The University of Idaho’s 8th Annual Hemingway Festival, held this year on March 3rd & 4th in Moscow, ID, featured PEN-Hemingway award-winner Ottessa Moshfegh, who participated in a craft talk with UI writer and professor, Kim Barnes; offered a reading and informal discussion of her recent short story collection, Homesick for Another World, at the Moscow Public Library; and delivered the keynote reading from her novel, Eileen, at the dinner, which drew an appreciative crowd of more than eighty. UI Hemingway Fellow for 2016-17 Jerri Benson read from her fiction and introduced Ottessa Moshfegh. The Festival is held as a fund raiser for the fellowship.
Other events associated with the festival, which celebrated the 100 th anniversary of Hemingway’s graduation from Oak Park High School, included an academic panel with presentations by Hemingway Review editor Suzanne Del Gizzo (“’His Father Came Back to Him’: Ernest Hemingway’s Troubled Relationship to His Father”), UI English professor Ron McFarland “Young Hemingstein: Hemingway’s High School Days”), and Boise-based independent scholar Stacey Guill “Ernest Hemingway’s Journey to War”). One highlight of the two-day event was the popular Sneak Peeks reading that drew an SRO crowd to the local independent bookstore, BookPeople. Melanie Thongs, Director of Creative Writing at UI, coordinated the festival.