A big round of applause to Comedian-Poet Daniel Holland for being my guest blogger while I was settling into my new digs at West End Terrace in the Central West End of St. Louis. I’ll be posting more about that process next week, but this week Riehlife features six members of Women Writing the West….
In the early years of my relationship with Daniel–we were together for nine years–we went up North to a weekend Sufi dance camp, invited by a friend. This is in fact, how we met. We met on Valentine’s Day in 1998 at Sandra Wade’s healing arts studio where Barbara Christwitz led circle dances. Daniel couldn’t…
Should I write a story with big words that pays big money? Or, should I write this story that is worth only five cents but makes sense to me?
Here’s Daniel Holland’s fanciful description of his writing process.–JGR I’m good at getting the hooks and baiting the hooks. I’m frustrated though, once my line is in the water. I don’t yet know how to play the line so I can get the bites and catch the fish. There’s my line in the water, dangling,…
In “White Girl, Black Heart: summer ’59” Arletta Dawdy deals with the doubts and misgivings that concerned her going in her first Sunday service at a Black Church. “Believe me it was a “moving” experience as the church rocked! This was Lincoln Avenue Methodist Church in Pasadena and the preacher was a wise man, an…
In just a few days I’m making a huge move in my life and where I live. I’ll be moving from Lake County in Northern California to St. Louis, Missouri where I’ll just be an hour away from my father. Pop, 91, lives just across the river in SW Illinois, about 6 miles upriver from…
She walks in beauty, like the night.—Lord Byron Walking the Beauty Way. –Navajo I stand in my Mother’s shoes—a few sizes too big for me. Mother is dead and gone. She has passed over. I stand in my sister’s shoes—a few sizes too big for me. Julia is dead and gone. She has passed over….
In a workshop on sacred space, I drew a rainbow vortex, holding 4-6 crayons in my hand at a time. I loved that part. Then, looking at my crayon drawing, I wrote this letter to the rainbow vortex. Later I cut the vortex into a spiral and pasted it into my journal, folding in switchbacks…
The Story Circle Network, in cooperation with the Alkek Library’s Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, is planning a weekend writing conference to mark the publication of What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest—Story Circle Network’s new anthology of writings by women celebrating their experiences in the landscapes of the Southwest. The…
Remember Arletta Dawdy’s poem “Clara’s Air” posted May 12, 13 and 14 in three parts? Here she is again with “The Apple Factory” which grew out of a conversation in the 1970s with an elderly neighbor as they stood in her kitchen window looking out on the apple orchard that backed both their homes. Both…