Wayne Fraser took several undergraduate courses with Dr. James D. Brasch, a leading Hemingway scholar, at McMaster University, and after completing his Masters of Divinity at the University of Toronto, returned to McMaster to take his Masters in English, with his thesis, “Into the Farther Timber: Hemingway’s Metaphor of Landscape,” supervised by Brasch. Meanwhile Eleanor Johnston completed the English Language and Literature Honours BA at Victoria College, University of Toronto, studying with great writers and scholars such as Robertson Davies and Northrop Frye. She took a course MA there as well, with a major paper on Margaret Laurence. Wayne and Eleanor married and moved to the University of Manitoba where they started their PhD’s and their family that now includes five granddaughters. His thesis was published as a book: The Dominion of Women: the Personal and the Political in Canadian Women’s Literature; Eleanor’s thesis was entitled Puritan Poetics: The Development of Literal Metaphor from John Bunyan to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Both worked part-time as assistant editors in scholarly publications.

In 1979 they moved to St. Catharines and devoted themselves to teaching English at Ridley College and caring for their children. Both wrote for and edited many school and student publications. Wayne was ordained an Anglican priest and worked as an honorary assistant in a local church. Eleanor moved to a day school, Grey Gables, where she was English teacher, Dean of Academics, and co-author of the school history book. Eleanor took early retirement to devote her time to writing. She has published over 40 provocative articles on theology and ecclesiology for The Niagara Anglican Newspaper 2007 – 2012. Other short pieces published include “Lest we ignore,” Niagara This Week, July 2007, four instalments of the war stories of Guenter Schemeit. Eleanor also wrote and published, through lulu.com, two full-length books: Parent-Teacher Interviews, 2008, a self-help book for young teachers and parents, and The Blessing Game, 2010, a novel that is a birth mystery set in a private school in the Niagara Region. She was ghost writer/editor of a book printed by Peninsula Press: How Far to go Home? The Memoirs of Guenter Schemeit. She rewrote this gripping memoir into a dramatized reading of the experience of an East Prussian teenager during WWII and his 1945 flight from the Russians. It was presented in two venues in St. Catharines as well as single shows in Toronto and in St. Louis, Missouri, at a history conference on “The Forgotten Genocide.” Wayne took the lead role.

During all his years as a teacher, priest and friend of Professor Brasch, Wayne maintained his expertise as a Hemingway scholar. He has read most books published on Hemingway as well as the Hemingway Review, and he has participated in discussions on the Hemingway-list serve on a regular basis and attended many international Hemingway conferences. His paper, “Subterfuge at the Finca: Further Implications of Brasch and Sigman’s Hemingway’s Library,” has been accepted for the June 2012, International Hemingway Conference. At the same conference, Wayne and Eleanor will make a presentation on using Hemingway as a Character in Fiction. Hemingway’s Island, researched by Wayne and written by Eleanor, is based on this expertise as well as on the week they spent in Havana in 2002. They are also eager to promote the publication, in English, of Hemingway en Cuba, a book written by a Russian diplomat who worked in Cuba during the 1950’s and interviewed many people connected to Hemingway. It is presently available only in Russian and Spanish.