Forty-seven members donned masks to see each other again at the 6th John Updike Society Conference in Reading and Shillington, Pa. from Sept. 30-Oct. 3—a conference that had been scheduled for 2020 but postponed because of COVID-19. With pandemic numbers still high, all attendees were required to submit proof of vaccination with their registration materials and urged to wear masks indoors.

The event was COVID-free, but the pandemic still cast a large shadow. More registrants and speakers than usual were forced to cancel, and any conference hiccups or glitches could be directly traced to COVID. But attendees looked past all that and reveled in each other’s company, happy to witness the dedication of the Pennsylvania Historic Marker and unveiling of the National Registry of Historic Places plaque at the John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Ave., in Shillington. In the end, the consensus was that the conference—the second directed by Alvernia communications professor Sue Guay—was another memorable experience.

Because of COVID, organizers sought to “go small” and decided to spread things out over three locations. Alvernia University hosted the conference for Oct. 1 events and provided all bus transportation. New partner Governor Mifflin School District hosted sessions at the high school just blocks from the Updike house on Oct. 2, and the society stayed at the Courtyard Marriott Reading for morning sessions on Oct. 3. The “vibe” was good, and members who had been eager to attend the grand opening of the John Updike Childhood Home immediately after the marker dedication ceremony were impressed by what they saw . . . and later enjoyed a side-porch reception at the house.

Member Greg EplerWood and local historian George Meiser teamed on Friday to handle the microphone for a bus tour of Berks County Updike sites. At a stop at Weaver’s Orchards and the Plowville farmhouse, Ed Weaver talked about living in the farmhouse now and his memories of growing up with Updike children visiting the area. At a stop at the Plowville church and cemetery, Michael Updike led a group to the Hoyer and Updike family headstones and talked about the marker he made for his father. At a stop at the cemetery high above Shillington, described in an Updike poem, members walked to find some of the headstones mentioned. And of course the bus drove past the new “Rabbit Run” signs posted along the nearby highway.

On Saturday, an estimated 200 people turned out for the marker dedication ceremony and grand opening tours of the house. William Lewis spoke as a representative of the Pennsylvania Museum & Historical Commission, telling the crowd that getting “one of these” is no small feat.

Honored guests included State Senator Judy Schwank, Berks County Commissioner Michael Rivera, Shillington Councilman Alec Ernest, Shillington Mayor Andrew Hivner, Shillington Chief of Police Brett Hivner, Gov. Mifflin School District Superintendent Bill McKay and Asst. Superintendent Lisa Templin Hess, local historians Meiser and Myrtle Council, Updike house restoration expert Bob Doerr, former Updike classmates and neighbors Barbara Hartz and Joan Youngerman, and all four of Updike’s children: Elizabeth, David, Michael, and Miranda. As the line formed to have a first look inside the house, member volunteers answered questions and kept the crowd moving along, while remaining members followed John Updike Childhood Home education director Maria Lester on a walking tour of 5-Corners Updike-related sites—including Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, where the Updikes attended. Pastor Colleen Cox, of Grace Evangelical, offered the marker dedication invocation.

James Schiff, tapped by the Updike Literary Trust to edit a “selected letters” collection, delivered the opening keynote, while award-winning writer Max Apple was the closing keynote speaker.

For more photos, go to the John Updike Society and John Updike Childhood Home Facebook pages.

COVID-19 scuttled the 2020 conference, but while the situation remains fluid the John Updike Society board has decided to move forward with the conference, which will be scaled back to a 2.5 day event with no long day trip, held Oct. 1-3 with most people arriving the day before the conference begins. The conference is hosted by Alvernia University in Reading, Pa., with Sue Guay serving as conference director. Please note that the society board decided the responsible thing to do was to require all conference registrants to be fully vaccinated; Masks will also be required for indoor sessions except when eating or at the microphone (See registration packet at the end of this post).

The conference celebrates the Grand Opening of The John Updike Childhood Home, with its 10 rooms of wall hangings, furniture, and 10 cases of unique exhibits that people can peruse for the first time. The conference also coincides with a 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 2, Pennsylvania Historic Marker Dedication Ceremony and the unveiling of the National Historic Registry Plaque.

OTHER CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS:

James Schiff will deliver a Friday evening keynote on the Updike letters project, with slides of some of his “finds” and a walk-through of the challenges that the massive undertaking posed.

The closing keynote will be by Max Apple, an award-winning writer whose works include The Oranging of America, Free Agents, and The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories. Apple frequently turns up in the same anthologies and “Best of” collections as Updike, and, in fact, the Jewish Journal wrote, “Max Apple’s people are the folks you might see having lunch at a local diner . . . a John Updike without Protestants.”

Elizabeth Updike Cobblah, David Updike, Michael Updike, and Miranda Updike will appear on a panel, “The Truth Behind The Maples Stories Fictions”; Updike society member and Updike family friend Carole Sherr will talk about “Remembering John & Linda Updike”; and a session on “Updike’s First Wife” will feature Updike classmate Mary Ann Moyer, who was Updike’s “stage wife” in two plays at Shillington High School. Moderator: James Plath.

The conference also will feature walking tours of Shillington Updike sites and a bus tour of the area, with stops at the Pagoda, Robeson Evangelical Lutheran (Plow) Church and Cemetery, and Weaver’s Orchards to see the Plowville farmhouse.

Unique to this conference is that Friday will be spent at host Alvernia University, Saturday at the John Updike Childhood Home and Governor Mifflin Schools just across the street from the house, and Sunday at the conference hotel, the Couryard Marriott Reading.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES:

August 12—Last day that academic proposals, Schiff Travel Grant applications, and requests to moderate a session will be accepted. See registration packet below for details.

September 2—Last day to book a hotel reservation and to register for the conference without a late fee. Again, see registration packet below for details.

