Growing up in Sheridan, Wyoming, I saw a portrait of Ernest Hemingway over a jukebox in the tiny town of Big Horn and wondered why it was there.

We were reading Nick Adams stories in class and his characters, the men who hunted and fished and drank, reminded me of my uncles and my dad.

Many years later I was living in Big Horn with my daughter and it was only by chance that I stumbled upon (this was before Internet searches were a thing) a Big Horn return address on a letter Hemingway had written to his longtime friend and American artist Waldo Peirce in 1928. I realized that not only had the great author spent time in Wyoming, but on his way up Red Grade Road, he likely drove right past the home where I was living. Curious, I began researching everything I could find about Hemingway’s connections to Wyoming.

That trip launched a Hemingway fascination that has led to years of research, my book Cockeyed Happy: Ernest Hemingway’s Wyoming Summers with Pauline, part-time Paris residency and creating my Left Bank Writers Retreat, as well as articles, radio and podcast interviews about Hemingway’s time in Wyoming, and the opportunity to speak to the 19th international Hemingway Society Convention when it was held there in 2021.