ARTIST IN RESIDENCE @ One River Zen
Call for Artists:
An Autumn Residency at One River Zen
Open Call: Zen and Creativity Artist-in-Residence Program
October 7th - December 5, 2026
One River Zen and the Ottawa Center for the Arts are pleased to announce the return of the Artist-in-Residence Program, presented as a collaborative exploration of the intersection of Zen practice and creativity.
This eight-week program is open to artists, writers, musicians, performers, and other creative individuals at every level of experience. No previous experience with Zen or meditation is required.
The Eight-Week Program
The core program will include four lectures examining the relationship between contemplative practice and the creative process. Each lecture will be accompanied by a creative assignment, giving participants an opportunity to explore the material through their own artistic discipline. Participants will gather to share their work and reflect upon the creative process in a supportive group setting.
The Residency Track
From the general participants, two individuals will be selected as Artists in Residence. In addition to taking part in the full eight-week program, the Artists in Residence will:
· Attend a weekend Zen retreat.
· Meet weekly to integrate Zen practice .
· Focus on integrating the Three Transformative Touchstones of the Eternal Spring Order into their creative practice: Maintain wonder, Include everything, Allow compassion to flow.
The Culmination
The program will conclude with a public gathering at which the two Artists in Residence will present the work they developed during the residency. Other participants will also have opportunities to share their creative explorations throughout the eight weeks.
This initiative is intended to build meaningful connections among contemplative practice, artistic expression, and the wider Ottawa community. Consideration will be given to Artist-in-Residence applicants who are interested in deepening their work through contemplative experience, creative experimentation, and community engagement.
2026 Artist-in-Residence Class Schedule
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2026
Class One: The Creative Way
Drawing upon Zen teachings on attention, nonattachment, and wholehearted activity, we will consider how creative work changes when we release the conceptual demands that confine it. Participants will explore the habits that narrow creativity, including comparison, perfectionism, self-consciousness, and the desire to know the outcome before beginning. Creative practice is not separate from life. It is a way of entering fully into what is already here.
ISSUE ASSIGNMENT ONE: René Parks Wendinger
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2026
Class Two: Maintain Wonder: Seeing Before Knowing
Wonder begins when certainty loosens its grip. It is the willingness to encounter something directly without the need to understand it.
This lecture explores beginner’s mind, curiosity, and sustained attention as sources of creative vitality. Participants will consider how names, judgments, habits, and expectations can cause us to overlook the richness of ordinary experience. We will practice seeing beyond the first impression of our judgements and engage with a subject directly, allowing its true nature to reveal itself.
Maintaining wonder asks us to meet the world without reducing it too quickly. In creative practice, wonder becomes the ability to see more, listen more deeply, and allow the work to surprise us.
ASSIGNMENT ONE PRESENTATIONS: Before the Name [René Parks Wendinger]
ISSUE ASSIGNMENT TWO: Douglas Dalrymple
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2026
Class Three: Include Everything: Creating Without Rejection
Creative work often begins with selection, but it is diminished by rejection. We dismiss an idea as wrong, an emotion as inappropriate, an imperfection as failure, or an interruption as something that does not belong.
This lecture examines the Zen practice of inclusion and its relationship to artistic freedom. To include everything does not mean placing everything into a single work. It means refusing to divide experience prematurely into what is worthy and unworthy of attention. Mistakes, limitations, uncertainty, silence, conflict, and even resistance can become part of the creative process.
Participants will explore what they habitually exclude from their work and consider how greater inclusion might deepen both their artistic practice and their capacity to meet life as it is.
ASSIGNMENT TWO PRESENTATIONS: At the Edge of Attention [Douglas Dalrymple]
ISSUE ASSIGNMENT THREE: Jay Reed
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2026
Class Four: Let Compassion Flow–Creating in Response to the World
When we maintain wonder, we begin to see more clearly. When we include everything, we stop turning away from what we see. From this openness, compassion can arise.
This final lecture explores creativity as a response to our encounter with the world. Compassion cannot be forced or manufactured. It emerges when we remain present to beauty and suffering, joy and grief, intimacy and injustice, without putting blinders on. Creative practice gives this compassionate response a form through its own medium.
Participants will consider how their work might bear witness, deepen understanding, restore dignity, or create a space in which what was hidden is now seem. The aim is not to produce work that delivers a moral lesson or provides an answer. It is to create the conditions through which the creative act of compassion can flow.
The true artist not a maker of objects, they are the one who meets the world attentively and allows that encounter point a way to Oneness.
ASSIGNMENT THREE PRESENTATIONS: Do Not Turn Away [Jay Reed]
ISSUE ASSIGNMENT FOUR: The Shape of what is Missing[Sensei Brunner, et al]
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2026
Class Five: Artist Presentations
ASSIGNMENT FOUR PRESENTATIONS: The Shape of what is Missing[Sensei Brunner, et al]
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE PRESENTATIONS