In her exhaustive Massey Hall lecture and accompanying book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Margaret Atwood shares her innumerable thoughts about currency. She argues, among many other things, that money is linked to memory: “If neither debtor nor creditor can remember it, the debt is effectively extinguished.” Atwood isn’t exactly a forgive-and-forget type of gal, but here’s a helpful reminder in case she decides to call in the IOUs.

Federal finance ministers
Atwood’s been making the taxman smile since the 1970s. As she said about the $7,000 grant she received early on, “If I’d been penny stock, I’d be written up in every financial journal on the planet.”

Local goodniks
The writer gave a rousing speech at a 1999 benefit for the Toronto Dollar, an alternate currency that earmarks 10 per cent of monies spent for community organizations.

Mother Earth
After winning the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, Atwood donated the hefty £20,000 prize to the David Suzuki Foundation and other huggers of trees.

Agoraphobic authors
Atwood added inventor to her lengthy CV with the LongPen, a device that enables writers—including a pre-clink Conrad Black— to sign books in absentia.

Multi-tasking doctors
She earned a lifetime of house calls for offering Vin­cent Lam advice after reading an early draft of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. The ER doc went on to win the 2006 Giller and ink a deal with the Movie Network.

The Grenada dove
In a stranger-than-fiction moment, the edible woman arrived at the 2007 Gillers with her dinner in a gym bag to protest the Four Seasons’ plan for a resort that would threaten the endangered bird.

TBA
Atwood won Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for Letters last June, sending charities scrambling to demonstrate their eco–bona fides in the hopes of getting a piece of the £50,000 purse.

Margaret Atwood holds forth at Convocation Hall on Nov. 1. $23. 31 King’s College Cir., 416-978-8849, www.uofttix.ca.