HNR 312 Hemingway in Michigan (an Honors Junior Seminar at Grand Valley State University)

This spring semester (May/June 2009) nine students and I embarked on a search to discover, in a very short six weeks, as much as we could about Horton Bay and Petoskey, summer life on Walloon Lake and Lake Charlevoix, from roughly 1899 to 1920. We wanted to know what it was like in the time Hemingway summered here and how his Michigan experiences shaped his work, even his writing set outside of Michigan.  We read the Nick Adams stories, Torrents of Spring, and The Sun Also Rises, as well as excerpts from biographies, selected scholarly articles, and relevant letters from the Selected Letters of Ernest Hemingway.  We learned about Ottawa and Ojibway history, and the tourist entertainment of 1905, the Hiawatha play. Thanks to the GVSU library and library liason Anne Merkle, we read local histories of the area, as well as contemporary accounts of resort life in the Chicago Tribune and Grand Rapids Press.

We took an overnight trip to Hemingway country, enjoying tours of Horton Bay and Petoskey led by James Vol Hartwell and Chris Struble. Our adventures included meeting fascinating world travelers on Lake Street and experiencing first-hand the dramatic meteorological moods described by Hemingway in his blustery settings. We enjoyed staying at the Perry Hotel in Petoskey, the last of the grand resort hotels, where Hemingway himself stayed.

Our Honors College curriculum emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches; the junior seminar is a special topics honors course designed to explore a subject from different perspectives. Our class represented a variety of majors (Art and Design, Accounting, Computer Science, Geography, International Relations, Business, Communications, English and Film and Video).  Each student identified an aspect of Hemingway's early life in Michigan to research further, using primary sources found mostly in electronic archives, such as newspaper databases and Google Books. As a result, you can listen to the world internet premiere of Grace Hall Hemingway's "Lovely Walloona," learn about the luxurious Lake Michigan steamer the Hemingway family took to northern Michigan, find out more about camping or cooking at the turn of the century. You can see what dances the Hemingway teens learned and why their father objected, or discover the top ten tunes of the teens. You can read about Native Americans in the Walloon Lake area. Watch videos of our tours, and if you are planning a trip to Michigan, consider a Hemingway bike tour.To see these finished projects, please visit this page.

At the One-Room Schoolhouse, Horton Bay
(who put the dunce cap on the prof.?)

Singing Grace Hall Hemingway's "Lovely Walloona" (1901)