On August 18, Fast Forward writer Brendan Harrison interviewed Margaret Atwood for his story on her new book and upcoming Calgary performance-based reading. The following is Harrison's transcript of their phone conversation.

Atwood: Hello?

Harrison: Hello. Could I please speak with Margaret Atwood?

This must be Brendan Harrison.

It certainly is.

Well, imagine that. What is the Fast Forward Weekly?

It’s Calgary’s only alternative weekly, sort of our answer to Toronto’s Now, or the Georgia Straight. I know that you’re very busy, so I will get right into my questions.

Year of the Flood inhabits the same universe as Oryx and Crake and is populated with some of the same characters, though it approaches them from a different angle. What was your reason for revisiting that world?

Two or three reasons. One: Everybody asked me what happens next and we do find out what happens next, and about the next eight hours. (Laughs) Second: In Oryx and Crake the character in it is on the inside, you know, he’s actually a member of the more privileged elite, though he’s at the bottom of the heap of that group. He’s not doing very well within it, but he’s still within the protected place, whereas people in Year of the Flood are on the outside. So they are the real bottom of the heap, and I thought it would be very interesting to look at the same world from that angle. Third: In the Oryx and Crake, there was a group that had already started to, in a way, coalesce in the real world, and that would be the God’s Gardeners. So I took that movement further down the road to see what a somewhat extreme form of it might look like. The trends are with us today.

Absolutely. The mixture of theology and ecology was clear even in Oryx and Crake, where Crake seemed equally dismissive of capital N nature and capital G God.

Well, they started out as the same thing. And a number of major religions still maintain that, like Hinduism. It’s quite clear in the Koran that the animal world is different but equal to the human one. The early forms of Christianity — why were those cathedrals all decorated with vines and leaves, trees, birds, animals, which they were? It’s because those cathedrals and that faith of that religion viewed everything as part of a whole, it was a much more holistic view. Then in the 18^th century, you’ll notice that [in] church architecture away go the pictures, the stained-glass windows, the carvings. It becomes very plain. That coincides with the enlightenment, mechanistic view of the universe, which caused the Victorians so much grief in the realm of faith. So science split off from religion and for a long time, the view of the natural world taken by each was quite different. And now you can see them coming back together.

I don’t know if you know about The Green Bible?

I’m unfamiliar with it.

Well, it just came out after I finished the book. Somebody drew my attention to it, it’s got an introduction by Archbishop Tutu, you can find it online, the “green” parts are green, various people have essays in it and then at the end there’s a section on how can live in a better, greener way. So that split in Christian fundamentalism was already becoming apparent when I wrote Oryx and Crake, and now it’s further advanced. Some of them say, “Why bother? It’s all going to be burnt up and we’ll get a new one,” and others are saying, “No, we were supposed to be taking care of this.”

It’s interesting that you’ve again written a book that is very timely, because a few months ago I picked up Payback as I tried to figure out what was happening with the financial crisis, and that was another extremely timely book, even though you had started it a number of years before the meltdown happened.

That’s right. I had to have it planned a number of years before because it was this Massey Lecture series and you have to let them know, essentially, what you’re talking about so it’s not the same as what other people talked about and so they can get a handle on it. So it’s actually sketched out several years before, and I was planning to be writing it this past spring. That’s when it was scheduled. But then the novel, which you’ve just read, which was finished — what year are we in? — it was finished by January of 2008, the U.S. publisher said, “We can’t publish it in the fall of 2008 because of the American election.” And we said, “How so?” And she said, “Well, no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, it will be an election unlike any other,” and she was right about that. Everybody was glued to their screen, watching the election around the time we originally would have been publishing this book. So we wouldn’t have gotten any air time with it. So I quickly had to write Payback right about then at a very fast clip. It then came out in the fall of 2008 just as the financial meltdown happened, and everybody then said, clairvoyant.

But there’s something more here than just lucky timing. There’s something deeper that you’re tapping into…

Well, I follow. It is true, you know, I do read the ads on the subway, I do look at ads in newspapers, I look at all of those things, having been an old, ancient Marshall McLuhan person. I’m just very conscious of not just the content but the surround of the content that’s going on in various forms of publication. And you can watch things moving from back of the paper to front of the paper or from minor topic of conversation to major topic of conversation. You can see that happening and I’m interested in those things when they’re minor.

