Lighting the Fire - A local poetry contest!

Friday, November 22, 2013 is the Centennial Celebration of the Ravinia Village House.  Highland Park Poetry and the Ravinia Neighbors Association are offering a $50 cash prize and featured publication on the HP Poetry website to a single poem.  The poet will also be asked to read his or her winning at the Centennial Celebration.  Below is information about the Ravinia Village House and its history by Amy Lohmolder Davies.  For a copy of the poetry contest submission guidelines and entry form, visit www.highlandparkpoetry.org.  

A Spark and a Fire

The story of the Ravinia Village House started at a June meeting of the Ravinia Women’s Club in 1912. In an apparent moment of frustration, perhaps in a flagging effort to bridge a deficit in school funding, Mrs. Robert R. Grieg is reported to have boldly stood and proclaimed “we have no civic pride!” Ravinia, in 1912 displayed a pronounced lack of community spirit. The women of the club decided that the solution was to erect a community center.

It was an ambitious undertaking into which the women dragged their men. According to archival material the accomplished artists, manufacturers and capitalists who inhabited the heavily wooded and naturally beautiful haven of Ravinia had heretofore kept largely to themselves. Archival material documenting Ravinia’s past reveals that in the early years of the 1900s “Interference with one’s neighbor’s affairs was resented and his sewer was his own business”. The village of Ravinia, which had recently been annexed to Highland Park, suffered invisibility as part of a larger city. It was written that “the council sometimes forgot we were here” and Ravinia’s lone representative, poorly backed by disinterested neighbors, had a hard time “keeping the spark of interest alive”.

And yet the women, and men inhabiting the seventy households of Ravinia finally did pull together exceeding all expectations for “sparking” civic pride. At the opening of the Ravinia Village House on November 22, 1913, their program proudly announced their “Lighting of the Fire”. It was a fire that would blaze brightly for decades.

How were these neighbors, once lacking in any zeal for communal life finally brought together so successfully? What caused them to move from disinterest to passion such that they gave so liberally? Why did they decide in 1912-13 to begin investing themselves in community? Historical records reveal clues, but much is left to our own imaginations and understandings of the human condition.

The challenge for the poet  is to help all of us wonder and reflect on how it is that any of us, in any age, might create sparks and ignite fires. How do we find our passion? Why do any of us step out from places of safety or complacency? When do we risk joining with others? What does it mean to give of ourselves? These are just some of the questions we might ponder.  The selected poem will be that which best helps us all to reflect upon how it is that sparks are ignited and fires lit.