connect, an essential element in our well-being, is enabled by our digital technology. Isolated in our homes or wherever we find ourselves, connections stretch out the minutes of our day into a zone of contemporaneous aliveness. We humans peer at each other through machines. Our bodies relax or contort into awkward postures scrunched down on a chair - or standing, our weight on one foot, at the sink.

“to put presence into absence”: on the occasion of the 2019 Booker Prize Awarded to Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo

janice williamson1 Comment

I wanted to put presence into absence. I was very frustrated that black British women weren’t visible in literature. I whittled it down to 12 characters – I wanted them to span from a teenager to someone in their 90s, and see their trajectory from birth, though not linear. There are many ways in which… Continue reading “to put presence into absence”: on the occasion of the 2019 Booker Prize Awarded to Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo