This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,

which is round but not flat and has more colors

than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,

this is what you will

come back to, this is your hand.

—from “You Begin,” Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems (1978)

“It’s just simple,” began prize-winning Canadian author, poet and literary critic Margaret Atwood in a Nov. 19 interview with The Harvard Crimson as she explained the predominance of settings familiar to her in her novels. “If you’re going to send a character to lunch, you’d like to know where. Apparently one of the plusses for people living in Brooklyn is that every single lunch spot—hot dog stands, White Castles—in the novels…people actually eat there. Things are in the right place. For them it’s like, ‘Wow, this is real’…you just want to know that everything’s in a certain place.”

But not everything has remained in its place for Atwood, who studied at Radcliffe as a graduate student in the early 1960s and returned to Cambridge after a significant hiatus to deliver a speech as part of the Radcliffe Institute Dean’s Lecture Series. I asked her how it felt to be back.

“Weird,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “There was no HMV, no Gap-type stores when I was at school. But as for the Yard, it’s exactly the same.”

Life experiences undoubtedly contribute to any author’s work, however, few writers would admit it as readily as Atwood. During her address and in the interview, Atwood liberally provided her listeners with autobiographical anectdotes that have appeared, only slightly disguised, in her fiction. In fact, Harvard provided the setting for her critically acclaimed 1986 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

An audience member asked about the role of Cantabrigian landmarks in Handmaid’s setting, so Atwood provided specific examples: One building in the book is Memorial Hall, another is the Brattle Theater, another Widener Library.