It's not the most efficient way to make a point, perhaps. But "efficient" has never been synonymous with "effective." Or so the Writers' Union of Canada believes as it gets set today to assemble a petition it plans to give - eventually - to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The union, founded in 1973, is currently holding its annual general meeting in Vancouver where Canada's most famous author, Margaret Atwood, will deliver the organization's Margaret Laurence Memorial Lecture tonight.

But before she does, Atwood is going to be one of about 150 signatories to a petition urging Harper to reinstate the $12-million cut his government made last year to the "public diplomacy" budget of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Atwood is also providing the technology for the petition, namely her now-famous LongPen writing machine that allows the transmission, in real time via the Internet, of hand-written signatures from one location to another.

In this case, the signatures are going to be "sent," starting around noon PT, via LongPen in Vancouver to another famous Canadian writer, Yann Martel, who will be manning a receiving LongPen device more than 4,000 kilometres away, at BookExpo America in New York. Once all the signatures are received, Martel, winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for fiction for Life of Pi, will give the petition to a courier who will then deliver it to the Prime Minister's Office.

The gambit seems the very definition of "roundabout." But for Martel, "by starting in Vancouver, racing across the land mass of North America, swinging by BookExpo America ... and then heading straight for Ottawa, the petition will be gathering formidable psychic and symbolic energy." Moreover, the hope is that Harper, who's currently writing his own book, on hockey, will realize that "the arts have mass, power and necessity that takes no heed of borders," Martel said.

The WUC petition marks what its incoming chair, Toronto novelist Susan Swan, calls the union's "Year of the Awakening."