By Felicia Preece
I was fortunate this past weekend to attend the Michigan Hemingway Society’s annual conference, held in Bay View, as the Bill Coté Scholarship recipient. Upon my receipt of the award, I was asked to consider my time at the conference and to reflect on both what I learned over the course of the weekend, as well as what being there meant to me. I have attempted to capture that information below.
As I shared with many of the attendees, my path to Hemingway was both typical (I read The Old Man and the Sea and “Hills Like White Elephants” in high school, feeling apathetic towards any literature where I was told what to think about it) and atypical (the first novel I read on my own was A Moveable Feast, the first memoir was Gregory’s Papa, and my favorite Hemingway novel is To Have and Have Not). Throughout college, I enjoyed exploring Hemingway’s writing, but it wasn’t until I was in my first year of Graduate School at the University of Toledo when I really got involved in Hemingway Studies. That is where this story begins. With encouragement from my department chair, I submitted a paper proposal to the 2012 International Hemingway Society Conference and was accepted. The conference was to be held in Bay View that year, and it was my first visit to Michigan’s Up North. The experience was nothing short of religious. As I made my way home after the week, I stopped at Walloon Lake – across from the general store on M75 – and swam. My dedication to the life and work of Ernest Hemingway began with that “baptism.”
And here we are now, six long years later, and I am back at “the beginning of something.” Over the course of the weekend, I was able to reconnect with several of you who have always held a special place in my memory and to meet many more people who will certainly continue to be among my Hemingway Family. The talks about Hemingway’s WWI wounding and his return to Michigan gave me a deeper appreciation for his relationship to this region and strengthened my own views that Hemingway really is a de facto Michigander. Hearing how the Civil War influenced young Hemingway’s life and attitude towards war helped illuminate his treatment of the subject throughout his life. I particularly appreciated Fred Svoboda’s suggestion of the magic in Hemingway’s writing and how it would seem that the magical is a reflection back to Hemingway’s time spent in the greater Petoskey area. To me, the area IS magical and healing to the spirit, and I would like to believe that Hemingway thought so, too. While the information itself was certainly beneficial, I believe that overall, the weekend gave me the inspiration and drive to rededicate myself (although this time I decided to forego an entire baptism and settled for plunging my arm in Walloon Lake) and continue working diligently on my dissertation.
There really are not words to describe how much it meant to me to be able to be with you all this past weekend. I am looking forward to many more conferences and to hopefully build my presence within the society and help spread the love of Papa not only throughout the great state of Michigan, but everywhere. I cannot thank the Board members enough for granting me this privilege by awarding me the Coté Scholarship.