Program Type:
Book DiscussionProgram Description
Event Details
Join us for a reading of the book We, The House with the authors of the book, Warren Ashworth and Susan Kander!
We, the House begins in 1878 in a frontier town on the Kansas prairie where a battered Civil War Union veteran builds his new wife her dream house, an Italianate glory she names Ambleside. Soon an early American portrait of Mrs. Simon Peale arrives from Hartford, Connecticut to dignify the dining room wall. When the portrait’s existential yelp causes house and painting to discover each other, Ambleside is a perfect ‘tabula rasa,’ almost literally born yesterday, and Mrs. Peale a devastated young widow, a starchy professor of Latin, who has been dead since 1841. Together, through the lives and generations of ‘their’ family, this disarming odd couple witness and try to comprehend the panorama of American social history. Over the decades, a most unusual love develops between them and quietly deepens, until one day in 2010 an art historian from New York happens to see the portrait of Mrs. Peale and, abruptly, everything changes.
Warren Ashworth is a licensed architect known particularly for restaurant design in New York and Chicago. He is a professor of design and of architectural history at the New York School of Interior Design with a special passion for American wood-framed architecture, of which Ambleside is a glowing example. He is also the editor of a biannual scholarly journal of design and material culture called Nineteenth Century published by the Victorian Society in America.
Susan Kander is a composer whose music has been heard across the United States and in Europe, China, Australia, and South Africa. Born in Kansas City, she studied music at Harvard University, then side-stepped into fifteen years as a playwright before coming home to composition in the 1990s. In 2015, she interrupted a busy career to “re-arrange the furniture in her mind” by going back to graduate school at SUNY Purchase, earning her MM in composition.