Ever wonder what a homemade Powerpoint presentation by Margaret Atwood detailing her life would look like? Well, let me tell you.

Seeing one of my all-time faves on Wednesday night (through the Center for Fiction, which is hosting its Science Fiction and Fantasy month) was a huge treat. Margaret just published the book of essays In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, which not only discusses her speculative fiction leanings (if you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale, stop what you’re doing and READ IT IMMEDIATELY) but also her childhood SF beginnings (e.g. flying rabbits).

Margaret is a tiny lady, so much so that a platform had to be set behind the podium so that she could step on it and reach the microphone (“sometimes it’s a telephone book,” she noted dryly). Though she looked just like the image in my head, with her trademark curly gray hair and red glasses, her voice surprised me. I’d imagined it being melodic and playful, but instead it was low and often deadpan.

And I mean deadpan. One might have thought Margaret was actually being serious, if she hadn’t let out sporadic chuckles. Ursula K. Le Guin (another keynote speaker, and the woman Margaret dedicated Other Worlds to) is “quite a naughty person.” The audio producer “asked if he should pronounce SF as ‘sfff.’” And as for her sassy pronunciations on death…well, let’s build up to that.

Margaret Atwood is an artist as well as a writer, and the endsheets of Other Worlds include dozens of her doodles—flying rabbits, aliens, human-eating plants, fairies. By the end of her presentation, which included readings from the book and the aforementioned Powerpoint, the origins for most of the doodles were clear.

The Powerpoint started with a black and white photo of “the insect lab,” where in the ‘40’s and 50’s Margaret’s parents would take her and her siblings for summer/fall every year. Deep in the North woods of Quebec, with no nearby stores or neighbors, the family grew and caught their own food and had to make their own entertainment.

Sans TV and video games, Margaret and her brother and sister mainly read, wrote and drew. Many of the slides showed elaborate childhood drawings, such as the “Blue Bunny Comics by Peggy,” which starred Blue Bunny and White Bunny. (They later morphed into Steel Bunny and Dotty Bunny, who would hang out in air balloons, eat ice cream cones and occasionally go to war.) Margaret also put on puppet plays, which garnered some of her first bad reviews via her brother.

The Powerpoint also showed experiences from later years: Margaret’s pre-teen reading choices (Brave New World, Weird Tales), her sitting at a poetry reading in an abandoned warehouse (hipster!), her drawings from the 70’s, her sitting at a typewriter in Berlin in the 80’s, starting The Handmaid’s Tale. Jumping to present day, it displayed superheroes Margaret drew for a few lucky Twitter followers (she’s a notoriously active user).

During the Q&A, Margaret touched on a large number of subjects—Inuit art, her SF reading recs (HG Wells, Bradbury, Huxley, Russell Hoban, Octavia Butler), her definitions of science vs. speculative fiction. A few random but interesting tangents were when she talked about how her “porny” covers used to mislead readers, especially in the Eastern Bloc of Germany where real porn wasn’t allowed.

On the subject of Twitter, she explained how she got into it (“It was an accident”), compared it to other short form writing (the telegraph/grafitti/tombstone), and noted that it’s handy for passing along news (a la the Egypt uprising) as well as pointing people toward more in-depth discussions. (She also was happy to receive about 35 different vampire emoticons after putting out a Twitter request.)

Someone asked how her writing choices have changed along with age. She responded that older people may write riskier things, and are able to because they know how plot works. She then shared with delight her usual age-related comebacks (“In thirty years, that will be your problem. I’ll be dead”)—and to end things, “on that cheerful note.”