From the Updike Casitas: Pietrzyk shares a short story

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Leslie Pietrzyk, the 2025 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow, shared a link to a short story she wrote during her two-week residency at the casitas formerly owned by John and Martha Updike, where the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner spent time golfing and writing in his later years. The casitas, located in the Santa Catalina Foothills, are owned by Jan and Jim Emery, and the annual residency is made possible by their generosity.

Pietrzyk was working on her proposed project, Nothing to See Here, a collection of linked stories about a neighborhood girl who disappears from a Midwestern town, written not as a police procedural or Gone Girl mystery, but rather to address the “emotional impact of growing up in a time and place where girls and women disappear.” She talks briefly about her project in this interview.

Lead judge Robert M. Luscher, an Updike society board member, praised Pietrzyk for tackling a “variety of significant cultural issues in its metaphoric critique of female disappearance. Though these stories of peripheral, collateral damage are set in the 1970s, sadly their themes are even more relevant today than the time during which the stories take place.”

Pietrzyk has published three novels (Pears on a Willow Tree, A Year and a Day, and Silver Girl), one historical novel (Reversing the River), and two short story collections (This Angel on My Chest and Admit This to No One). Her story “Stay There” won a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and she was named co-winner of the Polish American Historical Association’s 2020 Creative Arts Prize for promoting “an awareness of the Polish experience in the Americas” through her fiction. Previously she completed residencies at Hawthornden Castle, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Wolff Cottage (in Fairhope, Ala.), The Hambidge Center, and an ARGS Residency in St. Petersburg, Va.

Here is the link to the short story, which was published in New Ohio Review, and a link to more information about the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship and other grants and awards available from The John Updike Society.

Author talks about Ipswich, Updike, and her ‘Couples’-inspired novel

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Jenny Jackson is vice president and editorial director of fiction at Alfred A. Knopf, but that’s not her only connection to John Updike. As she wrote in a June 30, 2026 piece in Book Riot, “I grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a seaside town north of Boston famous for three things: beer, clams, and John Updike.

“The celebrated author wrote his biggest books, including the Rabbit novels, while living on East Street, a few blocks from my house. Ipswich is a small town, and Updike was very much a celebrity in the midst, winning every major literary prize, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, and regularly contributing to the New Yorker.

“But he wasn’t a reclusive star; instead, he was enmeshed in the social fabric of the town, playing volleyball with a big gang of friends, parenting his small children alongside a dozen other couples, and conducting messy extramarital affairs with a few of them.”

Jackson said The Shampoo Effect was inspired by Couples and, in fact, asks the question, What would Updike’s steamy 1968 novel be like if it were published today, in an era of cell phones and social media?

Read the entire article.

In Memoriam: Alexander Bernhard

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We regret to report the passing of Alexander Alfred Bernhard, who died in Boston at the age of 89 on June 15, 2026. Though Alexander was not known personally by The John Updike Society, members certainly knew of him. He and first wife Martha Bernhard, who would become Updike’s second wife, were part of the couples group that Updike wrote about in his 1968 bestselling novel Couples. Bernhard’s first marriage and the children produced were not mentioned in the obituary, nor was a second marriage to Joyce Harrington, who was part of another couple from those Ipswich years.

According to the obituary, Bernhard led a “peripatetic life,” attending high school in Mexico City, graduating from MIT in 1957, serving in the US Navy with the majority of time spent in the submarine force, and eventually settling on a career in law after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1964—just four years before the publication of Updike’s scandalous novel. After a stint as clerk for the 9th circuit of the US Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Bernhard settled into a career as a corporate lawyer at Hale & Dorr (now Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr) in Boston for 32 years. “He had a profound sense of community and was active with many nonprofit organizations,” the obituary noted. In 2004, he and his wife, Myra, founded The Friends of the Northern Rail Trail, which “successfully converted the abandoned Boston and Maine train line from Concord, NH to Lebanon, NH into a year-round walking and biking trail.”

The society offers its deepest sympathies to his surviving wife, Myra, three sons, and seven grandchildren.

Boswell receives Updike Society distinguished service award

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Since the society incorporated as a 501c3, Marshall Boswell, an English professor at Rhodes College, has been writing out checks (10-15 per month) and following up with phone calls to square things when a check wasn’t received or when there was some other problem. Each year he also collects information and prepares the checkbook to give to the society’s accountant at tax time. Because people are always in need of being reimbursed and bills always needing to be paid on time, he even takes the checkbook with him when he goes on vacation.

