Author Profile: Trina Gaynon, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

PHOTOGRAPH: Poet Trina Gaynon with The Great Gatsby Anthology in her Southern California garden. As flattering as flapper era clothing can be, she rarely leaves her own home in costume. Her poem in the collection, “Lost in Gatsby,” is a series of erasures, especially suitable for a man with so many blanks in his past. More recently The Great Gatsby has inspired two other poems — one about reading the book, as a substitute teacher, to write lesson plans for high school students, and the second about the “owl-eyed man.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Trina Gaynon is a literacy tutor. Her poems appear The Great Gatsby Anthology, The San Diego Poetry Annual, Saint Peter’s B-list: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints, Obsession: Sestinas for the 21st Century, A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of Sonnets of the Early Third Millennium, Bombshells: War Stories and Poems by Women on the Homefront, Knocking at the Door: Poems about Approaching the Other, and several WriteGirl anthologies, as well as numerous journals including Natural Bridge, Reed and the final issue of Runes.  Her chapbook An Alphabet of Romance is available from Finishing Line Press. Visit her at tdgaynon.webs.com.

Author Profile: Amy Schreibman Walter, contributor to THE GREAT GATSBY ANTHOLOGY

PHOTOGRAPH: Poet Amy Schreibman Walter took her copy of The Great Gatsby Anthology to The Wolseley, an Art Deco restaurant on London’s Piccadilly, situated in a building that dates from 1921. When first opened, the Wolseley was a car showroom for the Wolseley Car Company. Beautiful motors graced these black and white marble floors. The space has a grand, opulent feel. The Wolseley is famous for its afternoon tea — what Anglophile Jay Gatsby might have hoped to approximate during his tea with Daisy Buchanan at Nick Carraway‘s place.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Amy Schreibman Walter is an American poet living in London. A recent Visiting Writer at The American Academy of Rome, Amy’s poems have appeared in numerous publications on either side of the Atlantic. She is the co-editor of here/there:poetry. Amy has long been interested in the 1920s. Her forthcoming chapbook, Houdini’s Wife and Other Poems (out in 2016), features several persona poems written from the perspective of women in the ’20s. Her poem “They Slipped Briskly into an Intimacy from Which They Never Recovered” is featured in The Great Gatsby Anthology.

Christmas at the Roof of the World, story by Ernest Hemingway

CHRISTMAS AT THE ROOF OF THE WORLD (Excerpt)
by Ernest Hemingway

  …Paris with the snow falling. Paris with the big charcoal braziers outside the cafes, glowing red. At the cafe tables, men huddled, their coat collars turned up, while they finger glasses of grog Americain and the newsboys shout the evening papers.
     The buses rumble like green juggernauts through the snow that sifts down in the dusk. White house walls rise through the dusky snow. Snow is never more beautiful than in the city. It is wonderful in Paris to stand on a bridge across the Seine looking up through the softly curtaining snow past the grey bulk of the Louvre, up the river spanned by many bridges and bordered by the grey houses of old Paris to where Notre Dame squats in the dusk.
     It is very beautiful in Paris…at Christmas time.

###

Note: Ernest Hemingway wrote “Christmas at the Roof of the World” in 1923, when he was living in Paris and working as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. Find the story in BY-LINE ERNEST HEMINGWAY: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, available at Amazon.com.

Driving with Scott, Zelda, and Scottie Fitzgerald

Photo: F. Scott Fitzgerald with wife Zelda and daughter Scottie, 1923, in the sports coupé the author purchased a few years earlier after selling his first novel, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE.

“When I was a boy, I dreamed that I sat always at the wheel of a magnificent Stutz, a Stutz as low as a snake and as red as an Indiana barn.”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

According to an insightful 1993 article entitled “The Automobile as a Central Symbol in F. Scott Fitzgerald” by Luis Girón Echevarría:

“The cars in Fitzgerald’s life provide a rough gauge by which to measure the discrepancy between the dream and reality of his life, as well as his waning fortunes, and his journey from careless, irresponsible youth to cautious, worried middle-age…

His first car, purchased in 1920 after the publication of his best-selling first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a three-year-oíd sports coupé; during the next two decades he would own a used Rolls-Royce, an oíd Buick, [a] Stutz, a nine-year-old Packard, an oíd 1934 Ford coupé, and, finally, a second-hand 1937 Ford convertible…

It was Fitzgerald’s destiny to begin life dreaming of a magnificent red Stutz Bearcat and to end up driving a second-hand Ford. But during the interval he wrote of America’s dreams and of America’s enduring love affair with the automobile.”

Read more of this fascinating article here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Love Affair with Cars

Photo: F. Scott Fitzgerald with wife Zelda and daughter Scottie, 1923, in the sports coupé the author purchased a few years earlier after selling his first novel, THIS SIDE OF PARADISE.

“When I was a boy, I dreamed that I sat always at the wheel of a magnificent Stutz, a Stutz as low as a snake and as red as an Indiana barn.”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

According to an insightful 1993 article entitled “The Automobile as a Central Symbol in F. Scott Fitzgerald” by Luis Girón Echevarría:

“The cars in Fitzgerald’s life provide a rough gauge by which to measure the discrepancy between the dream and reality of his life, as well as his waning fortunes, and his journey from careless, irresponsible youth to cautious, worried middle-age…

His first car, purchased in 1920 after the publication of his best-selling first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a three-year-oíd sports coupé; during the next two decades he would own a used Rolls-Royce, an oíd Buick, [a] Stutz, a nine-year-old Packard, an oíd 1934 Ford coupé, and, finally, a second-hand 1937 Ford convertible…

It was Fitzgerald’s destiny to begin life dreaming of a magnificent red Stutz Bearcat and to end up driving a second-hand Ford. But during the interval he wrote of America’s dreams and of America’s enduring love affair with the automobile.”

Read more of this fascinating article here.

Christmas at the Roof of the World, Story by Ernest Hemingway

CHRISTMAS AT THE ROOF OF THE WORLD (Excerpt)

by Ernest Hemingway

  “…Paris with the snow falling. Paris with the big charcoal braziers outside the cafes, glowing red. At the cafe tables, men huddled, their coat collars turned up, while they finger glasses of grog Americain and the newsboys shout the evening papers.
     The buses rumble like green juggernauts through the snow that sifts down in the dusk. White house walls rise through the dusky snow. Snow is never more beautiful than in the city. It is wonderful in Paris to stand on a bridge across the Seine looking up through the softly curtaining snow past the grey bulk of the Louvre, up the river spanned by many bridges and bordered by the grey houses of old Paris to where Notre Dame squats in the dusk.
     It is very beautiful in Paris…at Christmas time.

###

Editor’s Note: Ernest Hemingway wrote “Christmas at the Roof of the World” in 1923, when he was living in Paris and working as a correspondent for the Toronto Star. Find the story in BY-LINE ERNEST HEMINGWAY: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, available at Amazon.com.