theHemingway newsletter Publication of The Hemingway Society | No. 71 | 2019 A Year After the Epic Paris 2018 Conference, the Hemingway Society Prepares to Go into the Great Wide Open: Complete Wyoming/ Montana 2020 Coverage ne year after 518 scholars and fans gathered in Paris for the largest-ever Hemingway Society Oconference, plans are firmly in place for what will go down as one of the most unique gatherings in the organization’s forty-year history. The XIX International Hemingway “Up the river were the two peaks of Pilot and Index, Conference, “A Place to Write, Writing where we would hunt mountain-sheep later in the month, Place,” will be held July 19-25, 2020, in two venues: from July 19-22 in Sheridan, and you sat in the sun and marvelled at the formal clean- Wyoming, and July 23-25 in Cooke City, lined shape mountains can have at a distance.…” Montana. July 23 will be a partial travel day with an opportunity to stop for lunch —Ernest Hemingway, “The Clark’s Fork Valley, at the Buffalo Bill Center of theW est in Wyoming,” Vogue (February 1939) Cody, Wyoming, just east of Yellowstone National Park, before an official welcoming enthusiasm from Laramie to Cheyenne extravaganza that evening in Cooke City. cabin in the Big Horns where A Farewell up to Jackson and over to Sheridan. This is not the first Hemingway to Arms was completed or the L Bar T They’ve built the local infrastructure conference with split destinations. In Ranch where To Have and Have Not was network needed to host an international 2006 the society met first in Malaga, labored over in 1936 are now molehills, conference. Spain, before traveling to Ronda. But the not mountains. “Then, of course, everybody got wilderness environs that attracted Ernest “We’re very fortunate to have great to know Chris Warren at the Paris Hemingway to the American West, first to folks both in Sheridan and in Cooke City conference, where he delivered a fantastic Sheridan in 1928 and then to Cooke City who’ve been campaigning for some time paper. He has hiked every inch of two years later, are far more rustic than to a host a conference,” reports Grimes. southern Spain and long discouraged the “Debi Isakson and John Sutton are both society’s board from seriously pursuing at Sheridan College, which has excellent, either of these important sites for a state-of-the-art facilities, and they’ve Inside conference. been partnered for a couple of years with Paris Conference Wrap-Up ............7 Shannon Smith, director of the Wyoming According to conference director Looking Back: Key West 2004 .....12 Larry Grimes—a resident nowadays of Humanities Council, to create Hemingway PEN/Hemingway Mancos, Colorado, some 700 miles south Highways, a NEH-grant-funded, multi- of Sheridan—the time has come to pioneer arts program celebrating Hemingway’s 2019 Coverage ..............................27 a foray into the great wide open. Thanks importance throughout the state. On the Road Selling Your to the hard work of on-site residents who “Shannon, Debi, and John and Hemingway Book .........................31 other council members have been themselves have been enthusiastically The True Gen: 2018 in Facts and engaged in Hemingway programming in sponsoring community reads and Figures ............................................30 recent years, Teton-like obstacles that once forums, creating exhibitions, and staging seemed insurmountable to celebrating the theatre productions, generating a lot of And Much More! 2019 | No. 71 | 1 Hemingway’s Yellowstone and knows the sites like the back of his hand. A few years ago he received a Lewis-Reynolds- ■ Smith Founders’ Fellowship, the fruits of which will be soon be published in a book that’s guaranteed to become the definitive where-who-what-when-why about EH in the MT. Chris has really been a driving force for the conference and a great source of enthusiasm.” (According to Amazon.com, Chris’s book, Ernest Hemingway in Yellowstone Country, will be available on August 7, 2019. We recommend everyone coming to the conference nab a copy as prep!) According to John Sutton, Sheridan is eager to welcome the arrival of members and outlines a series of events as eye- popping as the landscape: “The town of Sheridan is rolling out the red carpet,” he writes. “Our breweries will be creating a Hemingway-inspired beer and local restaurants will feature Hemingway-themed cocktails during the conference. Great plenary sessions are in the works. Evening events will take place at some fabulous locations, including the Brinton Museum, the Ucross Foundation, the Whitney Center for the Arts Kinnison Hall, and the Historic Sheridan Inn.” He also promises a special appearance by another local literary legend: “The late 1920s and 1930s were years in which Hemingway shaped his own image while