Katherine Lanpher - Atwood in the Twittersphere

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Katherine Lanpher is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist, host of "Upstairs at the Square," an interview series that can be found at bn.com/upstairs, host of TIME Financial Toolkit on Time.com, contributing editor to More magazine, and substitute host for “The Takeaway,” a collaboration of WNYC, PRI, the BBC and the New York Times. Springboard Press published her essay collection, Leap Days. Contact: leapdays@gmail.com. Any comments? They go here..... Would love to hear from you.....

March 30, 2010

Atwood in the Twittersphere

nybooks:

Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood, tweeting aboard the Queen Mary 2, August 2009
A long time ago—less than a year ago in fact, but time goes all stretchy in the Twittersphere, just as it does in those folksongs in which the hero spends a night with the Queen of Faerie and then returns to find that a hundred years have passed and all his friends are dead…. Where was I?

Oh yes. A long time ago, back in June of 2009, when we were planning the launch of The Year of the Flood and I was building a Web site for it. Why was I doing this building, rather than the publishers? Well, they had their own sites, and I wanted to do some non-publishing things on mine, such as raise awareness of rare-bird vulnerability and heighten Virtuous Coffee Consumption (Arabica, shade-grown, doesn’t kill birds) and blog the seven-country dramatic-and-musical book tour we were about to do. Anyway, the publishers were at that time hiding under rocks, as it was still the Great Financial Meltdown, not to mention the Horrid Tsunami of Electronic Book Transmission. “That sounds wonderful, Margaret,” they said, with the queasy encouragement shown by those on the shore waving goodbye to someone who’s about to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Oops! I shouldn’t have said that. Which is typical of “social media”: you’re always saying things you shouldn’t have said.

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