Sextet of authors to appear at senior center

PALMER — Six Alaskan authors, some of them with Valley connections, are headed to the Palmer Senior Center Friday.

The event starts at noon, today at the senior center at 1132 S. Chugach St. in Palmer. Listed on the bill for book discussions and signings are:

• Ken and Eleanor Anderson, authors of “The Adventures of Myo and Ning”

• C. David Gleason, who wrote “Living Life to the Limit in the Last Frontier”

• Katie Halley, author of “Running Red”

• Janette Riehle, who wrote two books, “Tales of the Trapline” and “Tales of the Fishing Beach”

• Dora Wheeler, who wrote “Our Favorite Alaska Recipes

Halley’s book, Running Red, has a short-but-sweet description on the website Good Reads:

“Annie finds herself in a difficult and unusual situation. Her sister Louise is missing, taken by invisible creatures with hissing voices! Her parents do nothing, seeming not to care at all. A magical horse, called Red Mare, learns of the sister’s abduction. Realizing this is the horse’s final act of fulfilling prophecy, she takes Annie into her world. A place where vines are alive and the enemies are shadows,” it reads, in full.

Descriptions on the same site for Riehle’s books are longer. They explain that the books are memoirs of a different time in Alaska, of a rough-and-tumble existence in a still-wild country.

Reached by phone at her home near Butte, Riehle describes her work as a family biography. It starts with the story of her parents moving to Alaska in the 1930s and getting married in 1937.

Riehle grew up in a homestead off of what is now Maud Road. Her family homesteaded here before the Depression-era Matanuska Colonists arrived. She still lives on part of the original 160 acres.

“The first book goes to ’45 and which time they had all four of us kids and you know the nearest neighbor is a half a day’s trip and or something like that and we all survived,” Riehle said.

She said she goes to book signings a lot. People tell her they enjoy the book, an assessment her husband, Wallace Reihle, backs up.

“People get started reading it they just can’t put it down,” Wallace Reihle said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.