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KAREN BARTA: Good morning. I'm Karen Barta with news from Minnesota Public Radio. Saint Paul Mayor Norm Coleman and Governor Carlson meet with National Hockey League officials in New York this afternoon. Carlson also will meet with officials at Standard and Poor's and ask them to restore a triple-A bond rating to Minnesota State government.

The House Education Committee will discuss education finance today. The committee is considering a bill that would restore about $337 million in proposed cuts to K through 12 education this fall. A new report from the Minnesota Council on foundations says corporate and foundation philanthropy in Minnesota ceased its double digit growth rate and remained flat in the early 1990s.

Grants to social service organizations increased, but giving to arts and culture groups declined. Council President Jackie Reese predicts welfare reform will fuel demand for social services and grants to fund them. But she predicts arts funding will not decline dramatically in Minnesota.

JACKIE REESE: I think that the arts will always be supported in this community because there's a sense that we need the arts to contribute to the spirit and the life of a community to offset any of the downside.

KAREN BARTA: Reese predicts future studies will show increased giving, reflecting strength in the economy and securities markets. The state forecast partly cloudy highs, ranging from the single digits in the West to the teens in the Northeast. And for the Twin cities, mostly sunny with the high around 10 degrees. Sunny skies around the region this hour. Rochester reporting a temperature of three below. It's 9 below in Duluth. And in the Twin cities, it's sunny. The wind chill is minus 22, and it's 3 below. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Barta.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's 10:06 o'clock. You're listening to midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Paula Schroeder. Minnesota Public Radio operates in association with the following institutions-- Saint John's Abbey and University in Collegeville, Concordia College, Moorhead, Luther College in Decorah, the College of Saint Scholastica in Duluth, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, the College of Saint Benedict in Saint Joseph, and Bethany Lutheran College of Mankato.

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Tom Webber was running a public health program to reduce the high rate of infant mortality in Northeastern Minnesota when Planned Parenthood offered him a job. Webber took the job and has been with the organization he now directs for 25 years. Today on our Voices of Minnesota interview, we hear Webber talk about his work with women's reproductive health issues.

Webber grew up in Michigan and thought he was headed for medical school. He talked with Mary Stucky about the work that led him to his job as director of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, South Dakota.

TOM WEBER: I had spent most of my career in public agencies, official health departments. I've worked with health departments in Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota before coming to Planned Parenthood. I was involved in Northern Minnesota in a county health department, setting up a division of health education. And as a part of that activity, got involved in the establishment of a family planning service in Northeast Minnesota.

It was at a time when the incidence of infant death was exceptionally high, unacceptably high in Northeast Minnesota. And the Department that I worked with felt that if we could establish, particularly for low income individuals, a mechanism of spacing, childhood spacing, spacing of pregnancies, that we might be able to lower the incidence of infant mortality.

As a result of that work, my wife and I were having dinner one night in our home and the telephone rang, and it was a representative of Planned Parenthood. And they were looking for someone-- this was in 1971, to help them develop a Rural Minnesota Family Planning program, and they asked me if I would be interested in leaving the health department and coming to work for Planned Parenthood in regard.

It was an activity that we had not-- my wife and I had not planned to undertake, but we thought, well, it's worth a try, and we felt that it would be good to spend a period of time in the private sector as opposed to government agencies. I fully intended to go back into government service. I fully saw that's where I would spend the bulk of my career. And for the last 25 years, I still been looking for that perfect job, and I think I have it where I am.

MARY STUCKY: What was the situation when you started working for Planned Parenthood? Was information nonreproduction as widely available as it is now?

TOM WEBER: Well, no, it wasn't. In fact, the public-private partnership that does exist in most states, certainly Minnesota today, did not exist at that time. In 1971, the federal government for the first time had passed a congressional ACT signed in December of 1970 by then President Richard Nixon, the National Family Planning Program Act, Title X of the Public Health Services Act.

This was the first time that the Congress committed designated funds to the field of family planning. And the intention of this federal program was to bring not only information, knowledge, education to people about family planning, but also to establish clinical services for low income individuals throughout America. It was a revolutionary act of its time.

At that time, in Minnesota, the view of many government leaders was, this is a pot of money we don't want. It's too controversial. It'll never be accepted. And everybody knows people in rural Minnesota don't want anything to do with family planning. That's a no, no. That's a bad. It's connected with sex.

In fact, when the federal government came to Minnesota and asked the state health department to take on administration of this new source of money, the state health department refused to do it. Said, we don't want anything to do with that program. We don't want anything to do with the money.

