| The Atwood Stories | |
|---|---|
| Country of origin | Canada |
| No. of episodes | 6 |
| Production | |
| Running time | approx. 0:30 (per episode) |
| Release | |
| Original network | W |
| Original release | February 20 – March 27, 2003 |
The Atwood Stories was a Canadian television drama series, which aired on W in 2003.[1] A short-run dramatic anthology series produced by Shaftesbury Films, the series dramatized six short stories by Margaret Atwood.[2] It was one of the first original Canadian drama series ever commissioned by the network.[3]
Browse through Margaret Atwood's poems and quotes. 30 poems of Margaret Atwood. Still I Rise, The Road Not Taken, If You Forget Me, Dreams, Annabel Lee. A Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the.
The series was a Gemini Award nominee for Best Drama Series at the 18th Gemini Awards.[4]
The following year, Shaftesbury produced The Shields Stories, a similar series which dramatized six short stories by another Canadian writer, Carol Shields.[5]
Episodes[edit]
| # | Title | Director | Writer | Original air date | Production code |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 'Polarities' | Lori Spring | Lori Spring | February 20, 2003 | 1-01 |
| A young American in his early 30s (David Sutcliffe) takes a teaching job at a Canadian university, and enters a relationship with a female graduate student (Michèle-Barbara Pelletier). | |||||
| 2 | 'Betty' | Marni Banack | Lori Spring | February 27, 2003 | 1-02 |
| Eight-year-old Alice (Megan Diamond) and her older sister (Samantha Kreger) observe the marital breakdown of their neighbours Betty (Sharon Bajer) and Fred (Jonathan Scarfe). | |||||
| 3 | 'The Man from Mars' | Lynne Stopkewich | Lynne Stopkewich, Doug Taylor | March 6, 2003 | 1-03 |
| A lonely, overweight young girl, Christine (Emily Hampshire) finds a new sense of herself when she meets an Asian exchange student (Jovanni Sy). Also stars Sonja Smits as Christine's mother. | |||||
| 4 | 'Death by Landscape' | Stacey Stewart Curtis | Jason Sherman | March 13, 2003 | 1-04 |
| A landscape painting causes sixty-five-year-old Lois (Roberta Maxwell) to reminisce about the mysterious disappearance of her childhood friend Lucy (Courtney-Jane White) while they are together at a summer camp. | |||||
| 5 | 'Isis in Darkness' | Norma Bailey | David Young | March 20, 2003 | 1-05 |
| Aspiring writer Richard (Christian Campbell) is entranced by Selena (Brigitte Bako), an exotic and mysterious young poet he meets in a bohemian Yorkville café. | |||||
| 6 | 'The Sunrise' | Francine Zuckerman | Francine Zuckerman, Chris Philpott | March 27, 2003 | 1-06 |
| A reclusive painter (Rebecca Jenkins) finds her life transformed when she meets a young man (Tygh Runyan) who threatens to upset her tidy, ordered life. | |||||
References[edit]
- ^'Atwood at large'. The Globe and Mail, February 15, 2003.
- ^'W Network to air anthology of Margaret Atwood stories'. North Bay Nugget, February 19, 2003.
- ^'Dramatized Atwood stories a big splash for W Network'. Ottawa Citizen, February 20, 2003.
- ^'Dark horses and front-runners in competition for 2003 Geminis'. Guelph Mercury, October 17, 2003.
- ^'Shields and Atwood on TV? What took so long?'. The Globe and Mail, March 9, 2004.
External links[edit]
- The Atwood Stories on IMDb
September 19, 1982,Section 7, Page3Buy Reprints
DANCING GIRLS And Other Stories. By Margaret Atwood. 240 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $14.50.
MARGARET ATWOOD the prose writer has always seemed closely informed by Margaret Atwood the poet. Her narrative style is as precise as cut glass; entire plots appear to balance upon a choice phrase, and clearly she writes with an ear cocked for the way her words will sound when read back.
A poet's sense of fine-tuning has shown itself in each of her novels - not only in the powerful 'Surfacing' but also in, say, 'Life Before Man' and 'Bodily Harm,' both flatter in content but still beautiful to listen to. Nowhere, though, is that sense put to better use than in her short stories, which tend to combine superb control and selectivity with an almost rambunctious vitality. It may be that she feels freer to take chances with short stories. On the theory that she has less to lose, she may allow her mind to range more widely, to play with more possibilities.
