From 1976-1980, studied Creative Writing at the University of Victoria, with Charles Lillard, Derk Wynand, P.K. Page, W.D. Valgardson, Dave Godfrey, and Robin Skelton.

Poetry explores the land on which he lives and where he grew up in an immigrant culture developing orchards and vineyards in the fertile Okanagan Valley. In the juxtaposition of new European cultures and an ancient land, Rhenisch sees again the Kenya of the 1920s portrayed by Karen Blixen in Out of Africa. After waiting in vain for a V.S. Naipaul to write of the colonial plantation cultures of the Okanagan, Rhenisch turned his sense of the land into a vehicle capable of speaking for a complex contemporary world: the autobiographical fiction of Out of the Interior: The Lost Country.

For over thirty years, Rhenisch has striven to create an authentic literature for the silent rural parts of Canada, to place their images and dialects on an equal footing with those of the modern urban world. At the same time, he has been a student of Ezra Pound, post-modern German literature, and trickster mythology. For Rhenisch, the work of starting a new literature is paramount, centred in the workings of consciousness and mythology.