And it was only as an alternative did the federal government turn to Planned Parenthood to say, well, since your state has refused this money, would you consider accepting it and developing a system of family planning clinics throughout the state? Well, we were young and stupid at the time. We said, absolutely, we'll do that. We didn't realize that the state government had already determined it couldn't be done. Of course, it could be done. Of course, the services were accepted, and the system has grown immeasurably ever since.

So I think at the time of my taking the position with Planned Parenthood, access to reproductive health care, support of reproductive health care, the acknowledgment that particularly women had every right to make these decisions about reproduction if, when, or not at all was quite different than it is today, controversial nonetheless then as it is now, and somewhat unfortunately controversial as it was the beginning of the century. And as we end the century, many of the controversies, sadly, remain.

MARY STUCKY: So you started your work before Roe versus Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that granted the legal right to abortion. Do you have any recollections of the time both before and after that decision?

TOM WEBER: Well, I certainly do. And the recollections before are mostly sad. Planned Parenthood prior to Roe versus Wade in January of 1973, when patients requested our help, requested information, requested referral to places where pregnancies could be terminated, our capacity to help meet patient requests was very limited.

In fact, our staff were so constrained both by federal and state law that we could not write down on a piece of paper information that we knew existed. I remember our counselors and our nurses sitting with a pad of paper on their desk and giving a pencil to patients and saying, if you wish to write this down, you can. And telling patients what other states they could travel to.

Some states-- New York, Colorado, Washington State had, in fact, by state law, made abortion legal prior to Roe versus Wade, or to what countries outside of America they could travel to terminate a pregnancy. Abortion did not get invented with Roe versus Wade, but the course of pregnancy termination prior to that time was mostly for the affluent, and it was extraordinarily difficult.

After Roe versus Wade, I remember the day the Supreme Court handed down its decision in January of 1973, and I remember the euphoria in our staff that at last the ropes would be released from our wrists. We could print material. We could make information available.

I remember the concern at the time that, oh my goodness, somehow there will be a tremendous increase in abortion. I remember the proclamations of many in the so-called pro-choice/pro-life community saying, well, there would be an epidemic of abortion. That, of course, did not happen.

What did happen was abortion became a safe medical procedure, became a medical procedure that was available to women regardless of their economic status, became a procedure that was no longer fraught with the indignities of illegal care, became a procedure that entered, we thought at the time-- I think we feel differently now, the mainstream of medical care of women's health care, began to lessen the incidence of admissions for incomplete and botched abortions, which in many parts of America was the number one cause of hospitalization for women of reproductive age.

There was a tremendous difference before and after Roe versus Wade. It is of great concern that the controversies associated with abortion even today continue. And that the public discourse is so fraught with far more heat than light, so fraught with rhetoric, that I think the work in terms of American understanding of this very fundamental health service, the work before us still remains to be accomplished.

MARY STUCKY: You say it did not enter the mainstream of medical practice, how so?

TOM WEBER: We thought that it would. We thought Roe versus Wade largely would settle the availability of abortion care. It didn't, and it hasn't. In fact, in Minnesota today, there are perhaps fewer than a dozen physicians in the entire state who provide abortion care. There are less than half a dozen facilities, agencies that have abortion programs available for women.

And with a single exception, a not for profit clinic in Duluth, all of those facilities are in the Metropolitan area. Of Minnesota's 87 counties, perhaps 84 are without an in-County provider of abortion care. Women's geographic access to abortion in our state is extraordinarily limited.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Tom Weber is the director of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota and South Dakota. He's talking with Mary Stucky as part of our Voices of Minnesota interview series here on midmorning. We'll continue with that interview in just a moment. And then at 10:30, we will hear from Margaret Atwood, who is out with a new book called Alias Grace.

It's a marvelous story about-- true story, actually, about a young girl convicted of murder, but she treats it as historical fiction. Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by 3M who generously matches more than 900 employee contributions to Minnesota Public Radio.

It's 10:17 o'clock, and temperatures still well below zero across much of the state. Winds have died down though, so the windchills are not quite as bad as they were over the weekend. Let's return now to Mary Stucky's conversation with Tom Weber.

MARY STUCKY: How is the abortion debate being changed by technology and chemistry? For instance, RU-486, the so-called abortion pill.

TOM WEBER: Mifepristone, which is the correct name for RU-486, continues to remain unavailable to American women. The much touted FDA approval of mifepristone was a tentative approval pending submission of additional data. And as you know that I don't believe a manufacturer for mifepristone has yet been found in the United States.

There has been some concern that the population council, which holds the patent rights to mifepristone in America, has perhaps entered into a business relationship that it wishes it had not done with the particular company that it hoped could develop that product for American women.

