In That Paris Year, five smart, adventurous young women arrive on the banks of the Seine in 1962 for their junior year abroad. What they get is an education of a different sort. As they move from the grueling demands of the Sorbonne by day to late nights of discovery in smoky cafes, the young Americans discover a mythical country shaped not only by the upheavals of history, but by the great French writers of the 20th Century, a place where seduction is intellectual as well as sexual. Ten years later, our narrator, J. J., is asked to speak at her old college on the virtues of going abroad. Drawing on the emotionally charged tools of memory and imagination, as well as old journals, letters, and telegrams, she chronicles and re-creates the story of that momentous year. Following in the footsteps of Marcel Proust, Joanna Biggar has written a novel in which intellect, eroticism, and art reverberate from the page to the heartbeat of the City of Light, an American book with the sweep and elegance of French literary tradition. 

That Paris Year

Literature & Fiction

Biggar, Joanna

Essays & Correspondence

Santa Fe Writer's Project

They’re off on another adventure, this time to the City of Light. More than a city, Paris is actually a world of its own, and as these very imaginative literary wanderers discover, it’s a destination layered in time. This time workshop leaders Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar and their worldly companions uncover some surprising new facets of the much-celebrated metropolis. Their personal lives connect with all that makes Paris astounding. Addressing Parisian luminaries, art, fashion, music, cuisine and passion, they present a sometimes shimmering, sometimes shadowy picture of a city that defies cliché.

Wandering in Paris: Luminaries and Love in the City of Light (Wanderland Writers presents)

Travel

McFerrin, Linda Watanabe

Travel Writing

Wanderland Writers

Thirty stories and poems by the award-winning Wanderland Writers. Workshop leaders Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar led a search for the soul of southern Spain. Along the way the writers discovered a country ripe with contradiction: an arid landscape filled with lush gardens; the practice of elaborate Christian rituals in churches echoing a rich Islamic past; a land of bullfighters, gypsies, poets, philosophers and scholars; a place where duende and alegria coexist. As they spread out in this inviting territory, they encountered—and wrote about—Columbus and the Christian monarchs; tapas and toreadors; sherry and sangria; caliphs and communists; flamenco and, yes, flamingos.

Wandering in Andalusia: The Soul of Southern Spain (Wanderland Writers presents)

King, Laurie McAndish

Sigmon, Anne

Pramik, MJ

Gardner, Rita

Maskaleris, Thanasis

Europe

Five young college women from California who shared their junior year in Paris once banded together to form a network of friendships they believed would last all their lives. Twelve years later, one goes missing. The instigator of the Paris trip, J.J., now a journalist, decides to uncover the fate of the missing Melanie Hart on a quest both professional and personal. Last seen, Melanie was the meek, besotted wife of a young classical musician. Now, rumors abound: Melanie had a breakdown and left him. She was seen at Woodstock. She was running drugs. She became a mystic, a mother, a radical. She may be on the lam. She may be dead. J.J.’s investigation leads her into a world of off-the-grid radical activists and bad cops, as well as the Hart family’s own carefully constructed version of events. Played out against a background of Vietnam War protests, the Watergate scandal, and Richard Nixon’s eventual resignation, J.J.’s investigation calls into question the very nature of choice, and what it means to lead an authentic life.

Melanie’s Song

United States

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Books by Biggar, Joanna