It’s a time-consuming job that Marshall has done faithfully without complaint for more than two decades, and for that the society board voted to present him with The John Updike Society Distinguished Service Award, an honor reserved for those who have assisted the society in important ways and donated a great deal of themselves, their time, their expertise, and in some cases, their financial support.

The award was to have been presented at the Roth-Updike Conference in New York City last October, but a family emergency kept Marshall from attending. Hence, it was presented to him on May 21, 2026 at the society’s annual business meeting, held at The Palmer House in Chicago during the 37th Annual American Literature Association Conference. Well done, Prof. Boswell!

Pictured in the background is society vice-president James Schiff, who presented the award.

Updike Society members convene in Chicago for ALA 2026

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The annual American Literature Association conferences provide an important opportunity for societies devoted to the work of individual American authors to gather, exchange research findings, and discuss issues related to the operation and development of their organizations. This was certainly the case at the conference held in Chicago, May 20-23, 2026.

The John Updike Society organized two sessions. The first session, Looking Back on Updike’s Late Fiction, was held on May 21 and focused on Updike’s novels and short fiction written after 1990. Biljana Dojčinović, Takashi Nakatani, James Schiff, and Peter Bailey presented papers on In the Beauty of the Lilies, Gertrude and Claudius, Terrorist, and “Blue Light,” a story from the posthumously published collection My Father’s Tears, respectively. The session was moderated by Marshall Boswell.

The second session, The Epistles of John: Updike’s Life in Letters, took place on May 22 and centered on Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff and published in October 2025. The discussion explored newly discovered material contained in the letters, as well as the challenges and rewards of collecting, selecting, and editing such a large body of correspondence. Participants included Peter Bailey, Marshall Boswell, James Schiff, and Matthew Shipe. The session was moderated by Biljana Dojčinović, substituting for Sylvie Mathé, who was unable to attend the conference.

At the business meeting of The John Updike Society, members discussed the division of responsibilities within the Society, possible themes for future issues of The John Updike Review, and matters related to membership dues and obligations. Planning for the next John Updike Society Conference, scheduled to take place in Salem in April 2027, was also an important topic of discussion.

In addition, James Schiff participated in A Roundtable on Mentoring and the Future of Author Societies, organized by The Philip Roth Society. All members of The John Updike Society attending the conference took part in this session, alongside representatives of the Hemingway Society, the Mark Twain Circle, and other author societies.

Participants noted that many literary societies face similar challenges, particularly with regard to membership numbers and member engagement, as well as the dissemination and recognition of scholarly work. Several proposals for addressing these issues were discussed, including the organization of multiple online meetings throughout the year based on pre-circulated materials, which would encourage greater participation and ongoing scholarly exchange.

 

Original Magazines places Updike at the forefront of generational change

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In “From Bedtime Stories to Cultural Struggles: Updike’s Domestic Lens,” Original Magazines examines an Updike short story that appeared in The New Yorker, “Should Wizard Hit Mommy?”

The article called Updike’s literary snapshot of a bedtime ritual happening all across America “The Suburban Calm Before the Storm” and “The Story That Keeps Asking Questions.”

“The New Yorker had evolved far beyond its origins as a humor magazine. By the late 1950s, it had become the most prestigious launchpad in American letters—a place where fiction wasn’t decoration but dissection. J.D. Salinger had already used its pages to expose the phoniness beneath polite society. Philip Roth was sharpening his knives. And Updike, still a rising voice, had chosen the most intimate battlefield imaginable: the space between a parent’s authority and a child’s emerging autonomy.

“The magazine knew what it was doing. Sophistication and subversion, wrapped in the same elegant package.”

The article continued, “In Updike’s story, Jack—the father—spins nightly tales for his daughter Jo. The ritual should be simple: father narrates, child listens, sleep follows. But Jo has developed opinions. When Jack’s story about Roger Skunk ends with the creature’s mother insisting he keep his foul smell rather than the roses the wizard gave him, Jo rebels. She wants the wizard to hit the mother. She wants the ending rewritten.

“Jack refuses.

“What follows isn’t violence or melodrama—it’s something more unsettling. A quiet standoff between generations, between the way things have always been done and the way a child thinks they should be. The bedtime story becomes a referendum on authority itself.

“Updike wasn’t writing about skunks and wizards. He was writing about 1959 America, where the next generation was beginning to ask a question their parents found uncomfortable: Why must it be this way?”

