Margaret Atwood Rocks New Technology
When you think of writer Margaret Atwood, do you imagine her to be embracing the latest technological innovations? Well, she is. The award-winning Canadian author of such novels as The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, and Oryx and Crake will be plugging her new novel, The Year of the Flood, at book fairs across Canada . . . virtually. Atwood will appear in the flesh at Toronto’s Word on the Street festival in September 2009. At the same time, she will participate via video conference in two other book events in Vancouver and Halifax.
In addition to meeting festival participants and answering questions, Atwood will also be signing books with LongPen, a device Atwood helped invent (!) that enables her to sign books remotely and in real time. Atwood came up with the idea for the LongPen on one of her many long and grueling book tours. She explained to journalist Anthony Barnes in a February 19, 2006 article in The Independent, “As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, gettting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, There must be a better way of doing this. The LongPen made its public debut at the London Book Fair in 2006.
Mariko Fujinaka
Thomas Riggs & Company
Missoula, Montana
From Thomas Riggs & Co Blog: www.thomasriggs.net/blog
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