Tag: Hemingway

Garden of Eden Reading Retreat

The Garden of Eden is one of Hemingway’s most perplexing novels.  Published posthumously and set in the French Riviera, it examines the complicated relationship between David Bourne and his wife Catherine.  We’ll explore the novel alongside two other Lost Generation novels that share important themes.

Here’s How It Works:

  1. Click here to download the brochure for full information on texts, schedule and price.
  2. Sign-up today and buy your books at any major retailer or from our store.
  3. Read the three books at your convenience over the summer.
  4. Join us in August for a weekend of discussion and fun based on the books.


Summer Writers Retreat

The retreat offers adults the opportunity to work on personal creative writing, share their work, receive feedback, and interact with others interested in writing.  Writers have the opportunity to work in the Barn-Studio where Ernest Hemingway wrote during visits to Piggott.  Not all writers come with something in mind to write, but many do.  The retreat is structured to be interactive, a time when friendships are formed, craft is honed, and creativity is enhanced.

This year’s Hemingway-Pfeiffer Writer-in-Residence Annmarie Kelly-Harbaugh will serve as mentor for the retreat.  She is the author of Here Be Dragons, a memoir about the wonderful misery of raising children with someone you love. She also hosts Wild Precious Life, a literary podcast about making the most of the time we have.

Annmarie teaches writing at Ashland University where she also works with incarcerated students trying to obtain their degrees. Her essays have appeared on in numerous publications and staged with the Cleveland Humanities Festival and Listen to Your Mother, Pittsburgh. In her non-writing moments, Kelly-Harbaugh loves kickboxing, karaoke, dogs, ping-pong, books that make her laugh, movies that make her cry, and salads other people make her eat. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is currently querying a novel about all the truth in the lies we tell.

For more information on the retreat, click here.

 



Hemingway’s Cuba

Join us for a unique once-in-a-lifetime trip to Havana on the beautiful and historical island of Cuba! You will enjoy a week supporting the Cuban people as you experience their art, culture, cuisine, music, and of course, the classic American vintage cars!On this amazing trip, you will have a chance to walk in Ernest Hemingway‘s footsteps in Cuba, where he lived for 21 years (1939-1960). You will exchange ideas with the Cuban people as you visit Old Havana and spend the day at Hemingway‘s home and museum, Finca Vigia, where he wrote The Old Man and the Sea.  At the Hotel Ambos Mundos, you will see where he began his work on For Whom the Bell Tolls.In addition, you will visit art projects, natural wonders, a working tobacco plantation, and lots of wonderful restaurants.

For more information, click here.



Papa’s Upland Bird Hunt

Charity guided quail hunt with proceeds benefitting the museum.  Tickets are $1500 for a party of four, with lunch included.  For more information, visit the event page.



Matthew Pitt

2023 Writer-in-Residence Announced

The museum announced its 2023 Writer-in-Residence this week, Matthew Pitt of Fort Worth, Texas. The residency is made possible by an underwriting sponsorship by Piggott State Bank.

Raised in St. Louis, Pitt previously worked in Los Angeles on a sitcom, New York City as an editor, and Massachusetts as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. These days, he operates as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at TCU, in Ft. Worth. He also serves as Editor of the literary journal descant, and Contributing Editor for West Branch.

While Writer-in-Residence, Matt will complete edits on The Be-Everything! Brothers, a novella due out at the end of 2023. He is the author of two prior short fiction collections: These Are Our Demands, a Midwest Book Award winner; and Attention Please Now, winner of the Autumn House Prize and a Writers’ League of Texas Book Award finalist. Individual stories have appeared in dozens of magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Oxford American, The Southern Review, Cincinnati Review, Conjunctions, Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Epoch and Best New American Voices. His work has been cited in “Best of” annual anthologies, and won honors and awards from The New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mississippi Arts Commission, Bronx Arts Council, Inkwell, Missouri Review, Salem College Center for Women Writers, and Bread Loaf, Sewanee and Taos Writers’ Conferences.

Matt will also work on a new novel, and his next collection, Unusual Poisons. National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson recently selected this work-in-progress for a 2023-24 Everett Southwest Literary Award. One story was honored by The Saturday Evening Post. Another was winner of the Crab Orchard Review Grand Prize in Fiction, while a third received the William Faulkner Society Short Story Award, judged by author John Biguenet. Other stories in the collection have appeared in Blackbird, BOMB, Story, and an issue of Michigan Quarterly Review themed around Persecution, guest edited by Reginald Dwayne Betts. The residency will allow Pitt the opportunity to live and work in the community of Piggott for a month, sharing his knowledge and experience with local writers and working on his own writings.  A more detailed schedule of the residency will be available later in the year.



Summer Writers Retreat

The retreat offers adults the opportunity to work on personal creative writing, share their work, receive feedback, and interact with others interested in writing.  Writers have the opportunity to work in the Barn-Studio where Ernest Hemingway wrote during visits to Piggott.  Not all writers come with something in mind to write, but many do.  The retreat is structured to be interactive, a time when friendships are formed, craft is honed, and creativity is enhanced.