The article concluded, “The June 13, 1959 New Yorker didn’t just publish a story about parental authority—it marked the beginning of that authority’s long, slow erosion. Updike’s ‘Should Wizard Hit Mommy?’ remains uncomfortable precisely because it refuses resolution. Jo’s question hangs in the air, unanswered.

“Should the wizard have hit the mommy? Should children obey without understanding? Should tradition survive simply because it’s tradition?

“In 1959, these were bedtime story questions. By 1969, they were revolution.”

Read the whole article.

 

Roger’s Version leaves blogger with mixed feelings

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Thomas Bevilacqua, a Ph.D. who teaches high school English at The Maclay School in Florida, recently posted his reaction to John Updike’s Roger’s Version on his Substack blog:

“It’s pretty clear to me why Roger’s Version is frequently pointed to as one of Updike’s best novels. You see some of the recurring themes from the Rabbit novels—sex, theology, relationships, America—but it’s presented in a more direct or less ponderous way. The two Rabbit novels I’ve read (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux) are a bit more ground in their historical moment . . . while Roger’s Version is a bit removed from that, though it is obviously and quite pointedly set in the Reagan moment,” Bevilacqua wrote.

The problem, for Bevilacqua, was Updike’s “engagement with, well, sex, to put it bluntly. I don’t think I’m terribly prudish when it comes to what I can read, but I always find how Updike writes about these things to be somewhat strange. Perhaps because they feel so alien relative to everything else he’s writing while someone like Philip Roth makes it feel more central. . . . The entanglements of Roger and Verna as well as Dale and Esther feel shocking, not just because of what is being depicted or considered by how it feels . . . dropped in. I don’t think Updike puts these things in just to shock us, but it feels that way and it drags me as a reader out of the narrative he’s crafted.”

Bevilacqua concluded, “Roger’s Version fits very much in my experience of Updike’s writing—both engrossing but also frustrating, and yet I feel compelled to read more.”

If that compulsion holds, perhaps Bevilacqua might try the other two novels in Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, in which Updike updated and retold Hawthorne’s story of an adulterous triangle from perspective of each of the main characters, starting with the Dimmesdale character (A Month of Sundays, 1975) and ending with the Hester character (S., 1988), with the voyeuristic Roger’s Version falling in the middle (1986).

In Memoriam: James N. Trexler

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We are saddened to report the passing of James N. Trexler, a classmate of John Updike’s who was part of a panel at the very first John Updike Society conference at Alvernia University in Reading, Pa. Trexler died of AML at age 93, and his obituary made a single reference to Updike:

“[Trexler] often joked that he ‘majored in swim team, wood shop, and typing’—a fitting description for the man his classmate John Updike once referred to as the ‘class clown’.”

Jim graduated from Shillington H.S. in 1950 and from Albright College in 1958, serving a stint in the U.S. Air Force in between. A people person with a sharp wit, Jim “worked as a sales manager for Columbia Cutlery while coordinating logistics with Ennis Manufacturing. After ‘retiring’ in 1993, he served as the Terminal and Operations Manager for Landis Transportation and concluded his career at Mark Metals, where he worked until age 82.”

The obituary added that Jim was known for his “incredible wit, generosity, integrity, and genuine interest in hours,” and Updike Society members experienced that first-hand in 2010 when he not only participated in the panel but hung around to talk with conference attendees. Pictured below is that panel, with Jim on the right, next to fellow H.S. classmates Harlan Boyer, Jackie Herneisen Kendall, Joan V. Youngerman, and moderator Jack De Bellis. We were privileged to learn from him and enjoy his company. Our condolences to his wife, Evelyn, daughter Joellen Trexler Nelson, son Andy, and other family members.

Brattleboro Literary Festival spends an hour with Michael Updike and James Schiff

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Since the Selected Letters of John Updike was published in October 2025, there have been dozens of interviews with the volume’s editor, James Schiff, and with Michael Updike, the family’s representative on the John Updike Literary Trust, who also has been doing readings and talks to promote the book.

If you only have time to listen to one of the interviews, this hour-long free-flowing conversation might be the one. For this interview, Michael is assisted by his wife, Olga Karasik-Updike, a Philip Roth and John Updike scholar. Even John Updike Society members who have known Schiff and Updike for decades will hear things for the first time. It’s an engaging, insightful  show billed as “A Literary Cocktail Hour,” recorded on May 13, 2026 and hosted by Jenny Altshuler. Here’s the link.