4th Annual Young Hemingway Birthday Celebration

Calling all Hemingway Aficionados! You are cordially invited to the 4th Annual Young Hemingway Birthday Celebration in Petoskey. This is a family-friendly celebration commemorating the writer's 119th birthday.
The event begins at 1:30 next to the young Hemingway statue in Petoskey’s Penn Park.  Robin Lee Berry, who wrote and performs the documentary’s theme song, “Gone Wild,” will kick off the celebration.
This will be followed at 2 p.m. by a cake cutting ceremony and ice cream for all those on-hand at the event. There also will be a letter writing station for children to participate in the tradition of writing summer vacation letters complete with a Hemingway Postal Stamp. Readings from Hemingway’s earliest published work about Northern Michigan will then be presented by Dale Hull and Eric Grandstaff, both active in local theater. And from the River Walk Theatre group in Lansing, Michael Hayes will present segments from his starring role in “The Hemingway Play,” a highly acclaimed play written for PBS presentation and now being performed by local theaters across the country.
At 3:30 p.m., a round table discussion open to the public of young Hemingway’s life in northern Michigan – and his published writings about that life – will begin in the Hemingway Room at City Park Grill led by members of the Michigan Hemingway Society. A cash bar will be available for those participating in the discussion.
At 5:00 p.m. a 75-minute Hemingway documentary, "Young Hemingway and His Enduring Eden" will be shown.  It will be free to the public at the Little Traverse History Museum. Dr. Colburn, the writer-producer-director, will be on hand to answer questions.
Hemingway’s actual birth date is July 21, 1899 and it was six weeks later that he first visited here. He would come with his family to this corner of the northern lower peninsula for the next 20 summers. He then was married in a Horton Bay church in the fall of 1921, and honeymooned with his first wife, Hadley, at the family cottage on Walloon Lake.
This is the 4th year that the Michigan Hemingway Society has been a sponsor of a young
Hemingway birthday commemoration.