Browse Exhibits (3 total)

Welcome to the Lake Forest Literary Festival 2012:  "The New Nature Writing"

The English Department is pleased to invite you to participate in the Lake Forest Literary Festival that will take place from Monday, February 27 through Wednesday, February 29.

The 8th Annual Lake Forest Literary Festival is brought to you this year by the Department of English, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, the Environmental Studies Program, and the American Studies Program, with additional support from the Mojekwu Fund. The theme of this year’s festival is “The New Nature Writing”: we have invited a bevy of poets and prose writers whose work explores, often from surprising angles, questions of place, the nature of home, and ecology. 

Our keynote speaker is John Elder, a noted literary critic who emphasizes environmental issues in his work. Other participants include our 2012 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer in Residence, the fiction writer Elizabeth Gentry, who will be introduced by the writer who selected her manuscript, novelist Kate Bernheimer. Poets Brenda Iijima and Ed Roberson, whose attention to issues of gender and race pushes the boundaries of ecopoetics, will read from their work and take part in a panel discussion featuring John Elder and myself. We are also fortunate to have the gonzo environmental writer and memoirist Mark Spitzer, fiction writer Lucy Ferriss, and the Tahitian Francophone author Rai Chaze as participants.

All best,

Josh Corey

The events will be held in Meyer Auditorium in Hotchkiss Hall on the College’s Middle Campus unless otherwise noted.

Events sponsored by the Dean of the Faculty, American Studies Program, the English Department, Artist-in-Residence, Student Government, and the Mojekwu Fund.

The Ragdale Scrapbook is a thick three ring binder holding archival family and Ragdale photographs.  The photos are labeled in Alice Hayes's handwriting with short captions.  There are also some articles, copies of architectural plans and a late 1930s planting plan for the ca. 1912-created Howard and Frances Shaw garden. Along with the Scrapbook, the library has large black and white photograph of a plan of the Ragdale estate by students of the Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

The Ragdale Scrapbook grew out of two events: Alice Ryerson Hayes' effort in the late 1980s to develop a guidebook to Ragdale (published 1990), and her decision to move out of the house into the nearby cabin in the 1990s.  She put the scrapbook together following the order in which material appeared in the guidebook, and conveyed it to Arthur Miller when he was her immediate successor as president of the Ragdale Foundation in the early 1990s. 

In the early 2000s, Lake Forest College student Sharon Milroy (Reid) and Arthur Miller met with Mrs. Hayes and went through the scrapbook to flesh out from her memory more about the photos and other items.  These recollections were transcribed by Sharon, and a new list of the Scrapbook contents was prepared then.

This online exhibit includes high-resolution images of every item in the Ragdale Scrapbook, together with cataloging descriptions based on the finding aid prepared by Sharon Milroy.

Thanks to LIT student workers Stephen de Wolff, Manu Kottoorazhikam, Paulius Kuprys, and Kelsey Small.