Books by Patricia Reis

Coming Soon!

Unsettled: A Novel

Patricia Reis
Sibylline Press
Publication date: October 10, 2023

As Van Reinhardt clears out her dead father’s belongings, she comes across hints of an unsettling family history, along with a request penned by her father prior to his death that sends her on a genealogical quest. Armed with a 1900 family portrait of her German immigrant ancestors who pioneered a farm in southwestern Iowa in 1870, Van arrives in her family’s hometown braced for a slog and struggle, and is greeted by unexpected warmth.

Aided by a small-town sisterhood of town clerks, record keepers, librarians, and a diner owner who offer interest and support, Van discovers calamitous events in probate records, farm auction lists, asylum records and lurid obituaries, hinting at a history far more complex and tumultuous than she had expected. All the while Van, haunted by her own troubled past, searches to find herself in their
narrative. The chance discovery of a small book, sized for a pocket—a secret diary—provides the missing piece, a lost female lineage that sheds light upon a longstanding mystery.

Unsettled delivers what DNA analysis and Ancestry.com cannot. Using memory, imagination and heart, Van constructs her ancestral narrative, uncovers the secrets that have kept her from the truth, and mends the tears in her family story.


“Unsettled is an old-fashioned novel, filled with characters as familiar as family pictures, as touching and as terrifying. Reis writes with assurance about the kinds of secrets that destroyed families generations ago — and maybe still do.”
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, Author of Deep End of the Ocean

 

Patricia-Reis-Author-Photo-2016Patricia Reis is a writer and author of the memoir Motherlines, Women’s Voices (with Nancy Cater,) The Dreaming Way, Daughters of Saturn, and Through the Goddess, and the creator/producer of the DVD, Arctic Refuge Sutra. She has a BA from the University of Wisconsin in English Literature, an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in Sculpture. In 1986, she earned an MA from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Depth Psychology and has a private psychotherapy practice. Patricia Reis has held positions as faculty, lecturer, and dissertation advisor and has mentored and facilitated many artists and writers in bringing their work to fruition. She appeared in the film, “Signs Out of Time,” by Starhawk and Canadian film maker, Donna Read, a documentary on the life of Marija Gimbutas. She divides her time between Portland, Maine and Nova Scotia. For more information, please visit find.mainewriters.org.

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