So while that means of a medical abortion is available to European women and has been available for some years, continues to largely remain unavailable. Planned Parenthood and our particular Planned Parenthood agency is one of a number of centers in the country doing clinical field trials right now on yet another drug, methotrexate, which we believe will be a very safe and a very effective means of medical abortion. And it's a drug that's already licensed and already approved by the FDA. And this would be a new use for an existing drug, a drug that's been around 40 years in this country.

So I do think as technology moves forward, we eventually will have a means of medical abortion that will be even more private than surgical abortion is. It will be somewhat more broadly available to American women than surgical abortion, certainly geographically more broadly available.

Whether, in fact, that will overhaul the abortion delivery system as it currently exists, I don't think so. In Europe, for example, where medical abortion has been available for several years, about 20% to 25% of all pregnancies that are terminated are terminated through medical as compared to surgical means.

A medical abortion-- two words that I would not. Use to associate with medical abortion are easy and comfortable. I would not use either term to describe a medical abortion. A medical abortion produces a miscarriage. It does that through medical and chemical means. I think any woman who has experienced a miscarriage-- and many women have, close to half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, would not describe that as easy or comfortable.

For some women, the capacity to manage an abortion themselves medically is very important. And for those women, medical abortion is going to be a very strong and very private alternative. But I don't think it will obviate the necessity of surgical abortion, and I don't think it will markedly affect one way or another the incidence of abortion.

What I do think it will do will be forever to change the political realities of what has been a very nasty debate for 23 years now. It virtually says, we are not going to turn the clock back. And Roe versus Wade notwithstanding, we're not going back to the days of the back alley abortionist.

MARY STUCKY: If these procedures, these so-called medical abortions, become widespread, how will that change your organization?

TOM WEBER: Well, we currently operate 24 clinics in two states. Of the 24, only two clinics provide abortion care, one in Minnesota in Saint Paul and one in South Dakota in Sioux Falls. So I think it wouldn't have-- if medical abortion became broadly available, wouldn't particularly have an enormous operational effect upon our existing clinics.

In fact, it would make us feel a little less pressured, particularly in states like South Dakota, to be the only provider of abortion care, which is what we are in that state. If we could integrate abortion care more routinely into obstetric and gynecologists practice, I think that would be preferable. That's what we thought would happen 23 years ago, and it has yet to be accomplished.

MARY STUCKY: Let's talk about sex education for young people. Is the right kind of information being given out right now?

TOM WEBER: Well, it is. And in fact, I think we've taken steps backwards. When my wife and I moved to Minnesota, Minnesota had some extraordinarily wonderful cutting edge programs in family life and sex education, some as far North as the Iron Range. And those programs pretty much got unwound in the latter part of the '60s, the early part of the '70s when some in society thought they were terrible, terrible things, these family life programs. I mean, they were anti-God and maybe communist plots, but certainly pink if not red and bad things and put great pressures on local school boards.

I think that the leadership that the state agencies have shown in terms of development of a family life and human sexuality curriculum is slim to nonexistent, at least in this state. I think the pressure that has been put upon local school boards for some has become intolerable. I think the attempt by the right wing-- and this has been true in some of Minnesota's local school board elections, to take over local school boards has really had the effect of moving us backwards in terms of meaningful educational settings and experiences for our kids.

That's a very bad thing to do to our kids. It is really stupid to say that, well, if we can keep our kids semi ignorant or give them only a very little bit of information or whatever information we give them we promise will be wrong, will help our kids grow up and make good decisions. That's some of the dumbest logic I've ever heard.

As a former educator and a former teacher myself, I think we have not served future generations of our kids well by making them tools in political crusades, and that is what I think has happened at local school board districts.

MARY STUCKY: Do you think there should be more talk with young people about abstinence?

TOM WEBER: Well, I do. I think abstinence is a pretty good thing. And I think most people who are or have been parents think probably abstinence is pretty good thing, particularly as it pertains to their kids. The realities is that most young people probably won't come to mom and dad and say, I think tonight's the night. What have you got to tell me about that?

And I think what parents need to be able to provide in a home setting and what our educators need to provide an educational setting is a milieu, an atmosphere where you are safe to question, safe to raise sensitive matters where you know your questions, your ambivalence is-- because kids don't enter into this without a great deal of ambivalence and fear, will be treated with respect.

I hope that my wife and I were able to do that for our daughters, I must say-- and both of them are young marrieds right now, neither one of our daughters, to my knowledge, ever came to me or their mom and said, yeah, I think tonight's going to be my first night. And I must say, we're pretty open, pretty close family.

