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Hemingway 20
Ah, the blank page. How I haven’t thought about you in a while. Looming with your absence, your taunts that I’m unable to put cohesive thoughts onto the page. Daring me to even try, knowing that I’d more than likely fail. Because the blank page always knows.
It’s Memorial Day Weekend and I woke up with a thought I haven’t for several Memorial Weekends… Hemingway. I’ve been looking forward to a weekend focused on art, especially with several vendor shows coming up, but I’ve had bits and pieces of poems and essays floating around my head all week. Then Stephen King’s book of shorts came out this week and after reading the first one, I fell back in love with language and storytelling in a way I had forgotten existed.
Hemingway whispered.
Twenty years ago I sat down on the three-day holiday weekend with nothing more on my mind than finishing my book, drinking my afternoons away by the pool, and little else. It was, by all accounts quite successful, and while I’ve made many attempts to recreate the magic of that first Hemingway Weekend, the creative flow never quite found its way again. That’s the thing with magic, it’s why it’s special.
Each attempt beyond that has been a labored attempt to fight the blank page. Some years have just left me to play in my kitchen or focus on the afternoon drinking with the perfected rum concoction of years past. I…
