Planting the Seed: Margaret Atwood

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AUTHOR APPEARANCES CAN be staid affairs, typically involving a short reading and a Q&A session followed by a long line to get just a few words with the writer. Margaret Atwood is upending that expectation on the tour for her latest novel, which incorporates music and drama into her readings. It's not simply an appearance, but a real literary event.

"Year of the Flood," Atwood explains, lends itself to such treatment. It follows a sect called God's Gardeners, who grow crops on abandoned rooftops, have canonized Al Gore and Rachel Carson, and "are trying to join religion, science and nature back together the way they once were," Atwood explains before adding an ominous qualifier: "The results are somewhat mixed."

Atwood calls it her "meanwhile novel." "In the Victorian novel, there is often a chapter that begins with 'meanwhile'," she explains. "You know that things in that chapter are taking place at the same time as those in the chapter you just read."

The events in "Year of the Flood" take place simultaneously with those in her 2003 novel "Oryx & Crake," which means the new book is set in the same ecologically gutted future, where industrial catastrophe has left most public spaces abandoned and corporations in control of the populace. "It's the same world," Atwood says, "and, in fact, some of the same people are in it. There's some overlap."

Each chapter begins with a short hymn celebrating the God's Gardeners feast and saint days. Some are based on real songs; others Atwood made up herself. But it was Los Angeles musician Orville Stoeber who set them all to music. The partner of Atwood's agent, he read the novel in its earliest manuscript and "got stuck into these hymns and starting composing music for them," Atwood says. "He got so thoroughly enmeshed that we told him to keep going, and soon after that we had 14 new tunes."

Inspired by Stoeber's compositions — and by the need to raise funds for real-world environmental organizations — Atwood launched her unique and ambitious book tour "in the greenest way possible," she says. "That means you don't get a show together and then travel it. You get local people in each place to be the singers and the readers. The narrator, which would be me, is the only one who moves from place to place."

As narrator, Atwood is "theming" herself to the book, which involves adopting the God's Gardener diet: no bird or beasts, although she is allowing herself a few crustaceans and gastropods. "Once you start looking, there's a huge organic and vegetarian movement. It's been quite a trip."

Because the cast and stage change from one stop to the next, each performance presents a unique engagement with the novel. "There's a script and there's the music, and that's the tool kit," says Atwood. "We just hand it over to people in each location, and they put it together. Each one has been different."

In the U.K., some were held in cathedrals; others on bare stages. Some featured lively music; others were more somber. At her appearance at Lisner Auditorium next month, Atwood will share the stage with students from George Washington University, who will arrange and perform Stoeber's music. "I haven't known what to expect," she says. "I would arrive on the day, go to the rehearsal, and I wouldn't know what I was walking into."

The performers "have thrown themselves into it, partly I think because it is a fundraiser" for such organizations as the American Bird Conservancy and Farm Forward, says Atwood. "You wouldn't do all this for just any old thing."

» Lisner Auditorium, 730 21st St. NW; Fri., Oct. 30, 8 p.m., $10-$35; 202-994-6800. (Foggy Bottom-GWU)

Written by Express' Stephen M. Deusner
Photo by George Whiteside