Dear Riehlife, I feel swamped after my first week teaching. Is my extensive creative life outside school as a dancer and workshop leader a dodge or escape or a wish for failure for my main work as a poet? What am I in quest of? Instead of spinning off in so many different directions, I resolve [...]

Elwood P. Dowd: Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” - she always called me Elwood - “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me. [...]

It’s perfectly possible to not know a word of a language, but to seem as if you know the language and culture well if you know the symbolic utterances and music of a language…it’s rhythms, rising and falling. If you know when to make sounds of sympathy and appreciation. If you know when to exclaim in amazement [...]

The poetry collection “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” by Janet Riehl is a soaring, poignant homage to family, sorrow, and the rebirth that comes with pain and loss. Written after the death of her sister in a tragic automobile accident, Riehl cobbled together her father’s mournful poems as well as her own and set out to [...]

Those of you who went to Sunday School will recognize my play on words with the beattitudes (be-attitudes). Coming back from such a sea-change trip, I wanted to count some blessings I received on home ground in this post. In another post, I’ll count blessings footloose and abroad. 1) Send-off Dinner. Before I left, Doreen Hulsey [...]

A woman in an on-line group I belong to shared this comment with me: “I was at an Romance Writers of America party in the early ’90’s and we were talking about apartheid and a best selling author said, ‘What’s apartheid?’ It spoiled my whole concept of her.” I’d been noodling with how to [...]

And, what a homecoming it is…with the athletic olympics ending and the political olympics getting more heightened with the conventions in full gear. On this day in 1963, 200,000 people participated in a peaceful civil rights rally in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front [...]

Between August 4th to August 26th, Riehlife travels to Southern Africa—South Africa and Botswana. I’ve decided not to take too many gadgets, so I’ll be leaving my laptop and cellphone at home. I’ll be in erratic computer contact, so I cannot say if I’ll be able to update Riehlife while I’m gone or not. Maybe [...]

Iconic Moments are defining life moments we harken back to. On the downside, they may be idealistic images that keep us from being grounded in the now. On the upside, they can serve as guideposts in our lives…to follow what was best and brightest…and create more Iconic Moments to draw from, as Treasured Touchstones. How do [...]

I reviewed this book for Story Circle Book Reviews (reviewing books by, for, and about women) and the review appears on Amazon. It’s good for the book and the whole shebang whenever you mark a review “helpful” there. Love it, if you would…..Janet ____________________ A Coming of Age Story of a Girl and a Country While set [...]