Author ensures her words will be read
Not that Margaret Atwood doesn't have a huge audience. But a new pen is, shall we say, her signature invention.
By JOHN FREEMAN Special to the Times
Published January 29, 2007
NEW YORK
Most authors are shelved in just one part of the bookstore.
Not Margaret Atwood.
Since she made her debut in the '60s, the Canadian writer and author of The Handmaid's Tale has published in more forms than it seems humanly possible - poetry, short stories, children's literature, thrillers, a romance, criticism, even science fiction.
"I've never written a Western," says the 67-year-old writer, sitting in a hotel suite in New York recently, where she traveled to interview the historian Thomas Cahill in front of a public library audience.
"I think I'm this way because I never went to creative writing school, and nobody told me not to. Nobody said, 'You have to specialize,' or 'For heaven's sake, control yourself.' "
And so she hasn't. But now Atwood is about to take on her most unlikely role yet: inventor.
Atwood is the force behind the recently launched LongPen, a mechanical device that allows writers to sign books from remote distances. So an author in Miami could sign for a bookstore customer in Mombasa, or a lawyer in Minneapolis can sign documents in Manitoba.
"It's like a very long pen," Atwood says. "I just say the ink is in another city."
Connected by an Internet feed, the author's end features videoconferencing, an electronic writing tablet and a magnetic pen. On the receiver's end is a video screen and the document being signed. The pen has had mixed results in early demonstrations, but Atwood says it's ready for its coming-out party.
"You can write anything with it," she says, an inventor's gleam in her eye. "You can draw little pictures. It reproduces every stroke that you have made, with exactly the same pressure."
Recently in Toronto, Atwood showed off the product with a demonstration. Alice Munro, Atwood's literary sister and another of Canada's most revered authors, signed books at a local bookstore from her location in southern Ontario. Atwood also interviewed her via the system.
Munro's appearance wasn't just good publicity. It gets at why it's so appropriate that a Canadian author is the driving force behind this invention, which she developed through Unotchit, a Toronto company she founded.
"Canada is a really big place," Atwood says, "so sure, there is Amazon.com, and there are more bookstores, but there are still a lot of people who would have a really hard time meeting an author."
Back to the start
Atwood understands this because at the beginning of her career, she went on the road when being an author on tour wasn't any great shakes.
"Back in the '60s and '70s, some places I'd go to didn't even have bookstores," she says.
"So you would take your books to the reading at the school gym. You'd sell the books, make change, you'd put it in an envelope, and take it back to a publisher."
Now she is published in 34 countries. Her publishers fly her around the globe to read in superstores.
None of this seems to have cut into her writing time. In the past 19 months Atwood has published a collection of essays, two volumes of stories and a book based on the life of Odysseus' wife, Penelope.
The last work was launched on the stage in London, with Atwood herself playing Penelope.
Atwood admits that this emergence as a literary celebrity is a draw on her time, but it is also a triumph. For some time Atwood's role in her own work was eclipsed by the theory attached to it.
Beyond 'text'
In the '80s and '90s, Atwood's work - with its recurring examinations of female identity, violence and the Canadian wilderness - was raked over the coals of deconstructionist theory, which stressed supremacy of text over author.
But the tide shifted, says Atwood, with a Cheshire cat grin. The importance of postmodern theory has waned, and "the authors are alive again, I'm happy to tell you."
It's a fitting resurgence. After all, Atwood's novels and stories, like the recent interlocking collection Moral Disorder, often concern a woman's struggle to wrest free from identity, or the identity others perceive her to possess.
"You are your story to a great extent," Atwood explains. "But other people's versions of you are going to differ from one another, and they're all going to be different from your version of yourself."
Example: a clam
Atwood found this out early as a youngster, and then she found out the hard way as a literary figure by examining something one of her two biographers wrote about her.
"It had a story about me at Harvard. That I kept a clam on my desk, and when asked why I liked it, I had remarked, 'It was very loyal.' "
Atwood gives a weary sigh.
"First of all, you can't keep a clam in a jar on your desk for more than about 24 hours or it will die.
"Second, I never had a clam in a jar on my desk.
"Third, the story was some permutation of a real story about my sister-in-law, not me. She had a pet hermit crab, of which she had remarked, 'It is very loyal.' But it came to a sad end, because they put it in an aquarium on top of a TV set and it got too hot."
Now, thanks to her invention, readers far from Toronto will know what Atwood really has on her desk. It's a small, oddly shaped pen.
As for what she's writing with her real pen, that will remain a mystery. Is she tempted to write a Western?
"I never talk about my temptations," she says.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
THE ATWOOD SHELF
- The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (2005), novel
- The Tent (2006), short stories, poems - Moral Disorder and Other Stories (2006), short stories
- Writing With Intent: Essays, Review, Personal Prose (2006)
- The LongPen online: www.unotchit.com