Join Canadian author Marianne Miller as she shares her debut novel, We Were The Bullfighters, about a young Ernest Hemingway who covers bank robber Red Ryan's daring prison break for the Toronto Daily Star. Marianne will be in conversation with Jim Phelan, a Distinguished Professor of English and the Director of Project Narrative at Ohio State University, and a Hemingway expert.
The purchase of We Were The Bullfighters waives the $5 registration fee.
The Ohio State University Department of English is Gramercy's Community Partner for this program.
In 1923, Ernest Hemingway, struggling with the responsibilities of marriage and unexpected fatherhood, has just made a big mistake. He decided that for the baby's first year he would interrupt his fledgling writing career in Paris and move his family to North America. No longer a freelancer, he now has a gruelling job with a difficult boss, as a staff reporter for the Toronto Daily Star. On his first day, already feeling hemmed in by circumstances, he's sent to cover a prison break at Kingston Pen.
The escaped convicts, led by notorious bank robber Norman "Red" Ryan, are on the run, making their way from the bush north of Kingston, to the streets of Toronto, and then through towns and cities across the United States. Their crimes become more brazen; their lifestyle increasingly glamorous. Growing more and more preoccupied with Ryan and his willingness to risk everything to be free, Hemingway ponders duty, freedom, and what stops a man from pursuing his dreams.
Marianne Miller is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Toronto. As an independent scholar and member of The Hemingway Society, she presented a paper, Hemingway in Toronto, at the 18th International Hemingway Conference in Paris, France. We Were the Bullfighters is her debut novel. She lives in Toronto.
Jim Phelan is Distinguished Professor of English and the Director of Project Narrative at Ohio State University. He teaches and writes about narrative theory, the medical humanities, the English and American novel, especially from modernism to the present. He is the author or co-author of over twenty books, and he has written several pieces on Hemingway’s work. His most recent book, co-authored with Simone Drake, Robyn Warhol, and Lisa Zunshine is Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism: Narrative Analysis for Social Change. In 2021 Phelan received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.
