Margaret Atwood loosens her grip on the Long Pen tonight to share her cherished invention with a fellow Canadian literary giant. The long-distance, real-time, honest-to-goodness pen-and-ink signing device will be lent to fellow author Alice Munro for a joint singing and interview event that Atwood will host from the World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto.

While other authors have dabbled with the invention, Munro is the first literary icon to request a Long Pen signing. Munro, a notorious homebody, will sign copies of her new work from the small Bayfield Village Bookshop near her home in Clinton, Ont.

"She and Margaret are great friends," explains the event coordinator, Bruce Walsh. "Alice was greatly intrigued by it, and so she chose it as the only publicity event this year to promote her new novel."

Munro will be present in all but body, as she video conferences with fans and spectators while autographing copies of The View from Castle Rock via the wizardry of the Long Pen. As is protocol with the device, fans can request customized signings, which Munro will scratch out onto a touch pad from afar. The personalized message will travel across the province as soon as she hits "send."

This might seem a curious experiment for Munro. While Atwood has often meditated on progress and cyberculture in her work, Munro's fiction has generally been more earthy and homegrown.

But University of Toronto professor Magdalene Redekop says that just because Munro tends not to write about cities, doesn't mean she is merely a nostalgic, rural writer.

"Even if other Canadian readers might not, Margaret Atwood would certainly understand that there are countless readers in urban centres all over the world who would pay to hear Munro read or to have her autograph their books," says Redekop.

Unotchit (pronounced "you no touch it") is the Atwood company responsible for the Long Pen. And Unotchit's ambitions, like the Long- Pen's capabilities, are far-reaching.

Its Web site boasts the Long Pen will revolutionize not only author signings but also book promotions. It hints at possibilities of Long Pen interview downloads for video-capable cellphones, iPods and Web sites, making the stylus an "all-in-one marketing device."

Munro, however, does not require this type of pomp for her book release. She's raked in awards from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., and is celebrated by readers and fellow authors alike. Her last publication, Runaway, won the Giller in 2004. So what's the impetus for a small town girl to start using a Frankenpen?

Unotchit's site suggests that some fans find the Long Pen autograph session even more intimate than a traditional sign-and-dash. With the Long Pen and video conferencing, the author and the fan spend more time actually looking at each other, rather than having the author briefly glance up after scribbling away on the cover page.

Bruce Walsh, Unotchit's vice-president of marketing, further suggests that Munro's fans "can be quite aggressive," and the Long Pen will allow her to interact with her throngs of admirers intimately, yet still at a comfortable distance.