I enjoy performing before an audience. It’s not just that I have great fun “acting” out my work; I equally enjoy the give and take with the audience. As my eye-rolling wife will tell you, I need very little encouragement to tell war stories about the writer’s life, and will happily recount in florid detail the private townhouse lunch I had with Malcolm Forbes and the Mayflower Madame. (We discussed the profit margins in the hooking business.) Or how precisely I wound up in the reclusive V. S. Naipaul’s London apartment. Or why I had a verbal dust-up with Tony Blair in his office at 10 Downing Street. It’s all part of the show and what we writers call “color.” But when someone asks me what I do exactly before a live audience, as happens on a fairly regular basis, I am usually stumped to explain it all.

No longer. I recently gave a reading at my alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, and the school’s fantastic Director Of Libraries, Charling Fagan, just sent me a copy of the photographs taken by the house photographer, Dana Maxson. I think Maxson’s series of photographs explain what I do far better than any stuttering description I could come up with. So here’s his “story” in pictures:

PHOTO CREDIT: DANA MAXSON/SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE

PHOTO CREDIT: DANA MAXSON/SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE

PHOTO CREDIT: DANA MAXSON/SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE

PHOTO CREDIT: DANA MAXSON/SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE

If you are interested in booking me for a talk, please go to the bottom of the home page and click on the “Book A Reading” portal. But that’s a bit of a misnomer. After a 25 year career at Forbes, my talks tailored to each specific audience frequently include stories from the trenches of business journalism and the odd insight into the global economy. Either way, the purpose is always to entertain and inform and have some fun.

Or as they say in the clubs – Mix it up!