The Tent by Margaret Atwood

Or "Margaret Atwood Can Do No Wrong."

I love Margaret Atwood the way Andy Lampl loves The Corrections. Every sentence is so rich and beautiful. It's like sitting down to a perfect meal and savoring every bite.

A related-but-not-related-anecdote. Recently, we had our auditions for Filament's 2010-11 season. Instead of monologues, we asked the actors to perform a poem, and suggested Margaret Atwood as a good poet to check out. The result was marvelous and so I'll just toss out to you all: Margaret Atwood poems can make for some really amazing audition monologues.

The Tent is a collection of not-really-short-stories. Prose-poems? Fiction essays? Hard to define, but marvelous to read. Because Margaret Atwood's writing speaks for itself much better than I could, I will just excerpt one of my favorite ones here. It's called "Faster."

Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on the long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.

Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.