The Vero Beach Book Festival
Program of the
Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation
Laura Riding was a widely noted avant-garde poet of the 1920’s, and the only female member of the “Fugitives” group, which included Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom. She moved to Europe in 1925 at the invitation of English writer Robert Graves, and lived and collaborated with him in Egypt and Europe for fourteen years. Eventually they settled in Majorca, Spain, where they ran a small literary press and hosted many international scholars and writers. In 1939, Riding and Graves came to the United States to continue their work promoting international peace through writing, taking up residence in the Pennsylvania home of time magazine poetry critic, Schuyler B. Jackson. That summer, Riding renounced poetry and ended her relationship with Graves. She married Jackson in 1941 and moved with him to Wabasso, Florida, where they bought a small frame home and an 11 acre citrus grove.
The Jacksons raised citrus organically for a gift fruit business and worked on an unprecedented dictionary in which each word had only one definition. They set aside the dictionary when they recognized they had to first set forth their philosophy of language. Schuyler died in 1968, but Laura continued the project, completing it with the assistance of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She won the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1990. Laura (Riding) Jackson died in Sebastian, Florida on September 2, 1991. The Jackson’s treatise was published in 1997 as Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words and Supplementary Essays by the University Press of Virginia. She is recognized in Who’s Who in 20th Century Literature as “The most consistently good woman poet of all time”. Her official biography, A Mannered Grace, by Elizabeth Friedmann, was published by Persea in January 2005.
The Jackson’s home was constructed about 1890 when the region was a wilderness. It is a good example of Florida’s historic “cracker” style of vernacular architecture. Because Laura lived in her very simply and rustically furnished home without electricity (until 1989 when live-in aides insisted on having it), the house reflects a way of life that would have been characteristic of a much earlier time.
After her death in 1991, the house was threatened with demolition, so in 1992 a group of concerned individuals including Steven Mohler, Greg Smith and Rene VanDeVoorde created the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation, a private nonprofit organization, to move the home to the grounds of the environmental learning Center. Through the leadership of Charlotte Terry, and with the help of others, the Foundation has used Laura’s home and its preservation to build programs and literary activities including public educational programs in literature, history, architecture and the environment. Activities ranged from poetry readings for adults to a tour of the home. The home, registered as Friends of the Library USA National Literary Landmark and listed on the Florida literary Map, was severely damaged during Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne and is presently closed to the pubic while being restored.
The Foundation’s public programs, including Teen Writers Workshops, which have served over 800 9th through 12th graders from six Florida counties and English language students at the University of Hanoi (funded thou the International cultural exchange program), are offered in other venues because of the small size of the historic home.
Planning for the 1st Vero Beach Book Festival began in 2004, but the Book Festival was rescheduled to November of 2005 due to the extensive damage Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne did to the community. The Book Festivals are staged in multiple venues throughout the older downtown Vero Beach as an expression of the foundation’s commitment to the community’s heritage assets.
The Foundation achieves its mission by emphasizing in its public programs the skills and dedication required to be a good writer, the possibilities of a life devoted to writing and the value of a lifelong engagement with great literature. The Foundation’s vision is to become a primary provider of literary and humanities-based programs for a broad range of audiences.
For more information about Laura and the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation, please visit the Foundation’s website www.lauraridingjackson.com.
“New From Laura (Riding) Jackson”
August 2007
Nottingham Trent University of England has developed a new website on Laura (Riding) Jackson
The University of Michigan has just published The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language edited by John Nolan. Harper’s magazine is reprinting an excerpt from The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language in their October issue. The excerpt is entitled “Notes for the Time of Ultimate Candor”.
