Crossing Over with Ernest Hemingway and Grace Paley

Meg Brewington 

Mentor: Joy Passanante

BACKGROUND:

            When I was little, instead of reading Goodnight Moon or The Cat in the Hat, my mother read me poetry.  Her favorite book to read from was The Best Loved Poems of the American People from 1936.  I would fall asleep at night to stories like “Casey at the Bat” by Earnest Lawrence Thayer, “Anabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Face Upon the Floor” by H. Antione D' Arcy, and “Beth Gelert” by William Robert Spencer.  It was “Beth Gelert” that made me fall in love with poetry.  I read The Best Loved Poems of the American People cover to cover over and over again, then all the other poetry I could find.  When I was about 8 years old I began to write my own poetry, and have been writing since.  With all my reading and practice at writing poetry, I am still not much of a poet.  However, poetry has heavily influenced my fiction writing.

            In high school, I branched into journalism.  I learned AP style, through  experience and editing the paper, as well as other elements of journalistic writing.  It wasn't long after that that journalistic rules of style, punctuation and sentence structure came to influence my fiction as well.  

            I have been interested for the past several years, since noticing the influence of these two kinds of writing in my own, in the influences of other genres on the writers I read.  I tend to read a book and wonder what else that author has written because of what I see in their writing, the way the sentences are constructed, word choices, assonance, images, sentence length, etc.

CURRENT PROJECT:

            When this project was proposed in class, it occurred to me to examine two writers who were influenced, individually, by the two writing styles that influenced me.  For this, I have selected Ernest Hemingway, whose fiction was influenced by his journalistic writing, and Grace Paley, whose poetic style is quite evident in her fiction.

            I chose a male and female author to show that both genders are prone to cross-genre writing, since the tendency to cross over is more widely recognized among women. 

            I went through several authors during my decision-making process, trying to narrow down the ones whose cross over in style were most evident in order to more easily present my evidence.  For the men I looked at Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but his style is not influenced by another genre and style of writing of his own, but other author's styles.  As soon as I started taking Ron McFarland's Hemingway class, I knew that Hemingway was my man.  For the women, I looked at Sandra Cisneros, whose poetry and fiction are just a little too different, and Patricia Hampl, but her poetic influence is more evident in her non-fiction than her fiction.  As soon as I read Grace Paley, as recommended by Joy Passanante, however, I knew she was my gal.

PLAN FOR THE NEXT TWO MONTHS:

            Over the next two months, I will read the works listed in my bibliography and identify, on my own and with the help of my mentor, the elements of journalistic writing in Hemingway's fiction and the elements of poetic writing in Paley's fiction.  I will also read biographies and critic commentaries to see if others have identified these elements as well.

            I have also planned a session with Ron McFarland to further examine the stylistic elements of specific works.

            I have also discovered that Grace Paley was a student of W.H. Auden and so her poetry may have been influenced by him. 

            Further, I intend to identify, in general, the common stylistic elements for each type of writing.  I intend to use such texts as the MLA style guide, and a poetry craft guide to be determined, as well as information obtained from my mentor and other University of Idaho English professors.

IDEAS ABOUT HOW TO PRESENT THIS WORK:

            My thoughts on the presentation of this work is mostly in writing, as in a kind of research paper,, but also visually, highlighting the elements of style in specific passages from both kinds of writing from my authors.  I would also like to include some sort of audio element, since the sound of the passages is important as well, especially in respect to the poetic elements.

            Aside from that, I'll need to think more and talk a bit more with my mentor to work out how best to present this work.

WORKS CITED:

Bach, Gerard and Blaine Hall.  Conversations with Grace Paley. University of Mississippi Press,   1997

Hemingway, Earnest. The Complete Short Stories of Earnest Hemingway. New York: Charles       Scribner's Sons and Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987.

Hemingway, Earnest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926.

Paley, Grace. Begin Again. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985.

Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960.

Paley, Grace. Fidelity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Paley, Grace. Later the Same Day. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985.

Paley, Grace. The Little Disturbances of Man. Penguin Books, 1956.

Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. University of Texas Press, 1990.

William, White.  Byline: Earnest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967.