Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood intertwines philosophy, memoir, and examples to explore the writing life. Atwood weaves together seemingly disparate parts of life to demonstrate how interconnected every aspect of life and writing are. Atwood discusses the writer's relationship to life, living, truth, deception, and shadows and the interpretation of all of these in the works they write complete with examples from a slew of writers. She explores how writers use those interpretations to communicate with the readers for whom they write. Atwood's descriptions of her journey to become and remain a writer offer glimmers of hope and inspiration for writers on their writing journey. I found concepts, experiences, and emotions to which I could definitely relate; however, there were also parts to which I couldn't relate. This is the nature of being a writer reading another writer's experience in the same way that it is the nature of being a human reading another human's experience.



Check back soon for my thoughts on other books I'm reading including:


Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff
Trouble by Janelle Brown
The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Reviews will be posted as I finish these books.



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