Two promising young writers have been honored by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.
Oak Park and River Forest High School student Mark Jung won the Hemingway Foundation Scholarship for juniors for his essay, “A Map of Home.” Oak Park and River Forest High School student Iris Henry won the Allan O. Baldwin Memorial Scholarship for seniors for her essay, “Set Aside Your Expectations.”
Jung, of River Forest, wins a $1,500 college scholarship and a mentorship with the Foundation’s writer-in-residence during his senior year of high school.
“I’ve been writing for a while for school and for fun since I was in kindergarten,” Jung said. He said he didn’t expect to win the contest, “I just wanted to enter for fun.”
Entrants in the two competitions were given a prompt to inspire them. The prompt for the Hemingway Foundation Scholarship was: “What is my escape?”
“My essay is kind of like a flashback,” Jung said. “I used to sled in this blacktop driveway. It has a slope. That was something really memorable for me that I wanted the audience to experience as well, whoever was reading.”
His surprise win will definitely inspire Jung to continue writing, he indicated.
“I think writing is such an important skill. It helps you be more creative and communicate more with people,” he said. “I think that the mentorship is going to be very valuable to develop me in writing, which I think will indirectly help me communicate better, which is something I would like to be better at.”
Although he has time to decide on a major for college, Jung said he is “very interested in nutrition and the biology and chemistry behind food and how it affects people.”
Fellow winner Henry, of Oak Park, wins a $1,500 college scholarship.
“I got more into writing within the past year,” Henry said. She entered the competition because she “was looking for scholarships for college and it seemed like a good fit to me because of my interest in writing and my interest in reading Hemingway.”
The prompt for the Allan O. Baldwin Memorial Scholarship was: “Life is an adventure.”
Henry described her piece, “Set Aside Your Expectations,” as “a review into my life living abroad in Indonesia.” That’s where she spent ten months during her junior year of high school.
“I wanted people to understand my time in Indonesia better because, when they hear about it, they usually make assumptions about my life being really luxurious or going to the beach all the time,” Henry said. “That was just not the case. I wanted to clarify that.”
She is convinced that winning the Hemingway contest will inspire her to do more writing. “It increases my confidence in my writing,” Henry explained. “Whenever I write anything, it’s a way for me to express myself and look deeper into my own life.
Henry will be using her scholarship money for tuition when she attends Trinity College in Dublin, where she will be studying linguistics.
Keith Strom, Executive Director of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, said the Foundation was “established originally to support Ernest Hemingway’s legacy, and specifically his legacy in his Oak Park years.”
But there’s a two-pronged mission, Strom noted.
The other part of the mission is “to make sure we’re relevant in support of the arts in the present day and in the future,” he said. The Foundation does this through a number of programs, including a writer-in-residence program, a short story contest, and the two high school writing competitions.
Submissions to the two high school competitions can come from students in Districts 200, 201, 208, 209, or 401. It was a coincidence that both of this year’s winners were from the Oak Park and River Forest area.
About 20 submissions were received for each of the two contests this year, Strom reported. They were reviewed by a panel of three writers, which included a previous writer-in-residence, the current writer-in-residence, and another writer from the local area. Prior to their review of the submissions, Foundation interns did an initial review of the essays and reduced the number of essays the panel had to read to 5 or 10 per competition.
The two winning essays will be published in the annual Hemingway Shorts anthology.
Myrna Petlicki is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
