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Friday, October 30, 2009 08:47 AM
New York: The Symphony Space perilous passage
October 27: Well, things had been going too well, so the Goddess Fortuna decided to throw a spitball. I arrived in New York, fresh from piles o’fun in Boston, for a read-through with the three actors for the Year of the Flood Event at Symphony Space the next day: Bernadette Dunn, who also reads “Toby” on the Random House audio book; Jonathan Tindle, “Adam One"; and Megan Raye Manzi, “Ren.”
After the actors had left, Phoebe Larmore revealed that the glowing reports we’d been getting about ticket sales had in fact been illusory: The promoter engaged to do what promoters are supposed to do – i.e., make it known that the event was taking place – had done very little. True, we were on their website, but as they were an outfit that usually promoted metal bands on harbour cruises – how did THAT happen? – this was not much help. (Hint: different audiences.) Next day we found that it was even worse than we’d thought: Not even the artistic director of Symphony Space had known until the last minute, and there was no poster out front because the promoter had said it wouldn’t be necessary. At 4 in the afternoon, bass guitarist Ted Perlman and documaker Ron Mann’s friend Oliver and I were sitting in a café planning to obtain 500 smiley-face helium balloons to put in the empty seats.
The New York actors: Bernadette Dunn, Jonathan Tindle and Megan Raye Manzi
When faced with the news, the performers – not only Ted Perlman and Orville Stoeber and the actors, but the SONOS Singers and percussionist Ray Marchica (who plays for Mama Mia and Barbara Streisand, among others – were surprisingly sanguine. They were, after all, in showbiz – they’d lived such stories before. “They told us everything was fine,” I said. ”That’s when you worry,” said Ted.
Astonishingly, an audience did show up – not like the sellouts we’ve been having, but a respectable number of hardcore readers. I made a welcome speech that included the lines, “We’d be very interested in learning how you got here: It must have been by telepathy, or by channeling voices through the fillings in your teeth…. Let’s just say this is a learning experience, and tomorrow it will be an anecdote. Tonight, however, it is an intimate, unprecedented, and unrepeatable experience, with wonderful performers who are also – luckily – very good sports.... We have just had a bonding experience, my friends. You can have a space in my lifeboat any time.”
Then the kids proceeded to nail it, delivering a stupendous rendition that was caught by Ron Mann on film. Not only the publishing group from Random House – including Nan Talese from Doubleday, LuAnn Walters from Anchor, and Alison Rich, who’s been such a help in getting us from place to place – but also all those whose teeth fillings had led them to us seemed very happy. And so was I. There’s nothing like a narrow squeak to get the sluggish adrenaline flowing.
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Monday, October 26, 2009 02:29 PM
At the Frankfurt Book Fair
On Oct. 14, I flew off to the Frankfurt Book Fair with my Think Pink, Pack Black mini-wardrobe. I disgraced myself by staying up all night watching two not very highbrow movies: the yak-a-minute Year One and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which cut off just as a tremendous wand firefight was going on. I'll have to catch that ending later. Then I toppled into the Zurich airport and took a gate-to-gate ride through a soundscape of the Swiss Alps: alpine horns, goat bleats, cow moos, bell tinkles. What might Toronto provide, I thought, if the magic train to Pearson Airport is ever built? Bellows of moose in heat? Raccoons mating? Don Cherry intoning "Rock 'em sock 'em" to the thud of hockey sticks on hockey players? The summer symphony of leaf blowers and gas mowers? So much choice!