drawing on inspiration from the Mountain West. The emphasis on this Western perspective will continue with New York Times bestselling author Craig Johnson, who will participate in a number Ernest Hemingway in Yellowstone: the official conference image. of events and present the conference’s keynote. Johnson’s popular Longmire series features many locations that would have significantly, ecology. Chris reports that first to employ a volunteer accessibility been familiar to Hemingway.” the keynote for the Cooke City portion is coordinator to field questions about If you’re not yet a fan as Your close to inking a deal, so stay tuned for a mobility, something particularly important Correspondent is of either Craig Johnson’s big announcement. given the rugged terrain. At its May 2019 fifteen-installment Longmire mysteries or Members have also already received board meeting in Boston, the trustees the six-season TV-show starring Robert a special email encouraging them to sign asked Krista Quesenberry of Albion Taylor, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Katie up early for the Old West Cookout at College to take on this role, and Krista Sackhoff, you’re in for a treat. They’re both Yellowstone on July 24, 2020. Space is kindly agreed. hands-down some of the best plotting and limited to 185 people, so the early bird “A Place to Write, Writing Place” offers characters in suspense these days, and gets the elk, as they say. You can find Hemingway enthusiasts an introduction Johnson has a reputation as one of the more information on the website at www. to a region of the writer’s globetrotting funniest, most gregarious speakers on the hemingwaysociety.org. Be thinking if overlooked by most audiences except for literary circuit. We recommend doing your you’d rather ride in the chuck wagon from locals and a handful of hearty biographers. research as you’re brushing up on “Wine of the Roosevelt Lodge or, like Yours Truly, The website WyoHistory.org, an excellent Wyoming,” which, as its name states, was Hopalong Curnutt, you aim to take the resource, offers a great overview of the directly inspired by the area. reins of your own horse. Hi-ho, Silver! sights and friends he made during his Meanwhile, the Montana portion of Cooke City will then wrap up on July many visits: the conference promises an immersive 25, with a final event that evening. In 1928 “Hemingway had left the experience with an emphasis on outdoors In an attempt to better serve members, sweltering Midwestern heat for the cool, activities, including hiking, fly fishing, and, the conference will be the society’s clear air of the Wyoming mountains. He 2 | Hemingway newsletter Hemingway and Frances “Bunny” Thorne, the future Mrs. Bill Horne, Conference director Larry Grimes with co-directors John Sutton at the Folly Ranch, west of Sheridan, August 1928. (Wyoming Room, and Debi Isakson of Sheridan College at the Spear-O Lodge where Sheridan County Fulmer Public Library) Hemingway completed A Farewell to Arms. and [friend Bill] Horne arrived in Sheridan one seemed to know him there and when both isolation and the camaraderie of his and found their way to the Folly Ranch in they learned who he was, they didn’t seem hunter buddies to complete a novel he the Bighorn Range. The ranch log includes to care. Olive Nordquist reported that couldn’t quite get a grip on, To Have and an entry in which a Dr. Spaulding was Hemingway started each day with a big Have Not. summoned in the middle of the night to breakfast and half a bottle of wine, then Carlos Baker tells the story of how treat Hemingway’s ‘twitching insomnia,’ retired to his cabin to write. For the rest of Hemingway invited his buddy Tom likely restless leg syndrome. the day, he drank whiskey. He was working Shevlin to read over the manuscript while “That summer, at age twenty-nine, on Death in the Afternoon, his bullfight staying at the L Bar T: “Knowing his he wrote to a friend from the ranch that book. friend’s sensitivity to adverse criticism, he was ‘lonely as a bastard,’ was drinking “That first year at the L Bar T, there Tom reluctantly agreed. He admired and eating too much, and that his whole were reports of a black bear bothering Harry Morgan’s prowess, but was not at all life seemed pointless.… Bothered by the cattle on the South Fork of the Shoshone impressed by Ernest’s portrait of Richard noise and the tourists at the Folly Ranch, River. Hemingway and the other hunters Gordon.… Nor did he care for the scenes Hemingway moved to the Sheridan Inn, killed a horse, sliced it open and left it involving the drunken CCC veterans in built in 1893 by the Burlington Railroad, in the sun to rot. When the bear was Freddy’s Bar.” In a harbinger of the critical then to the Donnelly Ranch and eventually attracted, they shot her.