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Located on the shore of Lake Michigan's Little Traverse Bay, Petoskey is a quaint resort community with unmatched beauty and charm. Here you can walk in the footsteps of a young Ernest Hemingway and experience the environment of his Nick Adams stories. |
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The conference sessions will be held in the Victorian community of Bay View, a National Historic Landmark.
Bay View was settled by Michigan Methodists in 1875. Around 1885, the organizers added cultural programs to the religious and intellectual activities, and emphasized music, theatre and current events. Many famous and notable speakers, writers, poets, and politicians lectured here.
Ernest's aunt Grace was a guest speaker at Bay View, and the John M. Hall Auditorium was named after his mother's cousin. Tradition has it that Ernest himself spent time writing in Evelyn Hall, one of the buildings we will use during the conference. |
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Of all the places where Ernest Hemingway lived and visited, perhaps none was more instrumental to his development as a literary artist than Northern Michigan. It was here that he developed a precise sense of place and gained the essential outdoor skills he would use for the rest of his life. Here he befriended people who, for better or worse, would later become characters in his work.
While spending each summer between his birth and his nineteenth year at the family cottage on Walloon Lake, Ernest grew to love the people, the rolling hills, the forests, the open farm lands, the wide waters of the lakes and the deep chill of the trout streams.
As a young man he wrote of these places and people in such stories as “The Three Day Blow,” “The End of Something,” “The Last Good Country,” and “Summer People.” Here young Ernest Hemingway came to know Native American people personally, some of whom he later immortalized in such short stories as “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “Ten Indians,” “Indian Camp,” and “Fathers and Sons.”
Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, a work often neglected by critics, is set in Petoskey, Michigan. Today numerous sites described in the novel still exist and can easily be visited on a walking tour of Petoskey. Other Hemingway related sites can be visited along well traveled highways. Much of the area has changed little since Ernest was there.
As depicted in “The Big Two Hearted River,” Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was also a force at work on the literary artist. Here are the same geographical features Nick saw. The once burned over town of Seney remains, its old depot now serving as a museum. Trout still hold steady in the stream below the railroad bridge. Kingston Plain, an area burned over in the early twentieth century, still lies barren. A cathedral of pines stands near the highway, and the blue hills marking the shore of Lake Superior continue to rise to the north. Travelers to the area will appreciate the landscapes that Hemingway portrayed in writings as vividly as Cezanne portrayed the French countryside in paintings.
Today Northern Michigan is a tourist’s Mecca. The scenic landscape, the beauty of Little Traverse Bay (which Ernest claimed was as beautiful as the Bay of Naples), and the ready availability of cultural opportunities continue to attract visitors in the twenty-first century. Just as the Hemingway family traveled to Windemere to live as “summer people,” so do thousands of contemporary families scatter across the area. Hotels and Victorian homes abound as they did a century ago .
At the Up In Michigan conference you are invited to experience the environment that so richly influenced both the literary genius of Hemingway's writings and the choices he made in his personal life.