Event: ENSFR reading group, June meeting

The next short fiction reading group meeting will take place (via Zoom) on Monday 1st June at 5pm (UK time). Below, you can find information on how to join the online meeting room. I have attached an iCalendar file that you can add to your calendar.

During the meeting, we will be discussing Julie-Ann’s reading suggestion: the short story “Death by Landscape” by Margaret Atwood. You can access the short story from this link:

https://223141929335512656.weebly.com/uploads/1/7/0/9/17093284/deathbylandscape_atwood.pdf

Our conversation will focus on the following discussion points that Julie-Ann has selected:

1. The story opens in a domestic interior but moves to a landscape of ‘wilderness’. How are these two contrasting spaces integral to the story?
2. Is there a power dynamic in the friendship between Lois and Lucy?
3. What is significant about the presentation of the camp and the language Atwood uses?
4. Does this story fit the category of bildungsroman?
5. How does Atwood explore ideas of colonisation?
6. In the following quote bodily absence is made significant. How does this idea relate to the wider societal conceptualisation of the female body through art, culture and mass media? How are female bodies represented elsewhere in the story?

“But a dead person is a body; a body occupies space, it exists somewhere. You can see it; you put it in a box and bury it in the ground, and then it’s in a box in the ground. But Lucy is not in a box or in the ground. Because she is nowhere definite, she could be any where.”

7. Structurally the story moves from present to past to present, using character memory to explicate the main story. How does ‘framing’ the past within the present impact ideas and meanings?
8. The story ends with a mystery? Is the reader invited to play detective?

Those who are interested in exploring the work further might want to read Atwood’s collection Wilderness Tips which also features “Death by Landscape”. Many of the other short stories in the collection are worth reading in conjunction, particularly “True Trash”. This is a recommendation by Julie-Ann. It is not mandatory to read further short stories for the meeting.

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Ines Gstrein is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic:  Short Fiction Reading Group – June 2026

Time: Jun 1, 2026 05:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85116499205?pwd=hx6KiEeoOcdhPibo4Egw3770UQhger.1