Ian McMillan welcomes the Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood, who joins The Verb from wild woods north of Toronto, to share poems from her new collection ‘Dearly’ and to explore the preoccupations that link her poetry and fiction: what it means to have a body, our increasingly precarious relationship with the natural world, the Canadian sensibility, and the way we are caught in time like ‘mice in molasses’. Margaret reads from her iconic novel ‘The Handmaid's Tale’ and takes us back through the layers of her own past, to a time in her early childhood when she started to tell her own stories, and write plays – about strange alien creatures, and a giant that gets squashed by the moon.