At the book fair: the Berlin Verlag display for the German version of The Year of the Flood
Once checked in at Frankfurt's venerable Hessischer Hoff (where the apples were embossed with a "Welcome to the Frankfurt Book Fair" skin brand; what finesse), I connected with Carsten Sommerfeldt, the very tall whiz behind Berlin Verlag publicity, and we were off. When I was first at the Fair in the late 1970s, the air was blue with smoke. Authors were tucked into cubbyholes behind the publisher displays, into which journalists would disappear for 15 minutes each. It was all faintly disreputable. Now the writers sit out front like real people, and I was happy to see the lovely orange Floating Onion cover of Das Jahr Der Flut decorating not only the Berlin Verlag booth but the cover of the Book Fairs magazine. (Wordsmiths and symbolmongers: There's a FloatingOnion contest on Twitter, closing Oct. 31. View and interpret the symbolism of the image, then post @FloatingOnion; the top five win small prizes but great acclaim.)
With (the very tall) Carsten Sommerfeldt of Berlin Verlag publicity
The Fair is getting pretty high-tech. Not only is Das Blaue Sofa a great success -- you sit on the blue sofa and the interview is up on a big screen and webstreamed and TV'd and lord knows what else -- but the newspaper Die Zeit also has its own public interview sessions, as does the popular TV host Gerd Scobel (pictured at top). And more, much more. Will the remote-signing LongPen come to the Fair soon, bringing publishers too small or from countries too remote to come in person, as well as authors who can't travel? That was discussed; the techhie Fair of today would be ready for it.
Among the friends I saw was photographer Isolde Ohlbaum, who first took my picture in Berlin in 1984 when I was writing The Handmaid's Tale, and Astrid Holzammer, who's been with the Canadian embassy for many years. Also radio interviewer and photographer Tobias Wenzel, with whom I spent some hours in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery this summer. Tobias has a Polaroid camera and some vintage film he keeps in a freezer, and he's luring writers into cemeteries where he makes silvery portraits of them and then gets them to talk about Death. Under 30, they do it, he says. And over sixty. In between, they don't want to. We pondered this, and also the fact that in the Scattering Garden -- my site of choice -- someone had interpreted scattering as a donut-like ring of ashes around the tree trunks. Is it a message, or a charm? In a Harry Potter film, it would be. Or, a more Canadian explanation: Is it the after-effect of too many Timmies, glazed?
Monday, October 19, 2009 02:32 PM
West Coast technolit and Amazonians
As I twirled down the West Coast of the United States in the first week of October, I found the neighbourhood a-boil with book talk. Was the Death of the Paper Book upon us, what with Google’s on-line library and the Amazonian Kindle? What about the fall pullback of the once dreaded but now mourned 30-city book tour? How about the print-on-demand machine that can turn out a bound book in the time it takes you to eat a doughnut if you chew slowly? Might it solve the chronic problem of over-printing or under-printing, the warehouse and inventory costs, the expense of the fuel used to haul skids of books hither and thither across the continent? Wouldn’t e-readers be an aid to travellers and to those with small apartments? It’s all in motion, and nobody knows where those chips will fall.
In Seattle, I visited Amazon in order to make a podcast. (Remember when pods were something in Invasion of the Body Snatchers?) At the Amazon Meet and Greet, I found to my surprise that most of the people who work there are – to my wrinkly eyes – about 20. “How did they get so smart?” I wondered. "Surely they’re too young to think.” But there they all were, smiling sweetly like the ones in the picture. Furthermore, they all love to read. (Or the ones I met did. Maybe the others heard I was coming and dove into their wastepaper baskets.)
In San Francisco I had fun talking with Rick Kleffel, a book blogger who writes The Agony Column for Bookotron. Once, “blogger” would have been a piece of Victorian Cockney slang meaning, perhaps, “lazy petty criminal.” Now it’s morphed into a respectable job description; these folks have business cards. Rick takes his blogging job seriously enough to confess that he'd expected me to bore him out of his tree – no matter, I expected the same of him – but we defeated each others’ negative vibes and discussed science fiction, its ancestors and descendents, its spinoffs and lookalikes.