To go back a little bit, you mentioned that you had to finish Payback in a hurry once you finished this book in January ’08. I remember when Oryx and Crake came out, reading an essay where you said that book came to you very quickly, almost fully-formed. With Year of the Flood, did that come at the same time or did it come out of writing that story?

No, it came later. Partly because people said “What happens next?” and partly because I wanted to explore this other part of that world. And partly because I wanted to see what a group trying to live, as it were, a dedicated life, what form that would take, what form the religion and the theology would take, who the saints would be. That kind of list of people exists already, they just don’t call them saints.

That’s interesting that you mention that, because I noticed on your website that you’ve got for Year of the Flood that people can submit their own candidates for sainthood.

You can get a scroll to say you have somebody that you feel has been labouring unnoticed and you just want to acknowledge them. You can get it online, it’s a part of the fundraising effort of the website, and you can present them with their own little scroll of sainthood. The Gardeners have a lot of saints that aren’t in the book.

How did you determine who those saints would be in the book? Was that part of your research?

Yes. If you go online, which is, in fact, an interesting research tool, and put in a country and then put “environmentalist,” you’ll find out some interesting things.

Really? That is interesting.

So I knew about some of them already and others I found and they led me to other ones and I know about some of them through the work in that field that we have done over the years.

The work with the Rare Bird Club?

OK. If you go onto the website of BirdLife International and then search for Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson, you will find out that we are honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International.

And what does that entail?

It entails a lot of work! (Laughs)

Really? Honorary sounds so…

So honorary?

Yes!

No, honorary means you don’t get paid. I mean part of why I’m doing the book launch in this way is that they said, “Well, how can we get our message across to people who don’t know who we are?” and I said “through the arts,” which doesn’t mean dressing up like big birds … So one of the puzzles, as it were, of how do you construct a general public event that will involve people who are in this world already. And here you are asking me about it.

Already raising awareness... Let’s talk a little bit more about the way that you are doing the book launch, because it is unusual to say the least.

Again, I call it unprecedented and unrepeatable, because I’ve never done anything like it before and I’m unlikely to do anything like it again. And the reason for that is the nature of the book. I’m unlikely to write another book that’s got 14 hymns in it, that has such a large quasi-musical component. And the music to the hymns got composed in the way that you can see on the website when you hit “music.” You can find the composer, you can find the story of how he came to do it. Essentially, he’s the partner of my North American agent and he got stuck into the hymns when she was reading the manuscript, and he started composing them. So he just carried on, and it eventually turned into a CD… we also had three voices in the novel, so you could have three people reading those three voices and you could have a group reading some of the hymns. So we took parts of the novel and strung them into a script, with the hymns as interludes. But you couldn’t do that with every book, because it doesn’t have those components.

No, and it’s not something you’d want to repeat.

You can’t! (Laughs) You actually can’t. You cannot repeat yourself.

When Oryx and Crake came out, you wrote that the experiments of science must be repeatable, and those of literature must never be. Was it difficult in anyway for you to ensure that this book was sufficiently different from Oryx and Crake?

No, it wasn’t difficult at all, because you have quite different people. Number one, Jimmy’s a man and, two, of the narrative voices in this [book only one is] female. That’s going to give you a different take on it right there. And the structure of this book is quite different and the life experience of the people is very different. It’s completely not the kind of life that Jimmy had.

No, no. Absolutely. I’m sorry, I’m bouncing around here a bit. Although these books are not science fiction, they are certainly fictions informed by science.

Yeah.

What kind of research do you do? Do you get to the point where you’re talking to scientists about what they’re doing?

No, you don’t — you could do that, but it’s not a scientific paper. So I read things like Scientific American, New Scientist, Discover. Seed is a good one, it’s biology largely. There’s some things from the National Geo that are of interest… If you’re looking for something, you’re on a kind of hunt and one thing leads you to another. But other things are just luck, you happen to be reading along and because you are sensitized to certain kinds of things, you pick up on them. You notice them in a way that you wouldn’t unless you were interested in those things. That just how I’ll pick up a copy of Discover and if it’s an article about outer space I probably won’t read it, because that’s not my interest. But if it’s an article about advances in neurological understanding of the human brain, I will read it.

In terms of you interest in these subjects, is that something that you’ve always had?