I suspect that's true of most parents. I do think abstinence is a good thing, but I think knowledge and information and support and love are also good things. And they don't have to be conflicting.

MARY STUCKY: Does sex education have any measurable impact, measurable impact, on young people's behavior?

TOM WEBER: Yes, it does. In fact, some work that came out of the state of Iowa, perhaps now 15, 18 years ago, showed that when school districts have comprehensive family life components and students receive throughout a school setting, not in a particular grade or a particular class, good sex education programs, some things don't happen and some do. What doesn't happen is, kids somehow do not get less sexually active.

They don't get less sexually active. And they don't necessarily delay for the years that many parents wish they would that first sexual encounter. Those things don't happen, but some things do happen. They get pregnant less often. They have fewer sexual partners. They have fewer abortions, and they don't get as infected with sexually transmitted diseases.

Well, now, I think those are pretty good things about family life and sex education programs. If we look at experiences in Scandinavian countries, which have quite different social attitudes about sex and male and female relationships than Americans do, kids in Scandinavian countries don't have as many abortions. They don't get pregnant as often. They don't have as many sexually transmitted infections as American kids do.

They don't get-- they are not any more sexually active, but those negative factors associated with sexual activity and sexual expression are markedly less. And what's the difference between kids in Norway or Sweden or Finland in America? It is an attitude towards human sexuality and it is the way in which we address through an educational process, understanding and appreciation of the profound importance of sexual relationships.

Americans, by and large, are still quite Victorian and in many ways still quite prudish about human sexuality. Boy, if we can't deal with that-- if we could deal with that by the end of this Millennium and at least get that off the plate, we would have gone a long ways towards settling some of the more theatrical displays and debates that we've had in society.

MARY STUCKY: There are, I would imagine, a lot of people who would agree that parents are really the best source of good sex education for their kids. Is there any evidence that parents are playing a bigger role in telling their kids about reproductive issues and values?

TOM WEBER: You know, I really long to see that evidence. I'd like to think that people of our generation, my generation, or my daughter's generation will be more open, more supportive, more able to address, in a meaningful way with their kids, things that my parents couldn't address with me. I don't know that we have that evidence yet.

And I agree that probably the most central relationship in a young person's maturation is a relationship with parents, and that's not always a good relationship. It's not always a relationship with mom and dad anymore. The family I grew up with is rapidly changing. But I do think that the atmosphere that exists in a home, however, that home and however that family unit is designed, however it's defined, whoever it's composed of, is critical in later decision making.

I really believe, that is where we fundamentally learn right and wrong. That is where we fundamentally learn good and bad. That is where we fundamentally learn how I should think about something before I make a decision. It's not in a church. It's not in a synagogue. It's not in a school. You fundamentally learn those very basic concepts at home. And I think those concepts can do much to serve us well later when we make decisions about sexual expression. And I think that-- I don't see the evidence yet that we've made as much progress in that setting, and I think that's generational in nature, that is yet to come.

MARY STUCKY: Tom Weber, your home has been picketed. You have been attacked and beaten in your office. Why do you stay with this job for 25 years?

TOM WEBER: Boy, I just can't find a job that I want other than this one. When I came to Planned Parenthood quite some time ago, I, at that time, said, well, make a three-year commitment. That's about all I can make, then I will go out and get a real job. And the sense of, could I find a position, a job, an agency, a program that made as much important contribution, where would it be?

And I've worked in some pretty good organizations throughout my life and worked with agencies and programs that really reached out to disadvantaged populations, so I have something to compare it to. The commitments that Planned Parenthood has made in America and throughout the world, I think, are some of the most profound and important that I can't think of a job or an agency that I would rather be in right now.

I mean, what a wonderful thing to say, every child should be a wanted child. Every child has an inherent birthright, ought to have an inherent birthright, to be gleefully wanted by its parents, gleefully wanted, cared for, loved, educated, valued, such a profoundly simple and important concept. I just can't think of something that's more significant than that right now. That keeps me here.

That's an important contribution that I think for many ways we haven't completed our mission on-- the flamboyance around abortion arguments, the needs to do better jobs for our kids. The assurance that women's privacy is more important than some placard carrying protesters. Those things we haven't prevailed on yet. We will prevail on them because it's right, and I guess I want to be here when we do.

MARY STUCKY: Thank you, Tom Weber.

TOM WEBER: Thank you.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Tom Weber is the director of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota and South Dakota. He talked with Mary Stucky. Our Voices of Minnesota interview is heard nearly every Monday at this time and is produced by Dan Olson with help from intern Brian Bull. It's 27 minutes before 11 o'clock. Today's programming is sponsored in part by the orthodontic practice of Dr. Richard Paulson in Golden Valley.