Margaret Atwood with Jeffrey Mahalo of mahalo.com
I do get in trouble over the sci-fi terminology – I just want the puffed rice package to have puffed rice in it, that’s all – but Rick, you heard this first here: I’m doing the Richard Ellman Lectures at Emory in 2010, and they will be called “Imagining Other Worlds,” and I’ll include the full sci-fi family tree in there.
In Los Angeles, right after talking to Wired Magazine – which I often consult on such subjects as lulz (“Often used to denote laughter at someone who is the victim of a prank”) – I went to Mahalo to do an interview with Mark Jaffrey of the Bibliotech Show. Mahalo is a search packager – it narrows the field to what you’re looking for. It’s the brainchild of Jason Calacanis (“Bio: I'm a cereal entrepreneur: Founder of Weblogs, Inc., TechCrunch50, Silicon Alley Reporter, Engadget & Mahalo.com”), whose orange all-electric car was parked outside. Mark Jaffrey is an enterprising young man who usually interviews people, um, somewhat unlike myself. (Hint: different colour of hair.) Confession: Mark picked me up via Twitter – that’s how enterprising he is! Not only that, he just sent me a New Thing to Try: a good-for-writers thing called Scrivener.
Looming over all of this peppy tech chat is the Shadow That Must Not Be Named. It’s actually two shadows. First, the servers that make the Web run are now emitting a huge amount of heat and a big pile of carbon from the energy used to run and cool them. But Iceland is standing by, with carbon-free geothermal power in a cool climate.
The second shadow isn’t specific to the Web: it’s Peak Oil, which will be followed by a decline in cheap plastic, without which none of these online goodies can survive. But meanwhile, the technobookotronobiblioagonosphere will be making lulz while the sun shines.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 11:56 AM
Kitchen, Kitchener, and WOTS all this?
Sept. 25, 26, and 27
That was a wild weekend!
It kicked off on Friday evening with a small Twitterparty we threw in our kitchen and backyard, in honour of all those who had helped with the website, and with its associated blogging, tweeting, weird things, and downloads.
Scott Thornley and Company, the designers who hand-built the site with coding provided by Meta-wave, was first and foremost. Scott – who drew the Propose-A-Saint Scroll and the inside-the-book T and Tote logos himself – was there with some excellent STC-client Malivoire wine -- one of the original Ontario organic practitioners. With him were Carmen Seravalle – who designed the “look” of the site, using as background many photos taken by Scott –and Superwoman Jamie Walters, the ever-patient, hard-working, and diplomatic account supervisor who was responsible for putting all the pieces together. Phoebe Larmore from Los Angeles, my North American agent, who produced the CD of the Gardener Hymns, and Orville Stoeber, who wrote and performed them, were there too.
So were Ron Mann, who is shooting a documentary about the tour, and Amber MacArthur, who did a little interview for her new Tech TV program, Webnation, for Discovery; and McLean Greaves, who was filming it all through his iPhone as part of the live webstream he did for all the Twitterpals out there in Airland, some of whom were eerily texting questions right into the kitchen; and Lisa Charters of Random Social Networking, who was out of her mind with joy about all the interfilming, streaming, clicking, tweeting, and lord knows what else that was bouncing around in there.
Livestreaming from Margaret Atwood's kitchen
I did a bit of webstreaming myself, though it would have helped if I’d had the iPhone turned the right way around. I think viewers got a picture of Scott Thornley’s voice booming out from my great big forehead. Oh well, Surrealism was just ahead of its time.
* * *
The next day, Ashley Dunn and I were driven to Kitchener by Global Alliance, a member of Green Ride Global. We landed at the Kitchener Public Library and were met by Sharon Smith for an event dovetailed with Word on the Street the next day: a reading and a Q&A , filmed to be shown at the actual WOTS event the next day. I threatened the Kitchenerites with exposure on my blog if they cut up rough, so they were very well behaved, and even put up with my singing of the Mole Day Hymn from the novel -- “We Praise The Tiny Perfect Moles” -- an appropriate song for a region that contains so many fellow tillers of the soil.