It’s another way of looking at people. Novelists look at them from the point of what used to be called character, and probably still should be called character. Who is this person? How are they likely to react? What do they do next? How do they act in a certain situation? How do they talk? Who are their best friends? What do they wear? All of those sorts of things that you need to know about a character.

And another way of looking at people is what do we know about them through repeatable experiments? What are our theories? What do we think? Why do we think the way we think? What do we think our history on Earth has been? That’s pretty fascinating. What were we doing a hundred thousand years ago?

Both science and fiction end up asking the why question?

They’re all asking, “How does it work?” They’re all asking, “Where did we come from?” “What are we doing here?” “Where are we going?” Those three essential questions. Science, art and religion ask the same set of questions. They approach them in different ways, but they are essentially, “Who are we?” Sometimes they’re “How do we get out of this mess?” but that has to do with “Who are we?”

That reminds me of a passage in the book where you write, “As soon as there is a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back until you get to the I don’t know.”

Yes well, that’s what — I don’t know how much time you spend with small children, but they all get to that stage where they say, “Where did I come from? What about where did I come from before that? What about before that? Well where did you come from? Well what about before that?” And it all goes back to that point where you have to say, “I don’t know.”

It’s interesting that in Oryx and Crake, when Jimmy went away, the Crakers started answering those questions themselves.

It was already starting. Yeah. “Crake made you” is not going to hold them for long. Well why did he?

Do you then hold that there is some kind of a God gene, that we are hard-wired for belief?

Well, Mr. Denis Dutton, who wrote The Art Instinct, that’s his theory — that art is an evolved adaptation, and particularly the narrative arts. That people are storytellers, we’re hard-wired to do so. And therefore, it was something that evolved during a very, very long time in the Pleistocene, and it gave us an adaptive edge. It gave us an edge to be storytellers, which is why people so strongly are, and why it’s something that comes out in young children very, very early. That’s his theory. And the religion part he would see as a subset of that, as part of that narrative, the built-in narrative thing. It’s the thing that says, “Let there be light” and the scientific theory says “the Big Bang,” but essentially it’s the same thing. One supposes an agent and the other one doesn’t.

One of the striking scenes in the book was when Toby was looking for something, anything, to protect herself, even a shovel, for she understood that every tool is a weapon if it’s held right. This idea of science being a tool that is also a weapon, is that something you were consciously exploring?

You know, it’s not rocket science. And even rocket science is like that. (Laughs) It could be a tool or it could be a weapon. So we know — I mean, if you read a lot of murder mysteries, you know that the murder weapon can be essentially anything. Some of my favourites, old classic ones, were murder by icicle. There’s one of which, a quite famous one, in which the woman hits the guy over the head with a frozen leg of lamb and then pops it in the oven, and when the police came around, she says “I just don’t know what happened and I’ve been cooking this nice lamb, would you like some?” So any implement that’s big enough or pointed enough or heavy enough or poisonous enough, can be used that way. It’s a question of who’s doing the using and what for. You could probably— I’m sitting looking at the desk here and I see a glue stick, some scotch tape, a stapler, some scissors, a pencil, and I think, OK, which one of these could you actually use? I don’t think the scotch tape would be really useful, but you could tape somebody shut if you had enough scotch tape, couldn’t you? I’m not sure what you could do with the glue stick or the stapler. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read one in which someone was stapled to death. (Laughs) But you never know.

Sometimes with these things it seems utterly implausible until you read about it in the newspaper.

Then you think, “My heavens! Who ever would have thought of that?”

You mentioned earlier that you had worked in marketing and had an interest in—

Market research.

Market research, I’m sorry. Jimmy also works in marketing and plays a game with himself whereby he tries to squeeze in as many fake words as he can.

I think a lot of those words are made up, especially on cosmetics. You could almost make them up yourself. You don’t know what they refer to. They say “patent pending” or “trademarked” or something. But you don’t know actually what they refer to. But it sounds good, and it’s very comforting to read.

Right. There’s obviously a science behind it because why else would they use those words…

Why is it obvious? (Laughs) It’s not obvious. (Laughs) Yeah. Sometimes they’re just making it up, I hate to really spring this on you.

On the topic of marketing, I wanted to ask you about the website for The Year of the Flood. Is the web marketing something that you are very involved in?

Did I help build the site? Yes, absolutely. I built the site, it’s essentially— it’s not a publisher website, it’s the novel website that I built. And one of the reasons I did it that way was so I could put all the publishers on it.

