LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH: Welcome ASP: James J. Patterson, Author of Bermuda Shorts and Joanna Biggar, Author of That Paris Year
Monday, July 12, 2010 || 6pm
Book Passage || Ferry Plaza
San Francisco || www.bookpassage.com
Join us for an evening that will take you from the good old USA to Paris, France, as ASP writer and publisher, James J. Patterson, and noted writer and teacher, Joanna Biggar, team up for an evening of all-American chatter and fine French bonhomie. North Beach dive? French cafe? Try the wine and fancy cheese, and you tell us.
Political satirist, musician, songwriter, dramatist, essayist, and novelist, James J. Patterson, will read from his new collection of essays, Bermuda Shorts. In this volume Patterson meanders delightfully, ominously, frightfully, hilariously through his life and times, touching down at specific moments in the nation’s history as well as his own, as seen from the back alleys, barrooms and his hidden sanctum in what he calls The Capital of the Empire, Washington, DC. More than just a garment, Bermuda Shorts, according to Patterson, is a state of mind.
Then, allow yourself to be carried away to Paris by Joanna Biggar.
Who has not dreamed of escaping to Paris? When wildfire ravished the landscape of Los Angeles, five young co-eds, house-mates in the rundown Maison Française, found the freedom to pursue that dream. They set sail on a rusty boat in the summer of 1962 determined to enroll in the Sorbonne. It was as if Mary McCarthy’s “Group” had landed on a mystifying Left Bank, exotic and compelling as Durrell’s Alexandria. What they lost was more than their virginity, their bad American accents, and their beloved clichés about “meaning”; what they gained, as they traded notes, clothes, dreams, loves and identities was the gift of geography — the tectonic shift that occurs upon discovering that place, native or adopted, is an integral part of who we are.
Joanna Biggar turned twenty in Paris, where she was a student at the Sorbonne, and went on to earn degrees in Chinese language and French literature. Since then she has chaired a school board in Ghana, traveled solo to remote regions of China, worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C., and taught inner-city school students in Oakland, California, where she lives. She is married, has five adult children and six grandchildren, who love books. A member of the Society of Woman Geographers, her special places of the heart remain France and the California coast.
We have a “killer evening” in store for everyone at the next Left Coast Writers Literary Salon!
We have a real treat in store for you at our May 3rd Left Coast Writers Literary Salon. Travel writer Tim Cahill is in town and will be speaking that night. Tim, who has authored many, many books including Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, Pass The Butterworms, Pecked To Death By Ducks, Hold The Enlightenment, and Lost in my own Backyard: a Walk in Yellowstone National Park, was a founding editor of Outside magazine and has been known to make readers laugh and cry in the space of a few minutes. He is also an expert on what makes a story work and the creator of Tim’s choo-choo, which is a dynamite way to quickly put an article together. 
POINT & SHOOT YOUR WAY TO PERFECT PHOTOS
NEW HOST FOR LEFT COAST WRITERS FERRY PLAZA EVENTS
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