This year’s Hemingway-Pfeiffer Writer-in-Residence Matt Gallagher will serve as mentor for the retreat.  Gallagher is the author of the novels Empire City and Youngblood, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has appeared in Esquire, ESPN, The New York Times, The Paris Review and Wired, among other places. He’s also the author of the Iraq war memoir Kaboom and coeditor of, and contributor to, the short fiction collection Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War.

A graduate of Wake Forest and Columbia, Gallagher is a 2021-23 fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, based in Green Country, Oklahoma. He lives with his wife and sons in Tulsa, and works remotely as a writing instructor for New York University’s English Department’s Words After War, a workshop devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature.

For more information on the retreat, click here.



Dorene O’Brien Announced as 2019 Writer-in-Residence

Dorene O’Brien
2019 Writer-in-Residence

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum & Educational Center announced its 2019 Writer-in-Residence this week.  Dorene O’Brien of Detroit, Michigan, will spend the month of June in residence at the museum and will serve as a mentor for other writers at the museum’s June Writers’ Retreat.  The residency is made possible by an underwriting sponsorship by Piggott State Bank.

Dorene O’Brien is a Detroit-based creative writing teacher and writer whose stories have won the Red Rock Review Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Prize, and the international Bridport Prize. She is also an NEA and a Vermont Studio Center creative writing fellow. Her work has been nominated for three Pushcart prizes, has been published in special Kindle editions, and has appeared in the Baltimore Review, Madison Review, Best of Carve MagazineShort Story ReviewSouthern Humanities ReviewDetroit Noir, Montreal ReviewPassages North, and others. Voices of the Lost and Found, her first fiction collection, was a finalist for the Drake Emerging Writer Award and won the USA Best Book Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction chapbook, Ovenbirds and Other Stories, won the Wordrunner Chapbook Prize in 2018. Her second full-length collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, released in 2019, was named first runner-up in the Mary Roberts Rinehart Fiction Prize and won a gold medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY). She is currently writing a literary/Sci-Fi hybrid novel.

In addition to serving as a mentor for the June retreat, O’Brien will spend the month working on her own writing in the Barn-Studio where Ernest Hemingway penned portions of A Farewell to Arms.  She will also live in the community, in a loft apartment on the Piggott Square which is a part of the Inn at Piggott.

“We hope that writers will take this opportunity to work with Dorene,” said museum director Adam Long.  “Besides being a great writer herself, she is also an experienced mentor to other writers.  The selection committee and I feel that she is a great fit for our retreat program.”



Sixth Annual Short Fiction Contest Announced

Kate Osana Simonian

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center will sponsor its Sixth Annual Short Story Contest.  This is a state-wide competition open to all undergraduate students currently enrolled in an Arkansas college or university, regardless of major.  The only stipulations are that the submitted material must be an unpublished fictional short story on any subject matter no more than 5000 words in length.  All submissions are due to the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum no later than April 5, 2019.  Winners will be notified by May 3.  They will receive a free spot in this June’s Writers’ Retreat and will be invited to give a public reading at the museum.

This year’s contest will be judged by Kate Osana Simonian.  Kate is an Armenian-Australian novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She hails from Sydney, but is completing her English PhD at Texas Tech, where she is a Presidential Fellow. Her work has been published by, or is forthcoming in, The Iowa Review, The Michigan Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, The Chicago Tribune, and The Best Australian Stories. In 2017, she won the Nelson Algren Award, and her honors include a Tenneessee Williams scholarship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and a position as the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer museum in Arkansas. Kate is an assistant editor for Iron Horse and fiction editor for Vanguard: Graduate Creative Exercises for the Classroom (TTU Press 2019). Ask about her novel-in-stories, Australialand, or check her out at katesimonian.com

Past winners of the contest include Anushah Jiwani of Hendrix College, Mike Smith of Lyon College, Justin Lee Hunsperger of the University of Central Arkansas, Emily Hill of Hendrix College, and Rebecca Prather of Arkansas State University.



Applications for 2019 Writer-in-Residence Now Being Accepted

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott, Arkansas, is pleased to announce its 2019 writer-in-residence position.  The residency will be for the month of June 2019 and includes lodging at a beautiful loft apartment on the downtown square in Piggott over the City Market coffee shop.  The writer-in-residence will also have the opportunity to work in the studio where Ernest Hemingway worked on A Farewell to Arms during an extended stay with his wife’s family in 1928.  The residency includes a $1000 stipend to help cover food and transportation.

The writer-in-residence will be expected to serve as mentor for a week-long retreat for writers at the educational center.  This retreat will be held June 10-14 and will be open to 12-14 writers from the region.  The recipient will be expected to hold one or two readings of his/her own work in the region.  The remainder of the month will be free to the writer-in-residence to work on his/her own work.

Candidates with an MA or MFA in a relevant field are preferred.  Please send a cover letter, CV, and writing sample to Dr. Adam Long at adamlong@astate.edu by Feb. 28, 2019.  Questions can also be directed to Dr. Long.

The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center, an Arkansas State University Heritage Site, contributes to the understanding of the regional, national and global history of the 1920s and 1930s eras by focusing on the internationally connected Pfeiffer family of Piggott, Arkansas, and their son-in-law and regular guest Ernest Hemingway. This includes drawing on Hemingway’s influence as a noted American author to foster interest in literature and the arts and promote excellence in both.