Because of COVID 19 and concerns for elderly and international members planning to attend, the board of The John Updike Society voted to postpone the 6th biennial JUS conference by exactly one year.

Instead of being held September 30 through October 4, 2020, the conference will be held October 1 through October 3, 2021. The host institution remains Alvernia University, and the conference hotel will still be the Courtyard Marriott Reading. All of the academics who had papers accepted have been told that those papers are still accepted for the 2021 conference. New proposals may be emailed to James Plath, Dept. of English, Illinois Wesleyan University: jplath@iwu.edu.

The conference will coincide with the grand opening of The John Updike Childhood Home, 117 Philadelphia Avenue, Shillington, Pa., which the society owns. For the past four years the society has been restoring the house to how it would have looked in the early 1940s when Updike lived there and also acquiring exhibit materials. At 1 p.m. Saturday, October 2, 2021, there will be a formal ceremony to dedicate a Historic Pennsylvania Marker and unveil a plaque indicating that the house-museum is on the National Registry of Historic Places. Updike’s four children will attend and also participate in a panel on The Maples Stories. Dr. James Schiff will also offer a plenary talk on the recently completed (but still to be published) Updike letters project that he was commissioned by the Updike Literary Trust to edit. Other planned activities include a visit to the Plowville farmhouse and a walking tour of Rabbit, Run and The Centaur sites in the area.

The John Updike Society is comprised of more than 200 Updike scholars, fans, family members and friends, and the kind of just-plain-readers that Updike appreciated. Membership in the society is required to present a paper, but those who submit proposals can join at the time they register for the conference. Details are forthcoming.

Writer Lorrie Moore will travel to Shillington-Reading to deliver the keynote talk at the 6^th Biennial John Updike Society Conference at Alvernia University. The conference will take place the first week in October 2020, which coincides with the October 3 grand opening and dedication of The John Updike Childhood Home.

Like Updike, Moore received the prestigious Rea Award for the Short Story, given annually to a living American writer who has made significant contributions to the genre. And like Updike, Moore won the O. Henry Award for a short story that was first published in The New Yorker. Updike and Moore were both admirers of each other’s work, and both authors worked in multiple genres—novels, short stories, non-fiction, children’s books, essays, and criticism.

“Her review of The Early Stories is one of my favorite takes on Updike,” JUS board member Matthew Shipe said. That review was reprinted in Moore’s collection of essays and reviews, See What Can Be Done (Knopf, 2018). Over the years Moore has published five collections of short stories (Self-Help, 1985; Like Life, 1990; Birds of America, 1998; The Collected Stories, 2008; and Bark, 2014) as well as three novels (Anagrams, 1986; Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, 1994; and A Gate at the Stairs, 2009); a children’s book (The Forgotten Helper, 1987), and that aforementioned collection of essays.

Birds of America won The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and brought her wide acclaim, with Alison Lurie remarking that Moore is “the nearest thing we have to Checkhov.” If that sounds heady, readers who want to explore the finer points of Moore’s work need look no further than Understanding Lorrie Moore, published in the respected major author series by the University of South Carolina Press and written by Alison Kelly, who notes, “Moore’s adroit pen portraits of places and people reflect her overarching artistic purpose, which she has described as ‘trying to register the way we, here in America, live.’ . . . Moore anatomizes American society as revealingly in her way as do writers such as John Updike or Tom Wolfe . . . .”

Updike had included Moore’s New Yorker story “You’re Ugly, Too” in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, which he edited. Moore is currently the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

More information about the conference and conference registration will be forthcoming.

At the membership meeting that closed the Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Belgrade, Serbia, hosted by the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, there was consensus that the conference was among the best, if not the best. Everyone agreed that Belgrade was a wonderful city, and the conference hotel was perfectly located in the old city where participants could walk to Belgrade Fortress/Kalemegdan Park, the University, and the pedestrian streets with all the shops and squares and eateries. People enjoyed the sessions, group dinners, and group tours, and those who went on the all-day bus tour of sites outside Belgrade were delighted by the experience. Any time you have a group of academics dancing at a restaurant in Zemun, you’d have to say the conference was an unqualified success. So thank you again, Biljana Dojčinović!

Everyone had such a good time on this group adventure that they voted to adopt a model moving forward where the society alternates between conferences held in the U.S. and conferences held abroad. That means every four years the society will meet outside the U.S. So start saving for 2022. We don’t know where that conference will be yet, but we’ll embark on another adventure..

To see a gallery of 100+ photos from the Fifth Biennial JUS Conference, go to the society’s Facebook page.

Attention now turns to Reading and Shillington, the announced site for the Sixth Biennial John Updike Society Conference. Once again, Alvernia University will welcome society members, and once again Sue Guay, director of The John Updike Childhood Home, will direct the conference with the help of an academic program director. The conference will coincide with the grand opening of The John Updike Childhood Home as a museum-literary center, and members who have visited the house before will marvel at the transformation. The society envisions a celebration that involves not just the community but beyond it as well. It’s also a big year because 2020 marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Rabbit, Run, and what better way to celebrate than to “run” around Reading/Brewer? Guay said that the city is undergoing a rejuvenation, with a brand new hotel in downtown Reading and newly refurbished areas popping up on a daily basis. Twenty-twenty also happens to be the year in which Toward the End of Time is set, with additional anniversaries for the publication of Bech, a Book (60th), Rabbit at Rest (30th), and Gertrude & Claudius (20th).

Pictured below is Jonathan Houlon reprising his “Talkin’ Rabbit” at Tarposh vineyards and restaurant, where attendees enjoyed a three-hour wine-tasting lunch, and Michael Updike talking with U.S. Ambassador Kyle Scott, who, with his wife, hosted The John Updike Society at a memorable reception at their residence.