This past week John Updike Society members met in Columbia, South Carolina for another highly successful conference (see our Facebook page for photo gallery), which ended with a session in which David and Miranda Updike shared and commented on a slideshow of family photos from the sixties. At the meeting that followed, society president Jim Plath brought everyone up to date with what’s happening at The John Updike Childhood Home and then announced the location of the society’s 2018 conference, the result of a unanimous board vote: In 2018 the society will travel abroad for the first time, to Serbia, for a conference hosted by the University of Belgrade and directed by board member Biljana Dojčinović.

As members chatted, a number of them were already plotting which countries to visit before or after the June 2016 conference, noting that there are often ridiculously low fares to the Dalmatian coast in nearby Croatia (Dubrovnik, Split), where members could enjoy several days before flying to Belgrade.  Below are slides from the PowerPoint announcement.