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Author Peter Ferry takes a walk on the mild side at Ragdale

A lot of great books have come to life at Ragdale, the renowned artists’ retreat in north suburban Lake Forest, but Peter Ferry’s novels are not among them.

Yet, there he was one recent sun-splashed afternoon last week, enjoying the solitude and the beauty of this 55-acre parcel of the planet.

“This really is a lovely place,” he said. “A quiet, beautiful place set aside just for artists is a wonderful asset, a great luxury, and I mean not just for Lake Forest but for Chicago.”

Ferry has known Ragdale for many years because it was, in a real sense, his neighbor. Though he and his wife spend their time in homes in Evanston and Michigan, he taught English for nearly three decades at Lake Forest High School, which is about a mile from Ragdale.

He would occasionally visit with some of his students, and a few of them eventually wound up spending quiet time as residents there, closeted in rooms, trying to make books come to life.

Ferry does his writing in longhand, but before it reaches that stage, it is being “composed in my head,” he says. “I like to take walks, and when I am ready to put pen to paper I will sit on a park bench or sometimes find a place in Norris Hall (the student center at Northwestern University).”

The results of these walks have been two terrific novels.

“Travel Writing” was published in 2008 and was greeted with great critical praise. A sampling: “An absolute pleasure to read. It is ensnaring, funny, suspenseful, smart and poignant,” wrote Donna Seaman in the Tribune, and “A novel that, for all the cleverness of its construction, is also earnest, engrossing and affecting” came from Publishers Weekly.

Arriving in a couple of weeks is “Old Heart,” a stunning story. In bright and precise prose it tells of 85-year-old Tom Johnson, a World War II vet who decides, much to the alarm of his maybe-dad-should-be-in-a-nursing-home grown children, to find the woman who he believes to have been the great love of his life, lost over decades and, perhaps, for good. And so off he goes, to a lovely town in the Netherlands and all manner of quiet joys and revelations as well as complications, both legal and emotional.

This is a novel of love and of loss and of self-determination. “Old Heart” moves through time and grabs your interest on every page and will stay with you for keeps.

One of Ferry’s former students has nice things to say about it.

Dave Eggers, who went on from high school to become one of the leading literary figures of our time (editor, writer, publisher, educator), says this: “‘Old Heart’ manages to weave together an astonishing array of themes and layers — the perils and freedoms of old age, the complexity of family ties, the liberation of travel, and finally, Ferry presents and proves the bold and needed idea that it’s never too late to re-open the past to recast the present.”

He also says that the novel is a “page turning book of ideas that has the power to change lives.”

Ferry is originally from West Virginia, and earned a B.A. from Ohio University and an M.A. in English literature at Northwestern University. After a few years editing and writing textbooks for Rand McNally and Co., he moved to the Lake Forest High School classrooms.

Though he has been a frequent contributor to the Tribune’s travel pages for many years and written short stories for various publications, he knows better than most that writing a novel is not easy work. ” ‘Travel Writing’ took me seven years to write,” he says. “This new one took me five years to write and then two arduous years to find a publisher.”

Two years? That’s another example that the publishing industry is a mess, focused on finding blockbusters while trying to figure out how to profitably navigate this e-book world.

Ragdale is an oasis of quiet creativity in our increasingly commercialized climate. It is a place for writers, painters, musicians, choreographers and, recently, architects. They come in all styles, ages, backgrounds and personalities, 150 of them each year accepted as artists-in-residence.

They stay from two to six weeks in the hope that they will benefit from, as Ragdale’s website puts it, “uninterrupted time for dedicated work, a supportive environment, dynamic artist exchanges, 50 acres of idyllic prairie and a family-style dinner each evening.”

It would be impossible to catalog the benefits received by these hundreds of artists, but Alex Kotlowitz, who was there more than two decades ago, says, “I love Ragdale.”

He made one and only visit, four weeks while in the midst of writing what would be his 1991 best-selling and award-winning “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America,” about Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers and their lives in the Henry Horner housing project in the West Town neighborhood.

“The beauty of Ragdale is that I got to spend this intimate time with other writers,” says Kotlowitz. “Many had considerably more experience, and their insights and support was invaluable, especially given that this was my first book.”

Ragdale was built in 1897 as the country estate of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw and his family. His buildings are still to be found in Lake Forest, Hyde Park and on the Gold Coast. The University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club is his design, as is Market Square, that U-shaped crowd of Lake Forest shops often cited as the first planned shopping center in the United States.

Ragdale remained a country estate until 1976, when Shaw’s granddaughter, poet Alice Judson Hayes, created the Ragdale Foundation, a nonprofit artist’s community, and invited artists to stay for a while. During those early years, she was in charge of everything, from mowing the lawn to cooking meals.

Eventually the foundation acquired more property and buildings. Embellished by a $3.2 million restoration in 2012 and featuring an outdoor performance space called the Ragdale Ring, it is a site to behold, and to stroll.

And you can. In recent years there has been a concerted effort on the part of those who run Ragdale to build awareness of not only its history, but its continuing vitality. This is being accomplished by opening to the public for tours, performances and other events.

The docent-led tours for individuals and groups start June 6 and take place Saturdays through the summer. Visitors will not only see Shaw’s handsome home, but the places where artists live and work, and will be able to wander the well-tended gardens and view the spectacular 50 acres of surrounding prairie.

Performances of various types — cabaret, vaudeville, storytelling, orchestral folk music — take place in the Ragdale Ring, a space long ago used for theatrical pieces staged by Shaw’s playwright wife, Frances. (All information about the performances and tours and other public events can be found at www.ragdale.org).

And so Ferry walked around and posed for photos and later got around to the question of creativity and how it relates to two of his most successful former students, Eggers and actor Vince Vaughn.

“What Dave and Vince (he was never in a class of his, but Ferry did work with Vaughn in speech and drama) had in common even more than great talent was vision. They knew what they wanted and went out to get it. I’m not talking about ambition. I really mean vision in the sense of artistic compulsion. They just believed in themselves. They were compelled to follow their hearts and minds. Neither one was interested in anyone talking to them about long shots or impracticality or putting meat on the table.”

That is one of the things that defines creativity: that urge to follow the heart and mind. It can happen anywhere: in classrooms, in the quiet spaces at Ragdale or on long walks through the leafy streets of Evanston.

rkogan@tribpub.com