Everyone else my age is an adult.

Margaret Atwood on Imposter Syndrome. (The Commonplace Book Project)

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“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.” — Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

I found The Handmaid’s Tale at a garage sale when I was sixteen. That would have been the summer of 1987. It was in a box of books some lady was selling for ten cents a piece.

I watched the first two episodes of the Hulu series when they were first airing. I was in Austin at a conference, staying in a hostel (which means sleeping in a bunkbed, in a room full of strangers) and I watched them on my phone.

But I didn’t go back to it.

I’m not sure why. Maybe because the book was important to me when I was a teenager.

I had a collection of books that were mine. Not just because I owned them. They were mine because they were . . . well, because they were mine. They sunk into me and changed me.

I kept them in a plastic milk crate that I carried around with me all the time my dad was in prison — starting when I was fifteen — and well into adulthood.

The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the first. Whenever I see it or hear of it, my first thought is that’s my story.

I think I’m afraid the TV show will shift something about the story for me. We’ll see. I might give it a try soon.

I enjoyed this essay on how Atwood came to write The Handmaid’s Tale.

Margaret Atwood is one of the most prominent authors that shares work for free on Wattpad — which is especially cool because it’s a platform that offers so much support to young writers like I was when I was fifteen and sixteen and first discovered her work.

She also has a course on creative writing at MasterClass that I’ve heard good things about and I’m looking forward to taking later this year. (Disclaimer: this is an affiliate link. If you click and sign up, Ninja Writers gets a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!)

I love this advice from Atwood to aspiring writers:

“Write every day if you can, no matter how awful you think it is. Just keep doing it.”

I’ve added Atwood’s Oryx and Crake to my reading list. I’m not sure why I haven’t read it already.

Today’s Poem:

Backdrop addresses cowboy By Margaret Atwood

Starspangled cowboy sauntering out of the almost- silly West, on your face a porcelain grin, tugging a papier-mâché cactus on wheels behind you with a string,

you are innocent as a bathtub full of bullets.

Your righteous eyes, your laconic trigger-fingers people the streets with villains: as you move, the air in front of you blossoms with targets

and you leave behind you a heroic trail of desolation: beer bottles slaughtered by the side of the road, bird- skulls bleaching in the sunset.

I ought to be watching from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront when the shooting starts, hands clasped in admiration, but I am elsewhere.

Then what about me

what about the I confronting you on that border, you are always trying to cross?

I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso

I am also what surrounds you: my brain scattered with your tincans, bones, empty shells, the litter of your invasions.

I am the space you desecrate as you pass through.

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Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.