New Beginnings in Creative Community
with Jack and Meridith Ridl
DATE: Saturday, June 29, 2024, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Tuition: $125
This workshop includes lunch at 1:00 p.m.
Jack and Meridith Ridl believe that the doing of art and writing brings about realizations and valuable experiences that can happen no other way. They also have more than 60 combined years spent “de-threatening” the art-making process. They offer a workshop that starts something for participants. They hope that you will leave at home any notions of departing Ox-Bow with something completed; instead, they will encourage you to start many things – written pieces, creative notions, seeds of ideas. They strive to create an “Instant Community” where conversation throughout the day is stimulating, a joy, worthwhile; where participants become “Instant Friends.”
Jack Ridl, Poet Laureate of Douglas, Michigan (Population 1100), is the author of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press). His Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (WSUPress, 2013) was co-recipient of the National Gold Medal for Best Collection of Poetry by ForeWord Reviews. His collection Broken Symmetry (WSUPress) was co-recipient of The Society of Midland Authors best book of poetry award for 2006. His Losing Season (CavanKerry Press) was named the best sports book of the year for 2009 by The Institute for International Sport. Then Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected his Against Elegies for The Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award. Individual poems have been published in The Georgia Review, Poetry, Colorado Review, Rattle, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Field, Poetry East, and elsewhere.The students at Hope College named him both their Outstanding Professor and their Favorite Professor, and in 1996 The Carnegie (CASE) Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. More than 85 of Jack’s students have earned their MFA degree and over 100 are published, several of whom have received First Book Awards, national honors. Every Thursday Jack hosts and posts on YouTube his monologue “The Sentimentalist.”For further information about Jack, his website is www.ridl.com.
Meridith Ridl is an artist and an art teacher Holland Public Schools. Much of her painting and drawing work explores gestures that might suggest tenderness, humor, gentleness, loneliness…arrangements that might have a wobble, or that ""aren’t quite right."" Her work ranges from meditative, delicate, and quiet to more tipsy and quirky. She recieved a BA in Studio Art from the College of Wooster and MFA from the University of Michigan. Her work is represented by Lafontsee Gallery in Grand Rapids, MI. He first illustrated book (The Lake Michigan Mermaid by authors Linda Nemec Foster and Anne-Marie Oomen was given a Michigan Notable Book Award in 2019.
Meridith Ridl, Pause, 2020, acrylic on panel, 11” x 14”