NOAH ADAMS: I'm Noah Adams. Later today, we'll begin a series examining the options for reforming Social Security.

SPEAKER 1: It's not the disaster that is being portrayed in many places, and I think that disaster psychology is what's added to the willingness to listen to very radical changes.

NOAH ADAMS: NOAH ADAMS: Plans for the aging baby boom generation and the day's news later on NPR'S All Things Considered.

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PAULA SCHROEDER: All things considered at 3 o'clock this afternoon here on Minnesota Public Radio. In 1843, 16-year-old Grace marks was arrested, tried, and condemned to death for the murders of her employer, Tom Kinnear, and his housekeeper and mistress, Nancy Montgomery. She was convicted along with a manservant in the house, James McDermott. The case was the most notorious criminal trial in Canadian history, attracting attention from the United States and Britain as well as Canada.

Margaret Atwood has brought Grace Marks back to life again in the pages of her new book, Alias Grace, that's winning rave reviews. While stopping at the Minnesota Public Radio studios as part of a four-month long international book tour last week, Margaret Atwood elaborated on the story of Grace Marks and James McDermott.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Both of these people were charged. They were both tried. Oddly enough, the same lawyer was allowed to defend both of them, which wouldn't happen today. And they were both condemned to death. But she had people getting up petitions on her behalf, which is what you did then, and her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in a penitentiary.

The man was hanged. Just before he was hanged, he said that she had helped him to kill the housekeeper, that it was only the murder of the gentleman that was tried. And since they were-- both got the death penalty, everybody then packed up and went home. So here you have a man who is known to be a liar and also known to be very annoyed that he was getting hanged and she wasn't testifying against her right before he's hanged.

There she is, remaining alive, with half the people thinking she did it and half of the people thinking she didn't. And some of them trying to get her out of the penitentiary. And that's about where we open the book.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah.

MARGARET ATWOOD: She has also spent almost two years in the lunatic asylum. So the question is, was she always a bit deranged? Was she deranged at the time of the murders? Is that what accounts for her involvement or was she faking insanity because the food was better at the asylum, which some did?

PAULA SCHROEDER: Was Grace Marks a character that children in Canada grew up knowing about, or how did you come to learn--

MARGARET ATWOOD: In the 19th century, a lot of people knew about her. She was like an upside down star, a kind of Charles Manson type of star. She was notorious, in other words. And in that century, you could take tours of public institutions, almost as if they were zoos, and you could go and visit the penitentiary, and it was Grace Marks that people would want to see.

And that's how I first learned about her through an account of her written by somebody who had gone to the pen and asked to see her. So she was trotted. And same thing, you could visit lunatic asylums, and the same author had visited the asylum, and there she was. So that was how I came across it.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Why did you choose to set your book later after she had-- Grace Marks had already been convicted, she had been in prison, and in the lunatic asylum for some time rather than set it during the trial?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, during the trial, it wouldn't have been nearly as interesting for me as a novelist. One of the things that became obvious as I read this newspaper and that newspaper and this eyewitness and that eyewitness is that most people couldn't agree on what had happened. Grace tells three versions of the day of the murder. McDermott tells a few.

And even the eyewitnesses, people who found the bodies, people who discovered the empty house, person A says everything was very tidy and nothing was thrown about and we couldn't tell at first that anything was missing, and person B said it was all topsy-turvy and the house had been ransacked, et cetera.

I believed person A because it took them a while to figure out that the people were in the cellar. And if the house had been obviously ransacked, they would have looked immediately a lot harder. So you're constantly presented with these discrepancies. And it would have-- if I had written about the trial, I couldn't really have told it through the Grace character. I don't think-- it wouldn't have worked so well. It also would have been a drama, and there really wasn't enough for that. Since people at the time couldn't make up their minds, could I, as an author, take a stand?

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, and the book does delve into Grace's mind through the character of Dr. Simon Jordan, who was one of--

MARGARET ATWOOD: He's trying to delve into her mind.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Right. We're hearing her reaction to his attempts or reading of her reaction to his attempts. But he is an early proponent of psychoanalysis. Was he a real character?

MARGARET ATWOOD: He had a lot of real prototypes. At first, he is a real person who was head of the lunatic asylum in Toronto. His name was Dr. Wertman. But when I went back to those records, I found that in fact, he didn't know Grace that well. He was the one who would send her back to the penitentiary. He had come in after she'd been in the lunatic asylum for a while. He came in as the new head, and he was, in fact, humane, thoughtful gentleman.

