Write in Hemingway's Attic

Up in the attic of a Victorian home on Oak Park Avenue is a safari writing retreat. Animal skins cover the floors and the walls are lined with photographs and maps, promising travels and thrills far away from the suburban life that surrounds the house. A leather desk and comfortable chair offer places to contemplate adventures both literary and real.

This is the office occupied by the Hemingway Foundation's Writer in Residence, a yearlong position

available for writers who need space to work and are interested in being inspired by Hemingway's legacy. Young Ernest lived in the house -- and played in the attic -- as a young child, his love of storytelling ignited by his grandfather and other family members telling tales around the fire.

The attic office was once a maid's room, but in 2012 the Thomasville furniture company transformed it to become the anchor of the Foundation's Writer in Residence program. The company offers an officially sanctioned Ernest Hemingway line of desks, chairs and other home furnishings, and offered these up to make the office -- which was dusty and in disrepair -- suitable for creating the next great work of American literature.

Thomasville's Oakbrook design teams studied the space and came up with two plans for the office and the Hemingway Foundation board chose the safari theme. Though the Hemingway Birthplace home is decorated in the Victorian style of the time when the family occupied it, the attic is a dreamscape: the sort of life Ernest imagined when he was a boy.

Other local companies pitched in to help renovate the attic. Clyde Russell re-plastered the room's walls and built benches to enclose previously exposed ductwork, and Hometown Handyman repaired broken floorboards and windows. Vincent Filak restored furniture found during the cleanout of the attic, including a child's rocking chair once owned by Marcelline Hemingway, Ernest's older sister.

Once the restoration was done, the Hemingway Foundation board put out a call to writers to apply to

Susan Hahn, first Writer-in-Residence

use the space. Though only office space -- not living space -- was offered, applications came from as far away as Hawaii and Germany. A committee of Foundation board members chose a writer closer to home: poet and novelist Susan Hahn, who would complete her second novel in the attic.

“It was a great honor and a great privilege to be the inaugural Writer-In-Residence at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Birthplace Home in Oak Park,” Hahn wrote in a message to the Foundation. “Being present in the Hemingway writing room--even when I wasn't actually able to be there--makes me feel that there truly might be ‘magic’ in those walls.”

The Foundation is accepting applications for the 2013-2014 residency through June 1. To apply, download the application here: http://bit.ly/1mt0Py1

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Allison Sansone is the Executive Director at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.