The Greater Rochester

Edward Averett
Edward Averett was born in the Pacific Northwest, in southwestern Washington State. His love of stories soon translated into a zeal for "getting things down on paper." So at age 11 he started his first novel, The Canadian Calf. He had just finished reading The Yearling, so he figured that a novel set in Canada about a young boy who adopts an abandoned moose calf would be just the ticket. When his younger brother, Doug, got his smelting pole hung up on an old piling and fell into the frigid floodwaters of the Cowlitz River, he came up with the idea for his second novel, appropriately titled The Swift Stream, which concerned the art of smelt dipping in the Cowlitz River using a woman's nylon stocking as a net.

"In my novels, I am most interested in the subjects of grief and loss, and how families work through these difficult issues. Loss can occur in many forms. Besides grieving the loss of loved ones through death, one can also grieve a divorce, losing friends from an old neighborhood after moving somewhere new, losing a favorite pet, the loss of status in the community, even losing one's place in the world in general. My sincere belief that people can get through loss and find a better way of life is what informs and inspires my writing. It is the primary issue in my novel, The Rhyming Season."

Books by Edward Averett

Rhyming Season

Seventeen-year-old Brenda Jacobsen’s brother Benny, a basketball star, died in a car accident last year, leaving Brenda and her parents without a way to fill the huge hole in their lives. This year Brenda’s joining the basketball team but there’s a new coach, whose offbeat philosophy has the girls reciting lines from poems as they play. Still, when the sawmill closes down and Brenda's parents seem to be on the verge of breaking up, she and the rest of the team find inspiration in the last place they'd ever have expected- poetry.