The Bookplate is happy to announce another author event in town featuring local flower farmer and author, Lisa Lynn Biggar. Join Lisa, representatives from Secant Publishing and the
Bookplate staff on Wednesday, October 14th for a 6pm book release event at Sultana’s Holt Education Center to celebrate her new collection of stories, Garden of Motherless Children. Immediately following the event, there will be a reception at The Bookplate, with refreshments provided.
Garden of Motherless Children is a short story cycle set on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, mostly in rural Kent County. Several of the characters are haunted by past traumas and are living on the fringe of society, untethered from mother earth—they are shunned or supported by those in the community who are from here, have come here, or have been brought here.
The integration of these native and non-native people is a dominant theme, along with the healing power of love and the need to lift each other up in order to restore faith and hope in humanity. Some characters find that they need to learn to take risks in the name of love, while others are blindsided by what they thought was love.
They realize that they never really knew their partners and discover that love, like life, can be fragile and fleeting. Overall, these stories come together in a search for meaning in a world that can be cold and dark as well as mysterious and sublime. 
“These are big, intelligent, brave stories. Lisa Lynn Biggar doesn’t duck the hard moments, the awkward and the inappropriate; she is willing to let her characters, and her readers, squirm a bit. But there are consolations: small moments of clarity or triumph, the sights and sounds of region and landscape, lovely prose.” —Christopher Tilghman, author of Mason’s Retreat and On The Tobacco Coast
Lisa Lynn Biggar received her Masters of English (creative writing) from Northern Arizona University and a Masters of Fine Arts (fiction) from Vermont College. She has worked as an editor for the government, private clients, various publishing houses, and was a contributing editor for the literary journal, Hunger Mountain. She currently serves as the fiction editor for Little Patuxent Review. Her poetry and short stories, several nominated for a Pushcart Prize, have been published in many literary journals, including The Main Street Rag, Litro Magazine, The Delmarva Review, Bay to Ocean Journal, The Minnesota Review, Kentucky Review, San Antonio Review, Superstition Review, and Pithead Chapel. Her novella-in-flash, Unpasteurized, is published by Alien Buddha Press. She has taught creative writing and composition courses at Northern Arizona University, Union Institute, Chesapeake College, and Anne Arundel Community College, and currently works as a humanities tutor at The Gunston School and Chesapeake College. She and her husband Don run a flower farm in Galena, Maryland, open since 2010.
For more event details contact The Bookplate at 410-778-4167 or contact@thebookplate.net. The next author event is with Constance Hays Matsumoto on October 22nd. These events are free and open to the public, but reservations are strongly recommended. Sultana’s Holt Center is located at 200 S. Cross Street in Chestertown, Maryland.
