Houston's Weekend Planning Guide

The creative mind behind the Hulu streaming series "The Handmaid's Tale" is not just Bruce Miller the series creator, its Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, teacher and environmental activist. Atwood has published seventeen books of poetry, sixteen novels, ten books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press editions in poetry and fiction. Atwood will be speaking for all of her endoveros this weekend at Jones Hall.
     If you are not familiar with the narrative of "The Handmaid's Tale" women are brutally subjugated, and by law are not allowed to work, own property, handle money, or read. The story goes fertility has slowed so much because of disease. Women that can make babies are assigned to the homes of the ruling elite, where they must submit to ritualized rape by their male masters in order to become pregnant and bear children for those men and their wives.

Forbes.com last week published a piece on the latest pop culture turn of "The Handmaid's Tale". Now you can add another medium to that list: comics, they reported. The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, released March 26 from the Nan A. Talese imprint of Doubleday, features a taut and well-realized adaptation by Renée Nault, a Canadian artist and frequent illustrator for the Los Angeles Times, who was specifically selected by Atwood to adapt her work.

Atwood will speak of this pop phnomno of her work and other items. As a novelist and poet, Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including the power of language, gender and identity, religion and myth, climate change, and "power politics." Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age. Among her contributions to Canadian literature, Atwood is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Writers' Trust of Canada.