The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series at Hope College will feature the program’s founder and one of his former students on Wednesday, Nov. 13.
Poet Jack Ridl, who is a retired Hope English professor, and memoirist and poet Chris Dombrowski, who is a 1998 Hope graduate, will give a reading, answer questions and sign books on Wednesday, Nov. 13, at 7 p.m. in Schaap Auditorium in the Jim and Martie Bultman Student Center.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
Jack Ridl was a member of the Hope English faculty from 1971 until retiring in 2006. He and his wife, Julie, established the Visiting Writers Series in 1982, and across the four-plus decades since hundreds of writers have visited the college, reading from their work and interacting with students. The college renamed the series in Jack’s honor in 2006 following his retirement.
National recognition for Ridl’s work has included the National Gold Medal for Best
Collection of Poetry by ForeWord Reviews and The Society of Midland Authors Best Book
of Poetry award for 2006. His collection “Losing Season” (CavanKerry Press, 2009)
was named the best sports book of the year for 2009 by The Institute for International
Sport. Then-Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected Ridl’s “Against Elegies” for the
Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award. He has been celebrated locally as Poet Laureate
of Douglas, Michigan. Every Thursday, he posts on YouTube on his vlog “The Sentimentalist.”
Students at Hope 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 his students have earned their MFA degree, and more than 100 are published, several of whom have received first book awards and other national honors.
The poems in Ridl’s latest collection “All at Once,” published by CavanKerry Press in October, are each structured as a lyrical collage that gazes in a rearview mirror over his 80 years of being, in the words of William Stafford, “an alien in an alien world, making himself at home.” Nothing eludes this poet’s attention, realization, quandary, reflection, poignancy, joy. His poems, while written in a direct style and gentle voice, weave together what usually does not belong together, leading readers to experience the reality that neither ourselves nor wherever we are is just one thing. In the words of his daughter when she was seven, “Daddy, ‘with’ is the most important word in the world because we are always ‘with.’” Each poem reveals the infinite realities of “With.”
The collection of poems, according to Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize winner in Poetry, “captures for us the surf-like oscillations of the past as it breaches our present tense. Ridl plumbs the past in order to follow the breadcrumbs to the depths of who he is, and to provide a key to the mystery of his survival… Jack Ridl is a poet whose poetry has occupied his life’s center, attested to by the number of poems he dedicates to beloved writers, acknowledging the connective tissue, the communal web.”
Dombrowski is the director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana,
and lives with his
family in Missoula. His most recent book is “The River You Touch: Making a Life on
Moving Water.” He has also authored “Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s
Most Elusive Fish” as well as three acclaimed collections of poems. When he burst
onto the literary scene with “Body of Water,” the book was acclaimed as “a classic”
(Jim Harrison) and its author compared with John McPhee.
Dombrowski begins the highly anticipated “The River You Touch” with the question: “What does a meaningful, mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the Anthropocene?” He answers initially by listening lovingly to rivers and the land they pulse through in his adopted home of Montana. Transplants from the post-industrial Midwest, he and his partner, Mary, assemble a life based precariously on her income as a schoolteacher, his as a poet and fly-fishing guide. Before long, their first child arrives, followed soon after by two more, all “free beings in whom flourishes an essential kind of knowing […], whose capacity for wonder may be the beacon by which we see ourselves through this dark epoch.” And around the young family circles a community of friends — river-rafting guides and conservationists, climbers and wildlife biologists — who seek to cultivate a way of living in place that moves beyond the mythologized West of appropriation and extraction.
Moving seamlessly from the everyday — diapers, the mortgage, a threadbare bank account — to the metaphysical — time, memory, how to live a life of integrity — Dombrowski illuminates the experience of fatherhood with intimacy and grace. Spending time in wild places with their children, he learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way — wisdom that is essential for the possibility of transformation.
Information about the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series can be found online at hope.edu/jrvws
To inquire about accessibility or if you need accommodations to fully participate in the event, please email accommodations@hope.edu. Updates related to events are posted when available at hope.edu/calendar in the individual listings.
The Jim and Martie Bultman Student Center is located at 115 E. 12th St., at the center of the Hope campus between College and Columbia avenues along the former 12th Street. Schaap Auditorium is on the lower level near the building’s southwest corner.