And he didn't think she was insane or certainly not insane enough to remain there. And it was overcrowded, and he didn't like the penitentiary always offloading these people on his asylum anyway. So back she went. So I couldn't really use him. But there is some evidence that the faction that was in favor of Grace tried for medical testimony. And it would indeed have been useful to them to have had somebody say either she absolutely didn't do it or she was deranged at the time.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Of course, back in 1843, there was no such thing as expert witnesses and psychologists or psychiatrists to interview.

MARGARET ATWOOD: It came fairly soon after that.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah.

MARGARET ATWOOD: In fact, in the 19th century, there was a case-- there was the kind of-- there was a sleepwalking case in which somebody said they had walked in their sleep and had no memory of it and killed somebody, and he got off. But that was by the 1880s. We think of Freud as being the origin of psychoanalysis, no such thing.

There was a huge amount of psychiatric theorizing, speculation, experimentation throughout the century the notion of the unconscious was there very early. There was a large interest in such phenomena as somnambulism. And the poetry, the novels, and so forth are full of people with unusual mental states. So these are not new things. They were 19th century things that have had 20th century life.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, of course, this is what Dr. Simon Jordan is striving for in his relationship--

MARGARET ATWOOD: He's a specialist in amnesia, and he's trying the chain of association method. And there was a lot of theorizing about memory, how we remembered things and where the things went that we remembered when we weren't actively remembering them with our conscious mind.

For instance, where is the multiplication table that you learned in school? It's in your head somewhere, the theory would go. How do we get it out again? How do we get-- how do we fish out from the depths, because that's how they thought of it, all of the things that we once knew and have now forgotten?

And how do we handle people who have forgotten everything? Dickens has a few characters like this. One of the things they thought was efficacious was to show them objects that were once familiar to them, and this would help the chain of association of ideas, and then you could get back the thing that was lost. So this is the theory that he's going on.

JACKIE REESE: And Grace thinks it's all kind of silly.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, Grace is a very practical person. She came from Northern Ireland at the age of 12 from a poor family. She was early acquainted with the hardships of life, and she immediately went out to work full time as a servant in various households. And her main interests are practical. Somebody shows her a potato, she's not going to think root cellar at the Connaire household, dead bodies in root cellar, now I remember. She's going to think, oh, a potato. Well, this is how you cook potatoes.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah. Right. It's really interesting to read what Grace thinks of herself, because she is very aware of her position in this Victorian society and how people view her. And she really seems to enjoy, in a way, playing that character.

You write, or she says, in the book at one point that the daughters in the household where she helps out in the prison wardens household asks her why she never smiles, and she says her face won't bend in that direction any more. But if I laughed out loud, I might not be able to stop. And also, it would spoil their romantic notion of me. Romantic people are not supposed to laugh. I know that much from looking at the pictures. So she's very aware of herself.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, she has a certain status, and she was indeed a kind of-- as I said, she was an upside down star. She was also, in a way, an upside down pat because, of course, her case, as most sensational criminal cases are, was very politicized at the time. And in this case, Canada had just had an attempt at a revolution, a Democratic revolution, kick out the monarchy, bring in a more universal kind of vote, set up a Republic. It failed.

But feelings were still running very high. The revolution was 1837, 1838. Murders were 1843. And people were still very divided into factions about this. So the Tory Anglicans tended to be anti-Grace Marks, thought she should have been hanged, keep her in jail for life, et cetera. The reform Methodists, on the other hand, took a more lenient view and felt that was enough. And although, yes, she had been involved in this crime, nobody actually knew whether she was only an accessory and really had run away with this man out of terror for her own life, which was what she said at the trial.

So the Methodist reforms tended to make rather a case of her, and a number of clergymen became interested in her. For instance, it didn't hurt at all that she was good looking. Everybody agrees on that. And the defenseless, single, possibly criminally involved, beautiful woman as a stock figure in Victorian literature.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Margaret Atwood is the author of Alias Grace, the story of Grace Marks convicted of a double murder at the age of 16 in 1843. You're listening to midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Paula Schroeder. It's 14 minutes before 11 o'clock. The book of Alias Grace is set in 1859 and gives readers an insight into the day to day lives of Victorian era Canadians.

MARGARET ATWOOD: The class system prevailed. The physical structure of life, of course, was much harder than it is now because there was no electricity, no running water, et cetera. So people with large genteel households had to have a large number of servants just to keep the thing running. And they did. It was no different in the United States.

