Novelist's work rooted in Coudersport

A budding novelist with local roots has published a book using Coudersport as its backdrop.

Joshua Palmatier, son of Beryl Tate Palmatier and the late Philip "Jet" Palmatier, will be reading from his latest work, "The Cracked Throne," Saturday afternoon (2:00) at the Lycoming Mall near Williamsport during a signing event sponsored by Borders Books and the publisher, Penguin Books.

A mathematics teacher at Lock Haven University, Palmatier said fiction writing has been his escape from the complexities of working with numbers.

His new book is a tale of political intrigue and survival in a city on the edge of starvation, civil war and doom in the year 1965. It focuses on spontaneous combustion in a town that he based very loosely on settings in Coudersport.

Palmatier, of Spring Mills, traces his interest in fiction writing to a junior high English teacher who encouraged him. He stuck with his writing habit during a childhood

that inc

l u d e d many relocations as his father, a decorated Navy pilot, was shuffled around the country before he was killed in a fighter jet crash.

Joshua Palmatier is making a name for himself in the highly competitive fiction writing business. This is his latest work as he explores the world of fantasy as a relief from mathematics.

Palmatier holds a doctorate in mathematics from Binghamton University.

His father was Commander Philip F. Palmatier, a 1972 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. Palmatier died in December 1990 when two Navy jets collided during training and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. He had been based at the the Naval Air Station in Beeville, Tex.