Patricia Averbach
Patricia Averbach, a Cleveland native, is the former director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center in Chautauqua, New York.
Dreams of Drowning, a work of magical realism set in vintage Toronto was released by Bedazzled Ink in February of 2024.
Averbach’s second novel, Resurrecting Rain, the contemporary story of a woman who loses her house but finds her home, was released by Golden Antelope Press in 2020.
Her first novel, Painting Bridges, was described in a Cleveland Plain Dealer review as “introspective, intelligent and moving.” Her poetry chapbook, Missing Persons, received the London based Lumen/Camden award in 2013 and was selected by the Times of London Literary Supplement (Nov. 2014) as one of the best short collections of the year.
Previous work includes a memoir about her early career as Anzia Yezierska’s sixteen year old literary assistant and an article about the Jewish community in a virtual world called, Second Life. Her work has appeared in Lilith Magazine, Margie, The Muse, and The Blue Angel Review.
Dreams of Drowning
It’s 1973 and Amy, an American ex-pat, is living as an illegal immigrant in Toronto where she’s fled to escape the scandal surrounding her twin sister’s death. Joanie’s been gone two years, but Amy still hears her cries for help. Is she hallucinating or is her sister seeking rescue from somewhere beyond time? Romance would jeopardize the secrets Amy has to keep, but when she meets Arcus, a student working to restore democracy in Greece, she falls hard. Arcus doesn’t know about Amy’s past, and she doesn’t know Arcus has secrets of his own.
In 1993 Toronto, Jacob Kanter, a retired archaeologist, is mourning his dear wife and grappling with his son’s plans to move him to a nursing home. Despite multiple infirmities, he remembers sailing as a youth and sets out toward the lake where he boards a mysterious ferry boat embarking on its maiden voyage. He expects a short harbor cruise, but the Aqua Meridian is larger than it looks, and time is slippery on the water. When he hears a drowning woman call for help his story merges with Amy’s, and they discover they have unexpected gifts for one another.
Resurrecting Rain
Deena's house is being auctioned off at sheriff's sale and her marriage is falling apart. As her carefully constructed life unravels her thoughts return to the New Moon Commune where she was born and to Rain, the lesbian mother she abandoned at fourteen. No one, not even her husband and children, know about New Moon or that she sat Shiva for Rain in exchange for her grandmother's conventional house in the suburbs. A continuing cascade of disasters eventually leaves this middle aged librarian homeless on the streets of Sarasota. Out of desperation she accepts a job with an octogenarian TV writer who believes crows are the reincarnated souls of Jews lost in the holocaust. Then, when her daughter shows up trailing trouble, she finds herself in a car full of desperate women racing toward New Moon, the place she spent her whole life trying to escape. Sometimes you have to lose a house before you find your home.
Painting Bridges
It’s April of 1976, eighteen months since Samantha lost her daughter and young husband. Immobilized by grief and afraid to drive, she’s barricaded herself in a dilapidated farmhouse in Western New York. Her wealthy parents want her back in Cleveland, but she refuses to go anywhere or to see anyone except her mother-in-law, an outspoken chain smoker who communicates with the dead through mediums at Lily Dale, a nearby spiritualist retreat. Then, unexpectedly, a deaf child with an eerie resemblance to Samantha’s daughter wanders onto her property and changes everything.
Missing Persons
Averbach’s poetry chapbook, Missing Persons, won the Lumen/Camden Poetry Competition in 2013.
