* Hey! SF Book Festival just awarded an honorable mention to our audio book "Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry & Music" in the audio/spoken word category! [In 2007 "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary won a DIY (Do It Yourself) honorable mention.]

* I was one of three invited readers at a literary salon. Nervous as all get out, but it worked just fine. Listeners were inspired by the "Sightlines" poems to remember their own family stories and resolved to write about them.

* Authors Access Podcast interviewed me on how to make and produce and audio book.

* Alethea Eason's two-part interview with me on Studio 101 was well-received. "Healing Grief with Poetry" one the Editor's Choice award and is now her most read article. The second part explores creativity and community.

* Gave workshops at two conferences: Story Circle Network & The Missouri Writers Guild. Topic: "Poetry? Prose? Who knows?"

So, there you go. Sometimes it pays to look back so you can see where you've been and where you're going.

Carol created this slide show from family archival photos I sent her. These photos play over my reading of "Mama's Suitcase" from "Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry and Music."

Death sometimes brings about a radical swing in the way the survivors look at life. Janet Grace Riehl, an award-winning author, has written a poetry book Sightlines (iUniverse Inc., Lincoln, 2006) that expresses her feelings about the beauties and frailties of daily life after the death of her beloved sister Julia in a road mishap.

Linking the abstract pieces of life’s jigsaw together, Janet Grace Riehl connects the presence and absence of loved ones, the things they do and the way they do it, the places they used to live, and the vitality of belongingness that makes life going. The book is written in a dominantly nostalgic poetical mode that sometimes points to the countryside and simple old ways of peaceful life.

Using free verse for expressing her thoughts and feelings, Riehl has touched on core human emotions like companionate love, parental love and care, grief and its remedy, and the feeling of continuity of life via bloodline. The first few pieces of verse in the book are by Riehl’s father, Erwin A Thompson whose lines are emotionally moving and literarily inspiring. Some of the entries have spiritual implications especially Pope In My Bedroom and there are messages about love of nature e.g. Loving Liberty and Up Under The Pine Rows. The author has also shared photos of her family to make the reader’s ‘sightlines’ clear for looking at the poetic scene at hand.

Sightlines will appeal to any lover of nicely-written free verse that is expressive of universal existential codes: love, peace, grief, belongingness, fear, and all that makes ‘life’ beautiful.

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 document the ties that bind and the things that matter most.

Interwoven with collections of family photographs are meditations on the importance of family and the comfort of kin. Using memories and recollections as her foundation, Riehl's poems are heartwrenching and triumphant. Many of the poems read as journal entries, and diary submissions. There's no belletristic prose or coruscate syntax, it's simple, it's original and straight from the heart.

Though the book obviously caters to those who have experienced a similar loss, there is a resounding conviction in her writing that allow her words to enter into the hearts of the reader. Much like Jane Brox's family memoir "A Thousand Days Just Like This One," Riehl retraces family steps while revisiting classic bits of dialogue. An example of this is in "Catechism":

Mother: "Dad Died?
Janet: Yes.
M: When?
J: Maybe forty years ago.
M: Why didn't I know about it?
J: Maybe you forgot.
M: That's possible. What else is possible?
J: I don't know, Mom.
M: Where are they now?
J: Up in heaven, I guess."

Though the book's center is initially Riehl's mourning of her lost sister, it's the pieces about caring for her ailing mother and her recollections of her Midwestern childhood that leave an indelible mark.

One of Riehl's better poems is "Praising Mother":

Your magnolia petal soul bobs down the creek
Navigating shallows and peering into depths
Delicate titmouse feather Mama, same as those
Miniature birds you feed
Before they dart into ground places.

No, Riehl's book isn't a New York Times bestseller and no, it probably won't garner glowing reviews from the folks at Harper's and Kirkus Review, but Riehl's work is both reflective and significant, and those two aspects are enough to earn this book a positive recommendation. More information on Riehl is available at her Web site www.riehlife.com.

Marcy Burns has been a "friend of the book" since Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" came out in 2006. She found it through Dan Poynter's list, reviewed it, and set about becoming a friend of the book, my work, and me. On my trip to Riverside last winter [click here for audio of talk and music], I met Marcy for the first time in her lovely home in Oxnard, California. This morning she sent me this heartening note:

The Ventura UU Book Group begins each session with chalice lighting and an opening reading. Yesterday, just as I was ready to leave home to go to the session, the group leader telephoned to say she couldn’t be there, and she asked if I would be the leader for the day.

Marcy

He's just posted my story of how I became a writer which includes my poem "Scribbler," from "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary."

You can read the entire post by clicking here to discover what wandering on the land, reading old-fashioned books...and having a blue collar father who writes...can do for you...if you're an impressionable young thing in Southwestern Illinois in the 1950s and growing up on land that's been in the family since the 1860s.

Like three other friends of mine, I'm now, Saturday, 11 a.m., to appear on Blogtalk Radio's Authors Read program hosted by Lillian Brummet (Conscious Discussions talk radio).

Folks, this is a great resource and readily available to any of you authors out there who wanna read from your books!

For my show, what I'm excited about, is that I was able to send files from the audiobook we're making of my poetry book.

So, if you're able to catch the program or listen to the archive afterwards, you can get a preview of the "Sightlines a Poet's Diary" audiobook!

