Wilderness Tips

Wilderness Tips

First edition
Author	Margaret Atwood
Cover artist	Frida Kahlo, The Wounded Deer, 1946
Language	English
Genre	Short story collection
Publisher	McClelland and Stewart
Publication date	1991
Publication place	Canada
Media type	Print (hardcover)
ISBN	0-7710-0819-8

Wilderness Tips is a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood, published in 1991 by McClelland and Stewart. It was a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Certain stories were previously published in The New Yorker, Saturday Night, Playboy, Harper's and Vogue.^[1]

Several of the stories are fictionalized portrayals of Atwood's contemporaries in Canadian literature. The mysterious poet Selena in "Isis in Darkness" is based on Gwendolyn MacEwen, and the journalist Marcia in "Hack Wednesday" is based on June Callwood.^[2] One story, "Uncles", prompted a feud between Atwood and Robert Fulford, who claimed to have been the model for the character Percy Marrow, described in the story as a "peeled potato with a little tuft of fuzz on top".^[2]

Contents

• "True Trash"
• "Hairball"
• "Isis in Darkness"
• "The Bog Man"
• "Death by Landscape"
• "Uncles"
• "The Age of Lead"
• "Weight"
• "Wilderness Tips"
• "Hack Wednesday"

Notes

1. Garvie, Maureen (Sep 21, 1991), "Lost in the Woods", The Whig-Standard, p. 1
2. Brian Busby, Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit. ISBN 0307368580.

External links

• NYT Review (1991)