By JOHN FREEMAN
Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
10:01 AM CST on Thursday, December 7, 2006

NEW YORK – Most authors are shelved in just one part of the bookstore. Not Margaret Atwood.

Since she made her debut in the '50s, 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, where she has 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 Ms. Atwood is about to take on her most unlikely role yet, one that has just as much peril as creating on the page, or interviewing on the stage: inventor.

Ms. 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 for that matter.

"It's like a very long pen," Ms. 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 Ms. 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."

Today, in Toronto, Ms. Atwood will show off the product with a demonstration. Alice Munro, Ms. Atwood's literary sister and another of Canada's most revered authors, will sign books at a local bookstore from her location in southern Ontario. Ms. Atwood will also interview her via the system.

Ms. Munro's appearance isn'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-based company she founded.

"Canada is a really big place," Ms. 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

Ms. 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."

She is published in 34 countries. Her publishers fly her around the globe to read in superstores.

None of this hullabaloo seems to have cut into her writing time. In the last 19 months she 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 Ms. Atwood herself playing Penelope.

Ms. Atwood admits that this emergence as a literary celebrity is a draw on her time, but it is also a triumph. For some time Ms. Atwood's role in her own work was eclipsed by the theory attached to it.

Beyond 'text'

In the '80s and '90s, Ms. Atwood's work – with its recurring examinations of female identity, violence and the Canadian wilderness – was raked over the coals of deconstructionist theory, which posited that there is no author, just a "text."

But the tide shifted, says Ms. 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, Ms. 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," Ms. 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

Ms. Atwood found this out early as a youngster, and then she found out the hard way as a literary celebrity by examining something one of 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.' "

Ms. 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 Ms. 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.