The first time my mother disparaged my weight, I was thirteen. I wore a size 7. My best friend and I were shopping, finding outfits for the fashion show our dramatic choir […]
The Weight Dilemma
Dear Sister: A Gratitude Letter
Dear Sister, A friend is doing a gratitude diary and it’s been helping her a lot, so I thought I’d try as well. I believe in the practice of gratitude, have seen […]
A Must Read Essay
The author of the essay “Whatever Happened to ________?” published anonymously, because she had to. Stalked by an ex-husband who freaked out due to her greater success as a writer, she has […]
Poetry Chain Letter
I’ve recently been the recipient of a handful of chain email plans, all with one idea: share quotes from poems that have been meaningful, inspiring, or comforting to you. The details of […]
Why I Bought a Golden Retriever Puppy—Even Though I Believe in Rescue
In the 1990s, I had two Golden Retrievers that I took over from my mother. She’d found that they needed too much exercise and she didn’t have the energy for them, and […]
6 REASONS TO PRE-ORDER MY POETRY BOOK
Love Songs from the End of the World poetry by Katherine Riegel Main Street Rag Publishing 2019 1. You save money! It’s $8.50 plus shipping right now; the normal price […]
Let’s School Together
I’m always sure it can’t be real when something good happens for me, especially something having to do with my career. So when my poem appeared on Verse Daily on April 1, […]
On Losing Weight
A rant in no particular order. 1. I need to lose weight for health reasons (blood pressure, cholesterol, stress on the joints, etc.). I’m not so enlightened that I’d be sorry to […]
On the Writing Process
I don’t believe there is a strategy that guarantees success, and the things we are so often told to do—because successful writers do them—may not be universal. That is, we think they’re successful strategies because successful writers engage in them, but what if they just work particularly well for those particular writers? What if our own individual processes must be designed specifically for us, an extension of who we are and also a creation of our own weird and wondrous imaginations?
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A Laugh for Boxing Day
It’s December 26th—Boxing Day in the U.K.—and my English husband is at work. Here in America, it seems, one day off for Christmas is enough. In England, Boxing Day means shopping, visiting […]
The Gloria Sirens 