New Year’s: Practice & Pasture of the Creative Life

If you are seeking funds or alternate payment options to participate in this program, please wait to register and first complete our Financial Assistance Application. 

This New Year’s retreat is an invitation to slow down into creative awareness of our inner lives and reflect on the world we will navigate through the coming year. Attendees will explore how artistic and poetic practices can help us give ourselves the gift of pasture – that space our spirits need to wander, play, and struggle to better meet the world with peace and integrity. The retreat is co-facilitated by artist, Todd Drake, and poet, Robin Reid Drake. Together, this father/child duo bring an intergenerational, interdisciplinary perspective to a generative exploration of creative, spiritual paths. This retreat is open to novices and experienced artists alike and will involve reading, writing, and workshopping diverse poetic forms including visual poetry, as well as printmaking, drawing, and collage in the Pendle Hill Art Studio.

Download the flyer to share with your community

This retreat culminates in an alcohol-free New Year’s Eve celebration, with hors d’oeuvres and a home-cooked dinner, lively concert in the Barn, desserts, and midnight candlelit Meeting for Worship. This event is already included with your registration to this retreat!

Leaders

Robin Reid Drake is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary poet, filmmaker, and educator originally from Greensboro, North Carolina. Their writing has been published in Foglifter, DREGINALD, UnderStory Quarterly, and Poetry Magazine, among others. They have received fellowships and residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, the Elsewhere Living Arts Museum, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Drake teaches in Chicago public schools through Young Chicago Authors, helps organize the annual ”Rooted & Radical Youth Poetry Festival,” the US’s largest youth poetry festival, and has lectured at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they received their MFA.

Todd Drake  is an artist and teacher living in the East Village area of Manhattan in New York City. During the COVID pandemic he and his wife stayed to continue running Penington Friends House, a Quaker collaborative community. Drake has also collaborated with other Quakers in creating “Quaker Canvassing Peace Walks” that allow Friends to engage successfully with other people across political divides. Today, Drake continues to print and post his linocuts and silkscreens. His most recent posters speak to how war begets war. Originally from North Carolina where he earned an MFA in Painting, he was also a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chapel Hill. Drake has exhibited his work all over the United States and overseas, including in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine. Drake is a member of the Brooklyn Monthly Meeting. You can learn more about Drake from his Pendle Hill First Monday Lecture, Graffiti as Witness: The Art and Activism of a Quaker Pirate, and follow his work on Instagram @QuakerPirate.