Joanna Biggar's Blog

Glowing after the Readings

Launching a new book opens up endless opportunities for exploring “new and used” places and venues. Alan Squire Publishing has been creative in finding non-traditional ways to present its new productions to the world – creating a theatrical, dramatic event featuring three new books at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, for example – and its darkened theater with spoken lines from my novel and a young chanteuse singing Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” was an introduction to a reading unlikely to be topped.

Another highlight for me, though, was to be invited to read and discuss my book at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Society of Woman Geographers – a group of which I proudly call myself a member. Founded in 1925 by a handful of intrepid women explorers who were excluded from the Explorers Club by members all of the male persuasion, it remains a bastion of amazing, high achieving women in diverse fields. From ambassadors to zoologists, astronauts to malacologists to Egyptologists, SWG about covers everything. To say nothing of about every spot in heaven and earth and beneath the seas as well. So it was especially pleasant to be surrounded by such women, such friends, discussing that place from which one never returns to the farm. Paris.