At the reading in Kitchener, ON
At the special lunch, at which Mayor Carl Zehr was present – I don’t always get mayors! – and at which I got an earful about the need for better train connections to Toronto – anyone listening? -- I was given – Yes! – some organic coffee and a basket containing many organic treats, including some Homestead Herbals from Little City Farm, an Eco-Bed and Breakfast, and some honey from Knechtel Apiaries in Wellesley.
There was also a plantable wildflower bookmark from regionofwaterloo.visiblestrategies.com, a lovely tribute book about farmers (Keepers of the Land: Hiebert and Cripps), and a Buy Local, Buy Fresh map guide to local food in the area. Ironically, one of its sponsors is the Government of Canada, which at the moment is planning to close down all of its local-food-crucial prison farms under the pretense that the farming skills taught at them and thus by extension the food grown at them are “useless.” Listen to that, Keepers of the Land! Do I hear some growls? I certainly hope so! (Write to the Hon. Peter Van Loan and tell him you aren’t useless.)
* * *
The next day was Word on the Street in Toronto, where I was to do the word’s first simultaneous coast-to-coast book launch – by LongPen (the only remote real-time 3-D actual-ink book-signing device) and Tandberg video-conferencing equipment in Halifax and Vancouver, and onstage in a tent in Queen’s Park, Toronto.
We did the LongPen signings first (see photo at the top of this blog entry), then the reading – beamed to Halifax and Vancouver – then a Q&A in all three cities. It was screaming madness, but it worked! One of our national problems has always been bridging our vast distances, but it can be done, sometimes. With the WOTS linkup, viewers in all three cities were able to participate in the undue interest one questioner was taking in my elderly – how shall I put this? – bum, and whether or not it has a Canadian flag tattooed on it. Never tell me culture doesn’t inspire!
Wednesday, September 23, 2009 04:03 PM
The road to Ottawa
Toronto, Tuesday, Sept. 22: In the early morning I was collected by Ashley Dunn of Random House, who has been planning the entire Canadian tour. We were catching an early-morning Ottawa train, for the first Canadian Year of the Flood Event -- the ninth in an overall total of 20. Ashley had two boxes with 300 programs each: they’d arrived late, so we were taking them with us. It was like the first days of book touring in the 1960s, when authors would haul their own books with them because you never knew. I myself was carting a bunch of the Gardener Hymns CDs, because you never know.
Ashely Dunn of Random House at Union Station, loaded up with the programs for the Ottawa event.
Ottawa is the city where I was born almost 70 years ago, so as we rolled through the fall foliage I found myself speculating on those early influences interviewers are always asking writers about. What would my biologist father have thought about my Gardener Hymns on subjects such as moles and snakes? (He’d been a sometime writer of similar verses himself, though usually when he had a cold.) Was my dare-devilish mother an “influence” on the crazed book launch/drama/musical series of “Events” I had so recklessly embarked upon? I expect so. She and her generation used to put on amateur theatricals in churches – wasn’t this project sort of the same?
Early influences? Margaret Atwood and her brother Harold shovelling the Ottawa snow in 1943.
“It’s like summer camp,” I told someone.
“It’s like Mr. Potato Head,” I told someone else. “Each city gets the basic kit – the script, the music – and then they make their own version: their own design, their own musical style, their own acting interpretation. Each Event is different, and I never know what I’ll find. The creativity unleashed is amazing!”
I turned to speculation on human creativity. Could it be true – as Denis Dutton argues in The Art Instinct – that art of all kinds, including narrative art, is an evolved adaptation that gave those that had it an edge over those that did not during the 80,000 generations we spent in the Pleistocene? Did their art unify groups, inspire them, teach them survival methods they needed to know, whether material or spiritual? If so, it’s not a question of whether people do art or don’t do it – they will anyway. It’s only a question of what kind of art they do, or whether someone else does it for them. Our stories are us, on a national and international level, as well as on a personal one.