Whatever the reason, 'Dancing Girls' is a stunning collection, mostly written within the last decade. Of its 14 stories, 7 are likely to linger in your mind for weeks afterward.One, 'The Man from Mars,' lingers for years, as I happen to know from having read it long ago in The Ontario Review. Another is arresting because it creates, in effect, a brand new verb tense, a sort of future-turning-imperceptibly-in to-present. Even the slightest stories set up some vivid images. They are, at the very least, works of integrity.
'The Man from Mars' describes a foreign student - bespectacled, ugly, hopelessly obtuse and persistent, a citizen of a deliberately unnamed Far Eastern country in which eventually North starts fighting South. This student develops an attachment to an overweight American girl, and his unwelcome attentions are infuriating and pathetic, but memorable. You want to kick him; you ache for him; you could weep for the unfortunate girl; but in spite of it all, you have to laugh. What an adroit, sly comic gift Margaret Atwood has! Here's her description of the girl's besiegement:
'As the weekdays passed and he showed no signs of letting up, she began to jog-trot between classes, finally to run. He was tireless, and had an amazing wind for one who smoked so heavily: he would speed along behind her, keeping the distance between them the same, as though he were a pull-toy attached to her by a string. She was aware of the ridiculous spectacle they must make, galloping across campus, something out of a cartoon short, a lumbering elephant stampeded by a smiling, emaciated mouse, both of them locked in the classic pattern of comic pursuit and flight.' Close kin to the galloping elephant girl is the narrator of 'Hair Jewellery' - a young woman who buys all her bargain clothes too big and practically swims in a long black coat, plastic rain boots and a 'garter belt which, being too large, is travelling around my waist, causing the seams at the backs of my legs to spiral like barbers' poles.' The story is a rueful account of the attraction that tragedy and despair hold for the very young. Even before beginning a love affair, the narrator enjoys imagining its demise. 'I visualized (our parting) as sad, tender, inevitable and final. I rehearsed it in every conceivable location: doorways, ferry-boat docks, train, plane and subway stations, park benches. ... I would be wearing a trench coat, not yet purchased, though I had seen the kind of thing I wanted in Filene's Basement the previous autumn.' As with 'The Man from Mars,' we laugh, but we're touched by the story's conclusion, which in this case finds the heroine grown up and successful, wearing a stylish red pants suit that fits her perfectly.
IN 'Polarities,' the brutal, dead cold of a far northern city is so pervasive that it's almost a character in its own right, and recognition of a woman's insanity creeps up on her friends - and on us - so gradually that for several pages we can actually follow her logic.
The Man From Mars Atwood
In fact, 'Polarities' could be the title of several of these stories, for Margaret Atwood's special concern is how certain innately unlike characters interact with each other, grate against each other, envy and resent each other's differences. 'Betty' features a cheery, domesticated woman who does not interest the child narrator half as much as does Betty's charming husband. By the time the narrator is grown, however, her perceptions have changed. The husband no longer intrigues her. 'It is the Bettys who are mysterious.'
'Giving Birth' considers the polarity between the happy motherto-be, diligently attending her natural-childbirth classes, and the mother-to-be who reluctantly hangs back -both women, as it happens, inhabiting the same body. When the first woman, in the early stages of labor, rides off to the hospital with her husband, she imagines that the second woman accompanies them, having been picked up on a street corner carrying a brown paper bag. While the first woman waits calmly for a room, the second is shrieking with pain. While the first is taken past the check-in desk in a wheelchair, the second rolls by on a table with her eyes closed and an IV in her arm, something having gone very wrong.
Atwood The Man From Mars Pdf Free Full
In 'A Travel Piece,' the polarity is between a woman who has always lived at one remove from her world - a travel writer coolly determined to be charmed by every trip - and the inescapable horrors of a plane crash at sea. In 'The Sin Eater,' the polarity is between a passionate, life-affirming man and the thin despair all around him.
The stories that seem to me less successful are those that exhibit a narrow-eyed bitterness about the relations between men and women. In these, men are generally infantile, demanding, self-centered; women are either purely wronged or they have retaliated with their own kind of meanness. Luckily, examples of this are few. In most of her stories Margaret Atwood gives full attention to the multiple facets of any situation. With a deft turn of phrase, a poet's delicate pounce upon just the right word, she manages to convey the complexities and contradictions of ordinary life.