_

_I just got back from ten days in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, my old hometown, where I gave a travel writing workshop at the San Miguel International Writers’ Conference.

On the first morning, I was invited to a faculty brunch in the courtyard of an old colonial hotel. As I was reaching for a mug, I looked beside me and there stood Margaret Atwood pouring herself a coffee. She was shorter than I thought she’d be, with smooth rosy skin and robin’s egg blue eyes. Surprisingly, this brilliant heroine of mine, a world literary giant whose books I’ve been devouring since high school, appeared to be an actual human being. I figured she wouldn’t mind a fellow Canadian saying hello. Just as I was about to ask her if she thought the coffee was the shade-grown, fair-trade variety, which I knew was important to her to protect the habitat of birds, a bossy woman came to tell us to sit down to eat. 

I wasn’t deterred. A few minutes later, I saw Margaret Atwood again, sitting at a round table surrounded by four other writers, two of whom I knew, sort of. There was one empty seat. I thought to myself, why the hell not? The rest of the tables were quickly filling up with American and Mexican writers. Why shouldn’t I sit with the Canadian writers? I smiled and asked if I could sit down. They said sure.  

Just as we started to talk, the conference organizer announced she wanted all of us to stand up and introduce ourselves, all 50 of us from our separate tables. Margaret groaned and rolled her eyes, giving me a knowing smirk, one that said, Oh please! Half an hour later, when we were deeply into our vegan antojitos and non-shade-grown coffee, we finally began to chat, discussing sex scandals at Canadian publishing houses; how Americans purportedly don’t want to read about their own country from an outsider’s point of view (both myself and a married couple at the table, Merilyn Simonds and Wayne Grady, have written travel memoirs set partly in the U.S.); and Margaret Atwood’s latest book, The Year of the Flood.  

I was especially interested in this topic since I’m reading the book now. The Year of the Flood  is her latest dystopian speculation about a world of survivors in a violent future, complete with genetically engineered humans and animals, a stifling hot planet, and a corporation ruling the world. The seeds of everything she writes about have already been planted today. The book is scary as hell.  Especially fascinating to me is the cult of Gardeners who cling to religion even though the cult’s leader knows that God is just a cluster of neurons in our brain and we’ve evolved to believe in gods as an evolutionary advantage. Since I believe this myself, I wanted to ask her if she thinks it’s an evolutionary advantage because those who believe in gods live longer, having more hope. But instead, all I could do was look at her despondently and say, “Margaret, is there any hope for the world?”  

She sighed. I’d asked her a question I learned that night in her keynote address she gets asked a lot. “We have to have hope,” she answered, “because without it, nothing can get better.” She smiled and shrugged.

The next day, after a lunch of spinach empanadas, I happened to sit next to Margaret Atwood again to hear Naomi Wolfe’s talk on advocacy. (My favourite of Naomi Wolfe’s lines was, “If you’re true to yourself, your writing can’t have clichés.) That night I went to a party in Naomi’s Wolfe’s hotel room and a cute young guy told me I had spinach in my teeth. I hadn’t eaten since the empanadas. I’d had a huge piece of spinach in my teeth while talking to Margaret Atwood. “Margaret Atwood must have noticed! I’m mortified!” I groaned.

I drank another margarita and thought, what the hell.  We’re all going to burn up in a plague anyway. Bottoms up.

_When I’m in other countries, one of the things I like to take note of are store mannequins. I’m always fascinated in how mannequins differ from country to country. In England, the mannequins have attitude. In Ecuador, I noticed the ‘mannequin girls’ look like they’ve had boob jobs. In New York City, the mannequins look like they could use a burrito. My favourite are the mannequins in Mexico. The girl mannequins have REAL butts (or bums, as we say in Canada). It’s refreshing.

In fact, one jeans store near where I lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, drew me inside because of their mannequins. In the store window, a fiesta of Mexican mannequin girls were showing off their butts in specially-made jeans designed to hoist up a woman’s butt using special stitching. (Oprah once featured these jeans on her show.) It was so fun trying on these jeans that I bought a pair. When some of my friends saw them that day, they made me take them to the store. Five grown women giggling in a change room and exclaiming over the transformation of our butts didn’t seem to faze the Mexican sales girls. In the change room next door, local teenagers were trying on the same jeans. Apparently, everyone wants to show off her assets.

_