Which sets the political hostility to the arts in a new light. What is it that power-hungry politicians want from artists? Control over the story through the annihilation of the former story-tellers? Is this the agenda behind the recent decapitation of arts funding in British Columbia, while mega-millions are poured into the Olympics? The BC arts community will retaliate, of course. Over the past 50 years they've put BC on the map, and now they’re being told that their sorts of contributions are without value. They’ve always been a scrappy lot: Watch that energy bite back at Mr. Campbell – that would be my guess.
At Ottawa’s St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities (that's the photo at the top), I took one look at the stunning backdrop created by designer Thea Yeatman out of old plastic bags, duct tape and string, and thought: Yes! Artists really can make more out of less, and something out of nothing. In doing so, they unify communities and inspire them. Our Pleistocene skills have not deserted us.
(For a report on the Ottawa Event itself, see the blog at www.yearoftheflood.com. Coming soon!)
Wednesday, September 16, 2009 12:03 PM
'Nu in de boekhandel!'
Amsterdam, Sept. 12 and 13
Saturday did not begin well. Pickup for the airport was late due to traffic, so I couldn’t leave my big wheelie in the baggage check as planned but had to haul my stash of Elephant PooPoo Paper and Notebooks from Discards – bought at the London Natural History Museum – across the channel. I grumpily made my way through Security, where the Luggage Conveyor Belt Belle was rude to me – Don't you know I write a blog, I wished to bark, but did not, for fear of being marched off to the Naughty Room. I only look short, I brainwaved at her.
Then my mood brightened as I saw a Pret A Manger, where all the food is organic, where all the sandwiches are fresh, and where all the staff are teeth-glintingly friendly. I got a Virtuous Coffee, a Virtuous Sandwich, and a Virtuous Brownie, in a cute little Virtuous Paper Baggie; and thus mood-enhanced, I was beamed across to Amsterdam.
All the foreign writers stay at the Ambassade Hotel and have done so for years. It’s a couple of tall, thin 17th-century houses with winding staircases, and it overlooks a canal. The interviews take place in the library, which is packed with books by everyone you can think of; though visits by foreign writers are dwindling, I was told, due to the shrinking of print space for book reviewing. Nevertheless, the book business in the Netherlands – which, with Belgium, is a Dutch-language market of some 20 million people – is holding its own.
A coffee shop: Don't go for the coffee.
How are things Dutch faring? Well, there was the bank crisis: I now have a book called The Perfect Prey: The Fall of ABN Amro, or What Went Wrong in the Banking Industry (Joroen Smit, Prometheus), a saga of a multi-billion-dollar-profit outfit going down the plughole. (I won’t tell the ending.) There’s cautious optimism about the emergence from the recession, coupled with an undertone of worry about rising sea levels. There is, as always, debate over the “Coffee Shops” – the marijuana establishments that dot the downtown area. (If you actually want coffee, try a café.) There’s widespread bike theft – by addicts, they say – which is why, in this city of narrow side-roads and scant parking space where everyone has a bike, people mostly ride clunkers. And who knew that every month a special boat dredges the canals just to fish out the many bikes thrown in there for obscure reasons possibly involving alcohol?
I had lunch with my excellent Dutch translator, Lidwien Biekmann, who was at the Banff translation conference this summer (that's us pictured together up top). She has ornamented her studio window with a whole row of The Year of the Flood – Het jaar van de vloed – with its onion-as-balloon cover. I’m thinking hard about that cover: What does it mean, exactly? Enlightenment expected shortly.
The Dutch cover, with the mysterious onion as balloon
During a dinner conversation with Prometheus editor Job Lisman and young Dutch novelist Esther Ending (Na Valentijn, Debut Award winner, now finishing her second novel), we cooked up a scheme whereby I would put a Dutch Tweet on my Twitter site. Jop wrote it, I posted it:
“Zojuist verschenen: de Nederlandse editie van de sprankelende nieuwe roman van Margaret Atwood: Het jaar van de vloed. Nu in de boekhandel! ('Just published: the Dutch edition of Margaret Atwood's sparkling new novel: The Year of the Flood. Now in the bookshop!'
