Poetry Is Where You Find It

with Jane Desmond

Saturday, August 24, 2024, 10:00 a.m–1:00 p.m

Tuition: $75

This workshop includes lunch at 1:00 p.m.

This half-day workshop invites participants to find the poetry in Saugatuck’s history by transforming observations of the local landscape and its social history into works of visual and textual art. Taking the rich cultural and ecological history of Saugatuck and Ox-Bow as our starting point, we’ll explore and then transform copies of historical documents, which will be provided, into “found poems” through simple techniques of selection, amplification, and visual enhancement. Participants will leave with a hand-made work of art combining text, color, and line that reveals hidden expressive meaning in plain documents from the past, like storm reports, newspaper headlines, and ephemera regarding the history of Ox-Bow itself. No background in writing poetry or formal art training is required! Participants of all levels of experience can enjoy this process to create something new from the past.

Jane Desmond is a poet, anthropologist, and former choreographer who works broadly across the arts and humanities. Her work has appeared in books, national print journals, on television, in film, and even on a billboard. As a teacher, she brings several decades of experience to teaching interdisciplinary classes both in the U.S. and abroad, including at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where has been featured multiple times on the list of "Teachers ranked as Excellent by their Students." Her creative and scholarly work has been funded by the NYState Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and through residencies at Write On Door County!, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Cummington Community for the Arts. Skilled in archival work, she will draw on Saugatuck's special history and local archives to bring the past alive in "found poetry" workshops that combine words and visuals and are easily accessible by both poets, visual artists, and the general public alike. Come find a poem in the past!

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.

Here’s What Matters

with Jack Ridl

Date: Saturday, June 22, 2024, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Tuition: $125

This workshop includes lunch at 1:00 p.m.

Workshop participants will spend the day exploring, through their preferred form of writing, the things that have profoundly impacted their own lives—whether they are funny, traumatic, serious, sorrowful, or joyous. Using Jack’s suggestions, writers will first talk with one another about what subject they have chosen. Then, they will have time to explore that choice in writing, after which the group will engage in a delightful debriefing about what showed up as they wrote, culminating in a deeply memorable day.

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.

Writing the Landscape

with Kathryn Remlinger

Date: Saturday, June 8, 2024, 10:00 a.m–1:00 p.m

Tuition: $75

This workshop includes lunch at 1:00 p.m.

The landscape is shaped by meanings reflected in colors, images, text, sounds, and signs that make up the natural and built environments surrounding us. Language and image are central to these meanings, and together they create a “languagescape” that make a place recognizable and identifiable. Workshop attendees will apply participant observation methods and mindful writing practices to describe the landscape surrounding Ox-Bow and analyze reflected meanings. Optionally, participants may incorporate collage, illustration, and/or found objects to their writing.

Kathryn Remlinger’s work relies on participant observation, ethnography, and mindful writing practices. Her research and publications are grounded in socio-cultural linguistic and linguistic landscape approaches to examine the role of language in meaning-making, place-making, and identity performance. Her publications include the book, Yooper Talk: Dialect as Identity in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and academic and popular press articles. She has taught writing for nearly 40 years to middle-schoolers, university students, and workshop participants, and for over 10 years she has integrated mindfulness practices into her daily routine and teaching. She has participated in and facilitated mindfulness workshops at Grand Valley State University and Paradigm Wellness Center in Grand Haven, Michigan. She holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University with a concentration in sociolinguistics.

Image courtesy of the artist.