Have other marketing websites been strictly the publishers putting them online?

There have been ones like that, and you can find them, but it will only have that publisher’s book on it. For instance, we’re going to have a portal for the German publisher, they’re just doing their translation now, and they have quite a different cover and it will all be German. But I couldn’t do that with a publisher-controlled website. They would only want their own version up there. I couldn’t have done music downloads, I couldn’t have done any of these other things on it. Now mind you, it’s not cheap.

And presumably, if it’s not the publisher’s site, they’re not the ones footing the bill?

No, they’re not.

That’s interesting. Is this important to you to try to attract new readers or…

Well, we’re going to find out, because I’ve never done it before. But it’s certainly part of our conservation fundraising and awareness-raising launch. I’m doing the whole launch that way, really.

I thought I read something a month or so ago about you were going to be launching the book in three cities at once?

Hmmm… I’m doing one coast-to-coast signing.

One coast-to-coast signing?

Yeah. With the LongPen, so it’s Halifax and Vancouver from Toronto. The LongPen signing, it’s on the 27^th of September as part of the Word on the Street, which is now a coast-to-coast event.

Can you tell me a bit about the LongPen?

Well, we originally did it as an aid to publishers and bookstores. But they didn’t believe us when we said what’s happened in the music business is going to happen to you in some other form, so you better start thinking about other ways of promoting books, other than the 30-city author tour. And lo and behold, here comes the recession, here comes various other things that have affected them. There is one new technology that ought to help them when it gets up and running, and that’s print on demand. And that ought to help solve warehousing, transportation of big numbers of books, over-printing, under-printing, remainders, all of those things that have been so difficult for them to predict or control. They now have something called the Espresso machine that is called that because you order the book and have an espresso, and by the time you’ve had it, there’s the book.

So that technology is in existence now?

Yes, it is. So that should help. But other things that people worry about are things like the Kindle, the Google Books Library… Amazon and the Kindle don’t cause publishers to lose a lot of money but it’s bad for bookstores. What causes publishers to lose a lot of money is the loss of their back list. So if you’re a student and you have to do an essay on Pride and Prejudice, once upon a time, you would have gone and got a [copy of] Pride and Prejudice. You might have got it secondhand or you might have got a paperback. But now you might go online and snip and clip. And if you’re really naughty, you might go online to somebody who will write your essay for you, pay them forty bucks. It’s happening.

Hey, these are tough economic times. If somebody dangled enough money in front of me, I could probably crank out an essay for them.

Well you’d have to make it — an ordinarily B student, you would have to be smart enough to write a B paper.

I have some experience writing B and C papers, let me tell you.

(Laughs) Then you’re perfect for the job. You should put yourself up on Craigslist: Want a B paper? I’m your guy.

To bounce back, I just wanted to talk about the connections between Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood and Payback. Though not as directly related there’s a certain similarity.

I think it’s called balance, off-balance. It’s called osmosis. So the law of osmosis, as you know, is if you put a super saturated solution on one side of a permeable membrane and water on the other, the molecules from one side will go over to the other side until both are the same.

This is why we see the idea of short-term gain exchanged for long term pain appearing in your work?

I think it’s more like, in the natural world, once it’s all gone, there isn’t any more. I don’t know why people find that so hard to understand. Once it’s all gone, there isn’t any more.

Do you ever feel like you’re shouting into a void?

Only every day. (Laughs) No, you’re not shouting into a void, it’s not a void. It’s that people in power don’t know what to do. I really think they just don’t. I think they’re at their wit’s end. So instead of trying to think of something that might actually be useful, they try to think of how to get elected next.

It’s interesting that you mention that, because when I told a friend who works in Calgary’s theatre community that I was interviewing you, he told me I had to read a letter to the editor you wrote about the Conservative government’s cuts to the arts and how Harper’s conception of ordinary being is so out of sync with what ordinary actually is.

Also out of touch with human nature. And you think, all right, where did you get this idea? It’s true that some people are colour blind and others are tone deaf. But those are the exceptions. Most of us are hard-wired for music, they know that. Little babies respond to it. And it’s cross-cultural and there’s not a culture without it. We are hardwired for narrative skills. We all tell stories; they may be stories about what happened at the office, they may be stories about Puff the Magic Dragon, they may be jokes — those are miniature stories — but we all tell them, except people with certain neurological conditions who don’t understand them. The arts are built in. And they can take many forms, but it’s there. It’s part of human nature.