The difference was that democracy was spoken of in the United States more, but that didn't mean there were no classes and no class distinctions and no people who thought they were better than other people. It was just more confusing because you weren't really supposed to think that, but everybody did.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Right.

[LAUGHTER]

Of course, Grace being a prisoner was at the lowest of that--

MARGARET ATWOOD: She was at the lowest, but in a way, that gave her a certain amount of freedom, because the others were constricted by potential loss of their status and loss of their reputation. And as she says to Dr. Jordan at one point, I've got nothing to lose. Already, the worst things have happened to me that are going to happen. What else can be done? So in a way, she was freer than other women were.

And this is another reason the Victorian novel is so fond of those kinds of figures, people outside. People who have transgressed, women particularly who have transgressed. And therefore, although they're outsiders, although they've been ostracized and penalized, they also no longer have to pay attention to all of these little things. They've already lost their reputations.

PAULA SCHROEDER: At the beginning of every chapter, you use the name of a quilt design, jagged edge, young man's fancy. What's the significance of that?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Every woman in the 19th century sewed. They all sewed. If they're at the very bottom, they were the women in Thomas Hood's song of the shirt, stitch, stitch, stitch and poverty, hunger, and dirt, which made a tremendous stir and called attention to this underclass of women who were doing piecework on gentleman's everyday garments and making almost nothing from it. So that was the lowest class, the poorest seamstress.

As you went up the social scale, you have, for instance, Mrs. Beeton saying a good, brisk maid of all work will get up at 5:00 in the morning and do all these various things all day. And then in the afternoon, if she's good at her chores, she will be able to reserve a couple of hours every afternoon in which to make her own wardrobe. You didn't lie down for a nap. You made your own clothes, and they did.

Then as you go up the social scale even further, you have people like the Aurora Lee figure in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem saying, we do this fancy work. We make footstools and embroidered slippers, and this is considered work. And we give them to the men in our lives who basically think nothing of them. And she was talking about the uselessness of gentle women's work.

PAULA SCHROEDER: This is your first novel of historical fiction.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Yes.

PAULA SCHROEDER: And it's clear that you-- well, and I remember when you came out with the robber bride, you loved to research.

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, I have to research. I don't always love it. In fact, sometimes it drives me really, really, really crazy because you can't find what you want. You can't find the detail that you really want to find. Nobody's written it down. They don't tell you-- I beg of you, if you're keeping a journal, put in the things that somebody 100 years from now is really going to need to know.

What is this microwave oven? How did it work? What did it do? What did you cook in it? Don't just say, you microwaved your egg for breakfast. [LAUGHS] But there are so many magazines now and so much written material that a lot more will be available to the researchers of the future you'd think.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, and isn't it isn't it so common that work that women did in particular was--

MARGARET ATWOOD: Wasn't written down.

PAULA SCHROEDER: --never written down.

MARGARET ATWOOD: They wrote down about their feelings if they were educated, quotes, "educated", they'd had governesses. They knew how to read and write. And what you were supposed to be interested in was your feelings and your social life. And if you were a Jane Austen character, you could be interested in your reactions to picturesque landscapes and things if you were a person of too much sensibility. But you didn't write down things like how you mended your stocking and who cleaned the chamber pot and how they did it. You didn't put those things in. They were much too common.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah. So even for those kinds of things, did you have to use your poetic license?

MARGARET ATWOOD: Some of it's written down, and some of it isn't. And some of it you can find in pictorial histories of the period. You look amongst the antique dealers types of books and in that area, you can find a lot of things. But some things I just couldn't find. For instance, in the penitentiary, the women prisoners wore dresses with blue and white stripes. Did the stripes go up and down? Did they go around? Were they big stripes or were they little stripes? I don't know.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You never say in the book whether she did this-- committed this crime or not.

MARGARET ATWOOD: I would have to be unfaithful to history to say that.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Because there is no proof--

MARGARET ATWOOD: Well, because there-- because their opinion is so divided, and there is no chain of evidence. There isn't any Hercule Poirot who can appear and say, because of this matchbook madam, we can tell it was her or it was him. There was an editorial writer in one of the newspapers who made the ridiculous claim before the trial that it could be told from the kind of knot that was knotted around Nancy Montgomery's neck that two people had been required to tie this knot. So off I went to my knots expert and said--

[LAUGHTER]

--is there a knot like this? And he said, no. But this was an anti-Grace newspaper. He wanted basically to condemn her ahead of time.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah.

MARGARET ATWOOD: He said, far be it for me to determine the course of the trial, but--

[LAUGHTER]

PAULA SCHROEDER: But I have.

MARGARET ATWOOD: But I have, but I'm trying.

