FROM SCARY TO CUTE
I used to be treated with a certain wariness - Margaret Atwood, an intellectual heavyweight ... Booker prize winner ... scary in interviews ... Canada's high priestess of fiction. People long to stick a label on you. But now the label's changed. My hair's gone white and suddenly everyone thinks I'm cute. It struck me the other day when I started twittering on my website. Everyone seemed to think it was extraordinary that I could master a computer. People wrote in saying: "Oh, how adorable! Isn't it cute when an old person starts to twitter!"
TWEETING FOR BIRDS
Of course what I'm really twittering about - or tweeting, if you prefer, given that I'm raising money for birds - is the environment. The tour for my latest novel, The Year of the Flood, which started in Britain last week, has been described as the greenest book tour ever. Each event has been a stage show, with actors and musicians, but we've used different performers in each town to avoid anyone having to leave unnecessary carbon footprints.
Our programmes are printed on paper approved by the Forest Stewardship Council and our stage props are made from reusable Sainsbury's bags. We serve tap water at our receptions, we research our hotels to ensure they are environmentally friendly and I'm travelling with my own supply of organic shade-grown coffee. I won't touch coffee that's been grown in the sun. It destroys the songbirds.
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DANGEROUS CONDITIONS
I've also gone vegetarian for the duration of the tour, although I am allowed non-avian and non-mammalian bioforms once a week and I still eat eggs. I feel quite good on it. My wardrobe isn't much to boast about, though. I've tried to pack only black clothes, on the basis that you don't need to wash them so often. Early cultures would make sacrifices to ensure a good harvest. If we don't change our ways the sacrifices will be made for us - that's what is happening with the droughts, famines and floods. We're overcrowded and malnourished - those are the same conditions that preceded the Black Death.
But don't call me a pessimist. A pessimist says: "Things are terrible and we can't do anything about it." I say: "Things are terrible and we must do something about it." That makes me a realist.
TREND SPOTTER
The Year of the Flood takes place in the same future as that proposed in my 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. The "waterless flood" has arrived, obliterating nearly all human life on Earth. Is it science fiction or speculative fiction? Call it what you like. I don't give a damn. I just hate making false promises. Science fiction conjures images of flying saucers and monstrous squids and my books don't provide them.
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And I don't go along with the idea that I'm prophetic. It's not as though I write in a trance, being dictated to by aliens. If I have any powers of prescience, it's that I can recognise a trend when it's coming. I wrote six years ago that Americans were digging themselves into a pit of debt. I saw the crisis coming - but I didn't know when it would arrive.
COMFORT OF A HUSBAND
The week has been so hectic I haven't had time to see beyond the present. I've already appeared in Edinburgh, Manchester, London and Cardiff and today I'll be in Bath. I feel as though I'm being shot out of a cannon.
I try to travel light. My husband [the novelist Graeme Gibson] has come with me and he's the only comfort I need. He carries all the baggage and he remembers the hotel key and what time the train's leaving.
He also writes. People sometimes ask me how that works, as though they expect that it doesn't work well. In fact, it does. When we are at home in Toronto, he does all the cooking and makes all the decisions on what we eat. I do all the laundry. I don't know if I am a feminist. You would have to define the term. Do I think all men should be pushed off a cliff? No. Do I think women can't do maths? No. Am I willing to put the sheets into the washing machine? Yes I am.
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I haven't quite turned into a cutesy, cookie-baking granny yet, whatever impression my white hair might give. But after three months of travelling I'll be longing to get home. In Toronto there is no typical day, just an ideal one, ie, a day when I work, eat, garden, work again, then sleep. The book tour will end in Ontario in November, the day before my 70th birthday. For the moment I'm just concentrating on surviving until then.