MARGARET ATWOOD – Introduction – I was a cat-deprived young child. I longed for a kitten, but was denied one: we spent two thirds of every year in the north woods of Canada, so if we took the cat with us it would run away and get lost and be eaten by wolves; but if we did not take it with us, who would look after it? These objections were unanswerable. I bided my time. Meanwhile I fantasised. My drawings as a sixyear-old are festooned with flying cats, and my first book – a volume of poems put together with folded sheets and a construction-paper cover – was called Rhyming Cats, and had an illustration of a cat playing with a ball. This cat looked like a sausage with ears and whiskers, but it was early days in my design career. Then our months spent in the woods became fewer, and I saw an opening. A cat belonging to one of my friends had kittens. Could I, would they, can’t I, why not? I wore them down. My father was never entirely easy about having an indoor cat – he was born at the beginning of the twentieth century on a small backwoods farm, so for him cats belonged in the barn, their job was to catch rats and mice, and unwanted kittens were drowned in a sack – but xi