Click here to hear downhome music recorded in my father's parlor mingled with poems from my mother's section of "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary."

The call-in Number for the show is: (347) 215-8319.

So, love it if you check out our music and poetry reading...and make use of this resource yourself!

What's particularly great that I was able to send the files beforehand.

Because this afternoon my father and I are anchoring a major program at the Godfrey Congregational Church for "Gems of Yesterday: The Poetry and Philosophy of Bee Lewis," our tribute book to my father's mentor that contains 274 poems.

We'll have 5 poetry readers, music, stories...and will be donating all proceeds from book sales to the church where Amelia Lewis, Bee's wife, was so active.

Because we had the audio files available, I won't have to stress about calling in and being in good voice.

I'll be there de facto in the pre-recorded files. It's such a freeing way to work. I love it! A brave new world for me.

I love using the new technology to bring out the truth, beauty, and wisdom, of the past.

A LONG DRIVE IN THE COUNTRY

It's a pretty drive from St. Louis to Nashville (routes 64/57/24) that takes around 5.5 hours and crosses three rivers (Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee) and passes by many gorgeous large lakes (Rend/Egypt/Barkley) where I wanted to just stop and camp. The routes down are so aesthetically constructed without billboards and with so much foliage embracing the roadway, that it feels like a highspeed Sunday afternoon drive in the country...which is what it was, with, amazingly, only one stop around Paducah, Kentucky.

My drive glimpsing the first cutting of new-mown hay (now rolled up in huge columns) and Angus cattle reminded me of our Sunday drives up to work on my grandfather's farm outside Carrollton, Illinois when I was growing up. Marring the lyricism were the bodies of deer and smaller wildlife on the side of the road as they'd dashed out of the surrounding roadside woods.

Enhancing the lyricism of the drive, though, was the fullness of the moon that first announced itself in ghost curves, and then in forthright moon-ness after the long twilight ended at 8:20 p.m.

VIEW FROM HOTEL INDIGO, aka HOTEL HAIKU

The view from my ninth floor room at Hotel Indigo on the night sky of Nashville (which likes to call itself "music city") is as glittery as a country music stage. (When I take the stairs, I find a dime, a cigarette butt, and a coffee spill on the levels going down. I love looking behind the scenes.)

Hotel Indigo bills itself as for the traveler who yearns for the uncommon experience. It's high-design with all it's communiques to guests written in Haiku structures consistent with the line and syllable count of the form.

I like the one on their note paper best:

A thought changed the world
It was on paper then grew
Doodles are thoughts too.

Ooooooooo-Kay! They call their customer communication project "A Haiku for You." If you want to find a more interesting version of that phrase, click here....Haiku for you, a collaborative project.

WHAT I'M DOING IN NASHVILLE

I'm here to record an audiobook for "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" that will also be available to download from my site as a multimedia ebook, the newest, most versatile use of the web I've seen which can incorporate text, audio and visual files, as well as external links. It will take awhile, but eventually, you'll be able to see and hear it on Riehlife.

"Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" shares good company with these other Independent Author Guild Members and their books.

Floyd Orr
Kevin Thompson
Shirley Mahood
Lynn Osterkamp
Shannon McRoberts
Joy Collins
Linda Gould
Laurel Osterkamp
Trudy Schuett

Find out more about Dianne K. Salerni's prize-winning book "High Spirits" by clicking here.

First Place Winner in the 2007 Reader Views Literary Awards

"A delightful discovery, mixing the right combination of gothic mystery and conspiracy." ~ Brian Trent, author of Remembering Hypatia

"Gone With the Wind meets The Titanic ..." ~ Rick Barber, 850 KOA in Colorado

May first. May Day is a many-splendored thing with more official holiday designations than perhaps any other day of the year. I recall as a child weaving May Day wreaths from spirea branches cut from our bushes and hanging them on our neighbors door. I especially liked hanging my wreath on Aunt Grace's door in the brown cottage.

As a woman living in Northern California, I celebrated May Day by dancing around a Maypole with other women in a secluded spot on Point Reyes.

Since May 1, 2006, though, this day has taken on another, deeper meaning. May first for me now mainly means the time my mother chose to pass from this earth. What a perfect time she chose to be the Queen of May...to culminate her lifetime graduate studies as a biology major.

Mother's high school graduation photo

For many people this May 11th will be Mothers Day. For my father and me, it's today. Today is not only Mothers Day, it is my mother's day. We won't be weaving funeral wreaths as grieving Romans did to appease Pluto, master of the Underworld. No, we'll be stepping out. Most likely we'll take an outing to Calhoun County to enjoy a day together in a place where my father and mother loved exploring and birding together...and perhaps have a country feast at Widman's Hotel. Wherever we go, and whatever we do...Mother remains our Queen of the May.

Asa way of connecting more fully with us, you can read some of my poems for Mother on the sidebar under "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary." Just look for the section titled "Sweet Little Dove." You'll also find her life story there and a moving tribute my father spoke at her graveside service.

By taking this day stepping out together we honor mother's memory and her place in our lives as she lives on in them, during the first two years following her change of destination. It is both our memorial to memory and our pilgrims' cairn on the path to the continuing future my father and I now share.