What are you working on currently? I read that there was a libretto based on Pauline Johnson?

Yes, we are working on that. And we have a composer composing it and we’re about at the point where we have to go back and see how long or short it should be, so we’re in the tuning part of it now. It’s a Vancouver City Opera project.

Is this your first foray into this type of writing or have you done others?

Have I done others? Well, I did write one for the Canadian Opera Company, but that never actually happened, partly because Richard Bradshaw died and other things happened too. But I could be silly and say that I wrote one in high school.

Really?

Yes. Well, it was a joke. It was a home economics opera.

(Awkward silence) Is the process for writing a libretto the same as for writing anything else?

No, not at all. A libretto is just a coat hanger and what gets hung on it is the music and the acting and the characters and the visuals and all of those things that go into making an opera, which is a very pan-aesthetic experience. It’s got narrative, it’s got music, it’s got drama, it’s got characters, it’s got emotions. When they work, they’re just astonishing, they take your hair right off your head. And when they don’t work, they’re like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd doing the Ring Cycle. So it is one of those forms that’s very risky, like watching somebody walk a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I don’t know whether you’ve seen The Magic Flute?

I can’t say that I have.

You sit on the edge of you chair until the Queen of the Night makes her top note, because you just don’t know whether she’s going to be able to do it or not. So in a way, it’s like watching an athletic performance, you know, are they going to fall off, fall down, or are they going to hit the bar. It’s in real time and the possibility for not making it is pretty dramatic.

At this point in your career, why take a risk of trying something that could fail?

Well, it’s not me taking the risk, it’s the singer. It’s the singers who are like athletic performers you don’t know whether they’re going to make it or not.

But presumably there are a lot more variables out of your control when writing a collaborative piece than there are when you sit down to write a book.

A lot. There are a lot. But unless the singing is any good it’s not going to work. So it’s really dependent on the singing, that’s what makes it go. And when that’s well done, it can be an astonishing experience. When it’s badly done, you just feel awful.

I don’t have a whole lot of time left, and there were some Year of the Flood questions that I wanted to get back to. You seem to delight in giving the various corporations and their patented products truly bizarre names.

You know, that happens all the time in real life, because names get trademarked. And then that means that they get used up. And people are forced into inventing more and more different names.

And often not very good names.

Well sometimes they’re not, and sometimes you can tell that this is an act of desperation, but the more the namespace gets, as it were, filled up, the more companies are driven to inventing other things. I had to think of a name for—I incorporated in the mid-seventies, I had to think of a name for my company that holds my licenses and copyrights. I wanted to call it the Acme Paper Products. And you’d be surprised at the numbers of names that are taken when you do searches on them. Or in Oryx and Crake, there’s a live site called “Nitey Nite” where you can watch assisted suicides, and then I did a name search, and there already as a “Nitey Nite.” It was children’s sleepwear. So I had to change the spelling, because you didn’t want even a fictional assisted suicide site to be the same as a children’s sleepwear company. You wouldn’t want it, they wouldn’t want it, it would just be pretty strange bad taste.

Do you ever consider that you have yourself become a highly recognized brand name that conveys…

Well, it conveys something, but nobody’s entirely sure what that is. (Laughs) I think you would probably find different answers in different people. It’s not like, say pick your favorite beer.

Alexander Keith’s.

OK. So everybody kind of knows what an Alexander Keith’s is. The product is the same in every bottle, or it should be, or if it isn’t, there’s something really wrong. But that’s not the same as a writer because you never know. You never know what’s going to come out next unless they’re a genre writer and they write the same book over and over, in which case you’re going for a dependable thing, you know? A Nancy Drew mystery — you kind of know what’s going to be in it.

What is coming out next? Do you have something on the go?

I have something in the thought process, but since I actually don’t predict the future I can’t predict that I’m going to write it or finish it.

The only other topic I wanted to get into before I let you go is your work with PEN International. How does that seep its way into your work?

Oh, I did that some time ago, in the eighties. We set up PEN Canada and I did it for two years with a co-president called Eugene Benson. Then Timothy Findley did it for a year, then Graeme Gibson did it for two years, and what we were doing was building an organization as part of a larger international organization and trying to make an effective Canadian one. And it has become really quite on-going and has helped a number of writers in other countries who have been imprisoned unjustly for having opinions in writing and has helped get them out. And in some cases, it has failed to get them out.

