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Scott Rechlin: Many chapters in the story of author Ernest Hemingway have been written. One of those is the story of a young Hemingway and his family's summers in northern Michigan. First published in 2010, “Picturing Hemingway's Michigan”, Hemingway researcher Mike Federspiel recently republished the book in paperback. He spoke with WCMU's David Nicholas.
David Nicholas: What guided building that collection that's so extensive?
Mike Federspiel: Well, it just started with me, really, and looking for Michigan-related things and things in general on Hemingway. And really, there are multiple Hemingways. There's the old man fishing in Cuba, there's the “Running with the Bulls” Hemingway in Spain, there's the war Hemingway. But I was most interested in the Michigan part. And I knew the Clark Historical Library focused on, among other things, Michigan authors. So, working with Frank Bowles, director of the Clark, and Tom Moore, I decided I would donate my collection to them. We would set up an endowment to allow for future purchases and maintenance of a collection and really worked with them to start looking at items that were unique to Hemingway's Michigan time as an author and as a person. And then over the years, as things came up, we, as best we could, snatched them or convinced people to donate. And the collection now is absolutely one of the premier Hemingway collections in the United States, and certainly the place to go if you're interested in his Michigan connections, because it not only has a great deal of information, personal information, family information about him, but it also contains local historical information about the northwest part of Michigan.
DN: Were these pictures that Hemingway himself took? I mean, that's kind of where all of the inspiration for this came from.
MF: I had been the president of the Michigan Hemingway Society for several years and had been working with the Clark. In 2007, the Michigan Humanities Council decided they would institute a program called the Great Michigan Read. And the idea was to have everybody in the state, or many people at least, read a single work of literature and then have them talk about it. And we got a call. We, the Michigan Hemingway Society, got a call from the director of the Humanities Council saying, “We've chosen the Nick Adams stories for the first Michigan Read.” Wonderful. “Would you like to submit applications for grants to create things that would support that?” Sure. And so Frank Bowles and I sat down, and we came up with seven different proposals and grants for everything, from a traveling exhibition to an exhibition at the Crooked Tree Arts Center, to publications to a Hemingway tour, which would have sign postings in Northern Michigan. We submitted all seven and waited for a response. In a short amount of time, we got a response and they said, “Congratulations, you got it.” We thought if you get one grant, maybe two, you've really done something. We got all seven. And so, all of a sudden, we had work to do and needed background material. Frank and I went out to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston where Ernest Hemingway's archive is and looked for pictures, looked for quotes, used his family's scrapbooks that his mother had put together, photo scrapbooks, gathered this immense amount of material. And by the 4th of July, I had our grants met, and among the things that we had done was an endeavor in conjunction with public broadcasting here. We did a 30-minute documentary that was not only aired on WCMU TV but was also duplicated on DVDs and sent to every high school in the state of Michigan. And so, it was a great partnership between the Humanities Council, the Hemingway Society, Michigan Hemingway Society, and the Clark Library. And so that really got us into the game. That got us the raw stuff, the raw materials to work. work with.
DN: “Picturing Hemingway's Michigan”, written by Mike Federspiel. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. I hope we do not encourage people to start knocking on your door. I know you will welcome them if they do.
MF: Thank you, David. It's a pleasure to be here again.
SR: That was Mike Federspiel speaking with WCMU's David Nicholas about his book, “Picturing Hemingway's Michigan”, now available in paperback and published by Wayne State University Press.
