Yellow Butterfly A Creative Talent's Struggle with Mental Illness

Yellow Butterfly showcases not only the budding poetic and visual talents of a promising young artist, but it also chronicles her struggles with increasingly debilitating episodes of psychosis as she attempted to negotiate high school, college, and young adulthood. The potential of her creative voice, easily seen in her earliest work, becomes even more apparent in her later poems. Like a shore bird’ s tracks in the sand, her sparse but keen use of language reveals an authenticity of style and a sense of how far she may have gone on her poetic journey. Confessional at times, Dorie Reichert does not use these revelations to shock us but to help us begin to unpack her experience. Knowing all too well how the world outside of her illness misconceives the landscape she navigated, her poetry offers us a way inside of it by using direct and honest imagery.

Dorie Reichert (1977-2003) grew up in Duluth, Minnesota and was a uniquely talented writer and visual artist, whose life and work would be compelling even without their insights into serious mental illness. She was, by her own description, an “ unordinary” youth whose commitment to community service set an example for others regardless of age. “ I’ m not on a mission to solve all the world’ s problems, only to understand them.” She recorded this mission in poetry, prose, drawings and photographs. At age 26 on July 18, 2003 Dorie died instantly in an automobile accident. Bob Reichert received his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from Purdue University (1961), and has a Master in Urban Planning degree from Michigan State University (1970). He worked for 15 years in city planning for private firms and public agencies, and owned and managed a small real estate investment company for almost 30 years. He has held many volunteer positions, including as his church treasurer for 11 years. Dorie Reichert was his eldest child.