Tell me about your bowing out of the Dubai festival.

That was very strange…

Did that situation make you feel uncomfortable?

Well the situation was simply the information that had been printed about what had gone on was wrong. So you can follow that whole thing. My article on it was published in the Guardian. And essentially, somebody said that they had been banned from the festival and that their book had been prohibited. Well, in point of fact, they’d never been invited to the festival and their book wasn’t published yet. So it was a very inaccurate use of terms. You and I think we know what they mean, we think we know what it means when it says banned. Usually it means that you have been disinvited. That you were supposed to be there and then you’ve been uninvited and told you can’t come. Isn’t that what you would take it to mean?

That is the general usage that I’m familiar with.

Yeah. So it doesn’t mean not invited in the first place. If it means not invited in the first place, I’ve been banned from a lot of places. (Laughs)

Most of the best parties in Calgary ban me on a weekly basis…

…because you’re not invited. (Laughs) There you are. But if you did turn up, they probably wouldn’t say you can’t come in.

That’s true.

And being censored usually means you can’t get a copy. You know, you can’t find one anywhere in the country. So you might not be able to find one anywhere in the country, but it might be because they haven’t been printed yet. So I then had to go on the sleuth trail of that and kind of trace it back to its source, find out how all of that had come about and who had got it wrong in the first place, and delve into all of it. It took me a lot of time. And then I wrote a piece saying, OK, here is the real story as I understand it. And I did the event by remote video in the middle of the night from downtown Toronto. I took the current president of PEN Canada, who’s from Afghanistan originally and I took a columnist from the Toronto Star with me to be present at the panel on censorship happening in Dubai under the wing of PEN. They were able to put together a panel on that and we participated long-distance because it was far too late to reschedule a trip. I couldn’t have gotten there.

Was it just a case of somebody manipulating the media?

(Sighs) You know, I don’t even like to jump to those kinds of conclusions. It was a— I don’t know what it was. It was not what you and I would mean by banned. The festival had looked at her manuscript, it was a first novel, and they said, “We don’t think this is suitable for us.” And that happens at many festivals — it happens at every festival. “Suitable for us, we think. Yes, this might fit our audience.” “No, this would not.” We’re constantly making those selections. And that seems to have been what happened. And that had happened back in September, and this story didn’t break until February, right before the festival. And then you think, well, if it was a case for so much outrage, why didn’t that happen back in September? And why did the publisher of the book and the festival organizers go out and have a jolly lunch in October, which they did, at which this matter was never discussed.

Curious.

A curious thing. Put me on the spot, dealt with it, took me a lot of time. Annoyed, really, that we all had to go through it. But it means that if anybody says banned/censored, you have to examine it. You know, I had it on the authority of some pretty reputable newspapers that this was what was going on.

I’m as guilty as anyone of believing what I read in the newspaper.

And we shouldn’t, because we know better, but in this case, you think they would have done their homework. And when I followed up with them, I think they had kind of tried to do their homework, but hadn’t gotten very far with it. I think part of the problem was that the festival organizers had never done a festival before. And when people tried to follow-up the story they somehow didn’t know what question was being asked. It took me a while to find out. I said, “So, in fact, she was never invited?” They said, “That’s right.” It took me a while to get to that point.

On the topic of festivals, just to wrap things up here, you will be coming through Calgary in conjunction with our WordFest?

Yes, September 29^th.

So this is going to be the full deal experience?

This is the full schmeer.

What can people expect?

I don’t know, because each event’s going to be different. So what you need to do is go to the Calgary Writers Festival and say, “Who’s reading the parts and who’s singing? How are you going to stage it?” It’s in Knox United Church, and I’m going from place to place, but each event will be unique in that it will be local actors, local singers, local directors. The places are putting the events together themselves.

Well, I will be sure to touch base with them to see what they’ve got in store for us.

If you go on the website and push the tour you can go down the list of events. And the first country to do it will be the UK, and they’re doing eight and those eight are almost sold out already.

I’m sure it will be a hot ticket. The space will be perfect for the reading. A great place for what I think is going to happen.

Well, we’ll find out what’s going to happen. We don’t quite know. It’ll be a surprise.

I like surprises.

I like surprises sometimes.

Thanks so much for your time.