Literature/Summer
Events
Literary gatherings
know no season, but this summer hosts its share: Key West is the
setting for Hemingway
Days and if you've watch Michael
Palin's tour of the Hemingway haunts, Key West is prime on
that tour.
- Oak Park, IL claims
Ernest as their own and are holding their a series of events during
the year at the Hemingway
Museum:
Hemingway and a Fitzgerald Panel, Session on Hemingway and Contemporary
Women Artists,
Public reading
of Hemingway story,
Paper Presentations,
and a reception.
- The town of De Smet,
SD hosts the annual Laura
Ingalls Wilder Pageant recreating scenes from Little House
on the Prairie within sight of the and the five original cottonwood
trees planted by Charles Ingalls.
- The Center for the
Study of Southern Culture is presenting the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha
Conference at the end of July will examine the topic "Faulkner
and War" through six days of lectures and discussions by literary
scholars and critics. When at the site, look at David Wharton's
photographs of Ripley,
Mississippi's First Monday Sale and Trade Days, a part of
that community's life since 1893. Wharton has also done a series
of Southern
Landscapes, many of them reminiscent of Faulkner's settings
and as Wharton describes them as touching upon several
themes traditionally recognized as Southern:
" These include
the ever-presence and importance of the past in Southern culture;
the direct, personal relationship many Southerners have with their
physical surroundings; and the omnipresence of religious consciousness
in the South."
- The annual
gathering of the Thoreau Society takes place between July
12 and 15th, the 60th Anniversary of the Society. The meeting
is deemed the largest gathering of Thoreauvians from around the
world takes place each July in Concord, Massachusetts.
- Tom
Sawyer Days is a bit more lighthearted gathering than those
of the Faulkner and Hemingway fests. It originated in 1956 with
the first Tom Sawyer fence painting contest, sponsored by the
Hannibal, MO Jaycees. Not to be outdone, the first "Tom and Becky"
contest was sponsored by the Hannibal Chamber of Commerce:
The Centennial Circle
of King's Daughters is introducing the Frog
Jumping Contest, based on Mark Twain’s short story, "The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." While living in Angels Camp,
California, Twain heard the tale and used it for his celebrated
story.
If you can't attend
the frog jumping or fence-painting
contests, climb into the hammock or glider with that lemonade
and read Twain's
New York Times' articles.
--T.G.
|
