Hemingway, Lorian 1951-

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HEMINGWAY, Lorian 1951-

PERSONAL: Born December 15, 1951, in Venice, CA; daughter of Gregory Hancock (a physician) and Shirley Jane (maiden name, McClain; present surname, Rhodes) Hemingway; married Jeffrey Allen Ward-Fischer (a remodeler), September 31, 1989; children: Cristen Hemingway Jaynes. Education: Attended North Seattle College, c. 1973-76, and University of Washington, Seattle, c. 1976-80. Politics: Independent. Religion: Independent. Hobbies and other interests: Fly fishing, sculpting, gardening, reading, lifting weights.

ADDRESSES: Home and offıce—Seattle, WA. Agent— Susan Crawford, Box 198, Evans Rd., Barnstead, NH 03218.

CAREER: Writer, 1976—. Hemingway Short Story Competition, coordinator and judge, 1980—; also worked as copyeditor and swimming pool cleaner.

WRITINGS:

Walking Into the River (novel), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1992.

Walk on Water (memoir), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

A World Turned Over: A Killer Tornado and the Lives It Changed Forever, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2002.

Work represented in anthologies, including Uncommon Waters, Seal Press (Seattle, WA), 1991.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Forsaking All Others, a novel; research on "the ten thousand islands area of the Everglades."

SIDELIGHTS: Early in her writing career, Lorian Hemingway tried to downplay the fact that she is the granddaughter of one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway. Since then, however, she has managed to establish herself as an acclaimed author in her own right, with several short stories, the novel Walking Into the River, a memoir, and a gripping nonfiction account of a tornado ripping through her hometown. In addition to working on her own writing, Hemingway devotes some of her attention each year to coordinating and judging the Hemingway Short Story competition in an effort to encourage other writers.

In Walking Into the River, Hemingway presents a protagonist, Eva, who overcomes addiction, abuse, and hereditary madness. Hemingway followed this volume with a more straightforward memoir, Walk on Water, in 1998. In Walk on Water she recalls her difficult childhood with a cold stepfather and an alcoholic mother, then goes on to discuss her own battle with alcoholism. She also tells of a difficult reunion with her real father, Gregory, the youngest son of Ernest, and her difficulties in dealing with his transvestitism. Hemingway gives readers these personal details of her life sandwiched between discussions of her love of fishing, a positive thing seemingly inherited along with all the negatives she acquired with the Hemingway genes. John Skow, reviewing Walk on Water in Time, praised the "achievements" of survival and fine writing that "shine in a graceful sentence early in her story." Similarly, Jim Dodge in the San Francisco Chronicle noted that "Hemingway uses lucid, sensuous details to open the imagination to the natural world." Carol Peace Robins concluded in the New York Times Book Review: "Eloquent, raw, funny, this Hemingway has a voice all her own."

Hemingway moved away from Jackson, Mississippi, which she looks upon as her hometown, when she was thirteen years old. She happened to leave just weeks before a tornado struck her old neighborhood, killing fourteen people at a small shopping mall she frequented, and over forty in other locations throughout the state. A World Turned Over: A Killer Tornado and the Lives It Changed Forever is Hemingway's 2002 account of her return to Jackson years later, to discuss the tornado with those who experienced it. According to Vanessa Bush in Booklist, Hemingway's "evocative recollections" enhance "the poignant memories of the resilient survivors."

Hemingway told CA: "Although I was born in Venice, California, I have as much attachment to that state as I would to a gangrenous limb. After a brief stint there as a baby, and a year or so in Africa, I was raised solely in the South, the homeland of my maternal family, many of whom are full-blooded Cherokee. My formative years were spent in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina, although it is my attachment to Mississippi that has remained the strongest. It was there that I first began to write, obsessed at first by the mechanism of typing. I did not realize at the time that I was preparing myself for long hours at the desk, a form of discipline I learned early and then neglected entirely until recent years.

"In time I wrote poetry for the school magazine and later for newspapers and national magazines, to whom I submitted hundreds of stories and poems—all but two roundly rejected. I had a fascination with rejection slips and can honestly say they did not disturb me. It was enough, when I was younger, to know that someone was out there at the other end, willingly reading my work with pleasure—or groaning aloud over it. I didn't care which, as long as it was in circulation.

"As far as influences on my work are concerned, I cherished Vladimir Nabokov and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I found that reading another's fiction when I was deep into my own was not wise. I studiously avoid being influenced, although I suspect this is an impossibility. Influences are all around me, in the way people speak and react, and particularly in nature. To name an influence that has been abiding in my work, I would have to say it is the natural world, with its rhythms and voices that are as distinctive as any Nobel laureate's.

"My purpose in writing Walking into the River, other than for the true joy it gave me to write about the South, was to speak to women, to address the plight of other women through the struggles of the protagonist Eva. In the novel I deal with abuse, rape, alcoholism, neurosis, to name a few, and ended the novel with the strong notion that these things can indeed be overcome—and not just dealt with in a contemporary pop-psych fashion. There is a form of personal redemption available to a person—to Eva, to all women—who can accept true responsibility for her life.

"The main objective of my writing is communion with the reader. If I can offer the person who reads my work a reality that touches her or him for the duration it takes to read, then I have done something for which I am grateful. I am also delighted and honored when people have actually taken the time to read me. My most rewarding experiences have been public readings, when I am actually able to make contact with the audience. Everything I have given out in these readings has come back to me a thousandfold. I am always struck by the kindness and thoughtfulness of people who read; their passions run deep, their eyes are always alive. I think sometimes that I write just so I can go out into the world and read.

"As far as advice to aspiring writers, I have only one thing to offer: Write for yourself. Don't write for a publishing house, don't write for the expectations of others, and don't write for the concept of eternity—there may be no such thing. Even if there is an eternity, today is what you have, and it is today for which you should write. Write even if it's painful, even if it seems pointless, because there are always those bright moments that happen, those moments in which you transcend the ordinary and hit on something that sings. Also, writing is not supposed to be easy, or why the hell would we do it in the first place."