Now people are tweeting to me in Dutch. What to do?
Tuesday, September 8, 2009 09:47 AM
On connections (lack of), balls and twigs
My blogging and tweeting has been seriously hampered by the UK hotel system’s absence of Internet hotspots that actually work, or that work with Macs. At times our little group has found itself wandering the streets like sheep in the desert, bleating pathetically for lack of e-mail or paying a pound an hour in the e-mail equivalent of fast-food chains or peep shows. How did it come to this? In the future, will it be like Road Warrior, with gangs of ruthless thugs circling the last remaining viable connection points and shooting at the defenders with weapons made of aluminum computer cases filed to lethal sharpness? Dearie me, I trust not.
But here I am in a small oasis, catching up on London – now six days ago. Since then we’ve done events in Cardiff, Bath, and Ely, with one more UK event to go – Bristol , on Wednesday. For them – should I find a Connection! – go to the running blog on yearoftheflood.com.
On Sept.2, we leapt off the (late) train from Manchester, inhaled some sandwiches at the Royal Overseas League where I always stay in London – very central, own garden – and then I sprinted to Hatchard’s, where I signed megabooks, while Roger Katz – a longtime bookseller friend – told me what he thought of the Booker long list. Then down the street to St. James Picadilly to rehearse. Of all the UK Events, this was the only one not done with, and therefore produced by, a literary festival or bookstore. Rosa Bosch, originally from Spain – of Buenavista Social Club film fame – undertook to produce it, along with Fiona McMorrough of FMcM, and Irina Brown, with a background of Russian theatre, opera, and drama, consented to direct it. Diana Quick was the first actor to say Yes in the UK, with Roget Lloyd Pack coming onboard as Adam One and Lucy Briggs-Owen and Ren. Irina added two players – Rosamund Hine and Daisy Marsden, two young drama student who played some Gardeners, and any other voices required (that's the full cast in the photo above). The Pink Singers came to the project rather late, jumping in where other angels had in fact feared to tread, and Javier Camilo was there as percussion, and to make threatening noises.
We were all kitted out with pin-on gold twigs – part of Louis Price’s design – and with fairy balls (donated by Mathmos) that lit up when you squeezed them. I was a failure at this until Daisy/Rosamund showed me how. The rehearsal was somewhat chaotic, with Irina fine-tuning the actors while Rosa ran around with bags of chocolates and food, worried lest we be undernourished.
Margaret Atwood with Irina Brown, the director of the London show
In general these events have been like jumping out of a plane wondering if your parachute will open, and this one was similar, with the added tension of the twigs and balls. Would the actors get their cubes with places and times on them turned around right? Would the Pink Singers make those ooo’s and lalalas? Would anyone be speaking to me in the morning? “Have we all got our balls? Have we all got our twigs?” said Irina, just before we went on. “I’m the only man in this room, “ muttered Roger.
Then acting professionalism kicked in, and they all started going mumumummm and pupupu to warm up, and reciting things like “I want a proper cup of tea,” and after that we rolled forth like one of those Chinese dragons with a lot of people inside, and all was well. In a state of relief, we bundled ourselves off to the Bloomsbury reception in Soho Square, where all the food was vegetarian and all the wine organic. It was my UK agent Vivienne Schuster’s birthday, and my North American agent Phoebe Larmore thought we should all light sparklers in the shapes of Vs and Is, which we did, setting off the fire alarms, and not for the first time. She has a long history of pyromania. Tired but happy, the travelers went home.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009 10:32 AM
Day One: A restaurant baptism, and a first performance
[Editor's note: This is the first of a series of blog posts Margaret Atwood is writing exclusively for the Globe and Mail during her innovative tour for her new novel, The Year of the Flood. For the tour, which began in Edinburgh on the weekend and will continue in the UK, Canada and the USA until December, Atwood wrote a one-hour play based on the novel that will be played by local actors each time it is presented. She also commissioned Orville Stoeber to write music for the 14 hymns from the hymnbook of the God's Gardeners, the fictitious eco-religious cult at the centre of YOTF. Atwood is trying to make her tour as green as possible; that included taking the Queen Mary 2 to England last week. You can also follow her tour at her blog here.]
