New London — A Thursday afternoon question-and-answer session at Connecticut College was titled — in perhaps requisite academic speak — "The Courage to Imagine: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood." 

Indeed, Atwood, the Booker Prize-winning Canadian novelist and perennial candidate on the Nobel committee's literary short-list, was a guest at the school as part of the school's 18th Daniel Klagsbrun Symposium on Creative Arts and Moral Vision series.

But the 90-minute session, hosted by Blanche McCrary Boyd, Conn College's Roman and Tatiana Weller professor of English and writer-in-residence, seemed more a freewheeling, mesmeric and often hilarious chat between collegial colleagues than anything formally scholastic.

Boyd's casual questioning — she described herself for this occasion as "bashful, which is not a word I use a lot" — ranged from craft and technique to the biographical and whimsical. In response, Atwood supplied anecdotes, asides, wisdom and plenty of self-deprecating humor.

More than once, Atwood smilingly confided to the capacity and mostly student crowd in Blaustein Humanities Center's Ernst Common Room that "I'm very, very, very old." It did not come off as a protestation but a gentle observation of wonder and possibility. Now 76, Atwood is the author of more than 40 books, including "The Handmaid's Tale," "Angel Catbird," "The Robber Bride," the Booker-lauded "The Blind Assassin," a just-out re-imagining of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" called "Hag-Seed," and a soon-to-be-published collaborative graphic novel "Angel Catbird."

Given the life experiences and imagination required for that sort of quality production, Atwood clearly has a wealth of experience and knowledge — but doesn't seem at all to take herself too seriously. She compared her initial efforts at writing any novel to being a rat in a maze. "When I finally don't run into a dead end and have to turn around and start over, I've got chapter one," she said. "If you can't get the reader in the first five pages, game over."

Three anecdotes about specific works were particularly intriguing. She wrote the title story of her "Stone Mattress" collection while she and her spouse were on a cruise — and she wondered with delight how hard it would be to murder someone aboard a ship. Atwood was approached to write "Hag-Seed" as part of a series wherein different contemporary authors would offer novels based on Shakespeare's plays. If she couldn't have worked with "The Tempest," she says, she wouldn't have participated. And a behind-the-scenes explanation of the epilogue to "The Handmaid's Tale," which was only possible because of what she learned reading "1984" and "Darkness at Noon," was an amazing revelation.

Atwood also remarked on topics like Canada's history with indigenous people; wizards and magicians in literature; the philosophy of prison incarceration; comic book superheroes; the emergence of moral vision in her work; and the therapeutic possibilities of compiling lists of books about death or hopeful things.

Boyd marveled over Atwood's prolific and consistently excellent output, pointing out that, while Ford Madox Ford wrote 60 books, "only five of them were any good."

Sipping from a Starbucks go-cup, Atwood responded, "It takes practice." She later said that she started writing seriously at 16, started publishing at 20, and read her first poetry aloud in a beat coffee house that had "the first espresso machine any of us had ever seen, and it was worshipped like a deity."

Later, Boyd — the author of four novels, herself, including "Terminal Velocity" — wondered if it was even possible for Atwood to remember all of the things she's written.

Atwood said, "I don't have the occasion to remember them all. Fortunately, I don't have to write a term paper on my own books. But maybe someday I'll sit in a rocking chair and go back and look at them."

r.koster@theday.com