Writing with Intent

Writing with Intent is a 2005 collection of Margaret Atwood’s essays, reviews, and personal pieces gathered from across the period 1983 to 2005. The book brings together more than forty pieces drawn from various magazines, lectures, introductions, and occasional writings, organized roughly by theme and giving readers a generous sample of Atwood’s nonfiction across more than two decades of her working life.

The pieces cover a remarkable range. There are reviews of major writers from Toni Morrison to Salman Rushdie to Alice Munro. There are personal essays drawn from Atwood’s own life in Canada, her travels, her family history, and her experience of political activism on issues she has cared about for decades. There are pieces on writing itself and on the strange experience of being a writer in the contemporary publishing economy. There are occasional pieces, eulogies, introductions, and lectures that give a glimpse into Atwood’s working life as a public literary figure.

What distinguishes Atwood’s nonfiction from a lot of writers’ essay collections is the sharpness of the prose and the seriousness of the engagement. She does not coast on her novelistic reputation. The reviews are real reviews, the political essays are politically committed without being merely tendentious, and the personal pieces have the kind of narrative discipline that her fiction shows. The introductions to other writers’ books are particularly worth reading because Atwood is one of the most generous and acute readers among contemporary novelists.

The early pieces in the collection, drawn from the 1980s, give readers a window into the years when Atwood was building toward The Handmaid’s Tale and developing the political commitments that would shape her major late career work. The later pieces show her engaging with the post Cold War world and the rising environmental and political concerns that have continued to drive her fiction.

For longtime Margaret Atwood readers, Writing with Intent is a generous companion volume to the novels and poetry. For new readers, it is an accessible way to encounter Atwood’s voice across multiple registers. The essays work both as standalone pieces and as a connected portrait of one of the major writers of her generation.