Dr. Carl and Margaret Atwood parents to writer and environmentalist Margaret Atwood

On my walk through the beautiful Scattering Forest at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, I came across a memorial plaque for the parents of one of this country’s greatest writers, Margaret Atwood.

Dr. Carl Atwood was born in Nova Scotia, and you could say he was fittingly returned to the earth, his ashes scattered among the native plants — a quiet nod to his life’s work as a forest entomologist. An entomologist is a scientist who studies insects and their relationships with people, the environment, and other living things.

Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood was born in the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia, the daughter of a country doctor. Her father considered her too “frivolous” for university, so she taught school to save her own tuition and won a scholarship anyway. She went on to train as a dietitian and nutritionist.

Their honeymoon was a canoe trip down the Saint John River in New Brunswick. From there they headed north to Quebec, where Carl ran an insect research station for the government, before eventually settling in Toronto, where he taught zoology at the University of Toronto.

Margaret, meanwhile, was known as a hilarious storyteller. Unlike her sister Joyce Barkhouse, a children’s author, she had no interest in writing herself, but she loved reading aloud, and all three of her children benefited from it, especially her daughter, who would one day become one of Canada’s most celebrated novelists.

That daughter, Margaret, was largely homeschooled by her mother at the remote camps where her father conducted his research. With no playmates in the isolated bush, the isolation likely helped build an early habit of self-directed reading and imagination, one that would shape her long before conventional schooling.

Carl Edmund Atwood died in Toronto on January 5, 1993. He was 86. Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood died in Toronto on December 30, 2006. She was 97.

A few sections over from her parents scattering forest is the family plot of Margaret Atwood’s late partner and conservationist, Graeme Gibson.