Meet the Author: John Whittier Treat
Author of The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House
Thursday, Nov 8 / 7pm
Calamus Auditorium at Gay City

Gay City presents an evening with writer and critic John Whittier Treat reading from and discussing his debut novel, The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House.

The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House examines the famed city of Seattle in the early 1980s, before Microsoft, hipsters, grunge musicians and Amazon transformed it. The novel is a time capsule, chronicling everyday life among now-vanished places of a once-vibrant era: Numbers, Different Drummer Books, Kingdome, Axel Rock and Dog House. Novelist Treat explores an era when a lethal virus begins to infiltrate a community already bruised by drugs, alcohol, and prejudice. Drawn from the author’s personal experiences as a Seattle resident during that era, The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House tells the darker side of a city better known for its natural bounty of mountains, water and forests.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Writer and critic John Whittier Treat has taught at Yale, Berkeley and Stanford, and is the author of Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and Atomic Bomb (Chicago) and Great Mirrors Shatter: Japan, Orientalism and Homosexuality (Oxford). Relocating from New York City to Seattle in 1983, he was witness to the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic in the Pacific Northwest. Soon, he became involved with the local recovery community as AIDS affected gay men already struggling with addiction. Treat’s fiction has appeared in literary journals, and his opinion pieces have been published in the New York Times and the Huffington Post. The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House is his first novel. Treat is now at work on a second novel, First Consonants, about a stutterer who saves the world. You can visit John online at johntreat.com.