By Margaret Atwood
Edinburgh, Sunday morning, Aug. 30: Day One of the Year of the Flood tour
Yesterday, after leaving the Queen Mary 2 – on which I’d done a pre-tour preliminary reading – we went by train from Southampton to Edinburgh, making our connection in Birmingham with one minute to spare via one of those heart-stopping haul-your-bags-up-the-stairs-and-across-the-overpass athletic events that characterize British rail travel. We arrived at 4 p.m., in time to meet with Phoebe Larmore, who has put the CD together, Orville Stoeber, the composer of the God’s Gardeners hymn music – who will also perform tonight – and Fiona McMorrough of FmcM, who has orchestrated the entire UK tour.
Above: Orville Stoeber, Fiona McMorrough of FmcM, the tour's UK planner, Phoebe Larmore, Margaret Atwood’s literary agent, and Atwood meet to plan the first show. Photo at top of page: The rehearsal, with Atwood in the pulpit. The music's composer, Orville Stoeber, is playing guitar.
We all had dinner together, and just as I announced that no, I would not have a glass of wine because I was not drinking before performances for the entire tour, the server – in shock, I suppose (“No! There goes our income!”) – dropped a tray with five glasses of ice water right on top of me. After this symbolic baptism and a terrific veggie dinner, we went off at 8:30 to rehearse, at St. John’s Episcopal – that big church at the Castle end of Princes Street. The cast for the Scottish event have thrown themselves into the project with great energy and improvisation. Bishop Richard Holloway (playing “Adam One”) has a wonderful robe made of scavenged materials, including some orange Sainsbury’s plastic bags – also used to decorate the God’s Gardener’s ceremonial pole objects – and “Ren” (Emma Danby) had decorated the script books with scraps of tartan and some floral paper napkins. There will be 12 singers – they have already rehearsed with Orville – but only three were present last night, and even so the rafters were shaking.
Margaret Atwood at St. John’s Episcopal church in Edinburgh with Bishop Richard Holloway, playing Adam One, and Emma Danby, who plays Ren.
During the read-through all actors were in fine voice, but Janet de Vigne (“Toby”), the director, had trouble with me – in the pulpit I looked like a floating head, as I did also behind the big brass eagle lectern. Height-enhancing boxes were tried, but in the end I was positioned in plain full view. As we left, large decorative birds were being hoisted – the event is a fund-raiser for the RSPB Scotland, who will be present with tables and leaflets. Now I will spend the morning doing last-minute tweaks to the script and crossing my fingers for the performance at 3:30. Miraculously, the CDs of the Gardener Hymns are actually finished – I will see one for the first time today – and Bloomsbury is doing the overall distribution in the UK, with Amazon UK and the YOTF website having an online presence.
In pursuit of greenery, we are staying at the Bonham, which has Green Tourism Gold status – quite comprehensive. Zerofootprint is carbon-counting the entire tour, in stages: Toronto-Edinburgh came in at 1.86 tonnes, which we are offsetting though forest regeneration.
P.S. After the Event, from the Authors’ Yurt at the Edinburgh International Book Festival: A roof-rocking success! Singers and actors were brilliant! Happiness all round!
Atwood on Tour Contributors
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is the Booker Prize and Governor-General's Award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake and many other novels. She is also an acclaimed poet and critic. Her latest novel is The Year of The Flood. She lives in Toronto.