PAULA SCHROEDER: As a novelist, did you consider that might be frustrating for your readers, that there's no resolution to be had?

MARGARET ATWOOD: No. I think it would be more frustrating for them if I slanted evidence.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Margaret Atwood, who always keeps her readers best interest in mind in whatever she writes. Her latest novel, Alias Grace, is published by Doubleday. It's coming up on six minutes before 11 o'clock. This is midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Paula Schroeder.

If you're thinking about heading out to the Western part of Minnesota or if you are there now, be aware that the remnants of the blizzard are still causing many problems. A lot of schools are closed in the southwestern part of the state. Some highways are down to single-lane traffic or there might be very slippery. A lot of county roads are still blocked by huge snow drifts in the Dakotas as well as southwestern Minnesota. And it looks like we'll be able to get a little bit of cleanup done today with temperatures not too bad. They'll be up into the above digits above zero today.

GARY EICHTEN: 1996 was a great year on Wall Street and a pretty good year on Main street, for that matter, unless, of course, you lost your job. So what's ahead for this year. Hello. This is Gary Eichten inviting you to join us for midday. Author and economist Paul Erdman will return for his annual economic forecast for the new year, and I hope you can join us. Midday begins each weekday morning at 11:00, and we rebroadcast the program each weekday evening at 9:00 on Minnesota Public Radio KNOW FM 91.1 in the Twin Cities.

PAULA SCHROEDER: During the 11 o'clock hour of midday, a forecast for the Minnesota economy as well. Here's Garrison Keillor in the Writer's Almanac.

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GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is the Writer's Almanac for Monday, the 13th of January, 1997. It's the anniversary of the first radio broadcast to the public. Lee de Forest set up a microphone at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on this day in 1910 and broadcast Enrico Caruso singing Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana, a signal that was received by a few people around the city of New York who happened to have wireless receivers.

It's the birthday of Horatio Alger, born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1832, the author of many, many novels about poor boys who, through perseverance and hard work and virtue, rose to great wealth. It's the birthday in Bedford, Indiana, in 1901 of Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr. AB Guthrie, novelist of the Great West who wrote The Way West, Shane, The Kentuckian, Big Sky, and many other books.

Here's a poem entitled "My Neighbor's Pants", written by Hunt Hawkins.

My ex next door neighbor, fired and divorced,

Is staying in our TV room

Before dinner, we open a bottle of champagne

While he tells us he still can't find a job

And his daughters are using their mother's maiden name

That night, I wake at five, clutching my wife's knees

I think it's because after the separation,

My father reappeared and lived for months in the basement,

Drinking and picking fights with the furnace.

The next day to cheer him up

We take our neighbor to the beach

Where he lopes like a dog over the seaweed

And tries to talk with the gulls in their own language

I remember that the Bible tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves

But after this neighbor is finally gone,

I become convinced he switched pants on me

The blue ones hanging in my closet are baggy and threadbare

An odor of failure rises from them

I try them on, then suddenly feel as if ants

Are covering me from my ankles up to my waist

So I rush into the backyard, rip them off, and drown them with charcoal starter

The gray haired Baptist lady out raking her lawn

Looks at me without much surprise

Maybe I own all the equipment of middle class life

But in her heart she always knew this is what poets were like

As the flames die down and goosebumps swell on my legs,

All I can see left among the ashes is the label

Only when I pick it up and read it do I realize

I've just burned my own pants

A poem by Hunt Hawkins, "My Neighbor's Pants", from the collection The Domestic Life, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press and used here by permission. That's the Writer's Almanac for Monday, January 13th, made possible by Cowles, enthusiast media publishers of British heritage. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

PAULA SCHROEDER: That's midmorning for today. Thanks so much for joining us. Tomorrow, we're going to be talking about civility in the workplace. So if you've got some stories to tell about that, you can call in tomorrow. I'm Paula Schroeder. Gary Eichten is here. He's going to bring you midday in just a few minutes.

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SPEAKER 2: The marriage of Apple and Next and the future of the Macintosh computer, that story on the next Future Tense. Future Tense in one half hour on Minnesota Public Radio, KNOW FM, 91.1.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio, 30 years of great radio thanks to you. 0 with a wind chill of 15 below at KNOW FM 91.1, Minneapolis, Saint Paul. In the Twin Cities today, we're looking for a high around 10 above when tonight, increasing cloudiness with a low from 0 to 8 below, tomorrow, mostly cloudy with a chance of light snow and a high in the teens.

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GARY EICHTEN: Good morning. It's 11 o'clock, and this is midday on Minnesota Public--