As It Is On Earth Author Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright at Canio’s
05:00 pm
Canio's Books, Sag Harbor,
On Saturday, December 1, at 5 p.m., Canio’s Books hosts a reading by Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright. The novel As It Is On Earth is set in New England over seven days leading up to Columbus Day at the end of the Millennium, 1999. Narrated by Taylor Thatcher, an irreverent young university professor from a fallen family of Maine Puritans, the story follows his ruminative quest to escape from history. Along his errant way, Thatcher is swept by Time through the “family thing” – from the tangled genetic and religious history of his New England parents to the redemptive birthday secret of Esther Fleur Noire Bishop, the Cajun-Passamaquoddy woman who raised him; and, finally, from love in
the ruins of the Mayan Yucatan to his own last stand on Columbus Day at a high-stakes gambling casino, rising in resurrection over the starlit bones of a once-vanquished Pequot Indian Tribe.
Old New England, its landscapes, rivers, and tidal estuaries are also casualties of history in Thatcher’s story of Deep Time and the wayward collision of nature and civilization.
Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright is an architect and Associate Professor at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. He received his M.Arch degree from Princeton University and BFA degree from Trinity College. His design work has been widely published in both the national and international press. The Kaleidoscope House, a modernist dollhouse designed in collaboration with artist Laurie Simmons is in the
Collection of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. He comes from a family of writers with an abiding interest in the natural world. His uncle is three time National Book Award winner, Peter Matthiessen, and his brother Jeff Wheelwright’s third book of non-fiction, The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess was published in 2012. As It Is On Earth is his first novel. The Door-Man, his second, is in progress.
