Updike Society members head to Tucson, Ariz.

Some are in transit already, while others are just starting to write their packing lists. But on Thursday, September 21, 2023, members of the John Updike Society will travel to Tucson, Arizona for the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Tucson, Arizona, where John and Martha Updike owned two adjacent casitas (condos) and spent roughly five months each year during the early 2000s.

Below is a PDF of the schedule of events, including the academic sessions, side trips, and social events. If it looks like something you’re sorry to have missed, plan ahead:  the 2025 conference will be held in the Republic of Georgia, known as the birthplace of wine and the former ancient kingdom of Colchis. Follow us on Facebook to keep current with what’s happening.

UPDIKE IN TUCSON program 9-12-23

Updike Society sponsors ALA panel on The Centaur

The Centaur was a big deal in 1963. The novel, which dealt with classical mythology on the surface of an otherwise realistic narrative, earned John Updike the National Book Award. His third novel (following The Poorhouse Fair and Rabbit, Run) turns 60 this year, and the American Literature Association panel on “The Centaur at Sixty: Updike’s Ulysses” will be reprised with a slightly different cast at the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Tucson this coming September.

As Stacy Olster noted in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike, “Updike’s willingness to assign tremendous significance to his childhood home reaches a crescendo in The Centaur, a powerful attempt to mythologize the artist’s early portrait by returning, as James Joyce did in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), to ancient Greek stories.”

Updike had told Charlie Reilly in 1986, “For The Centaur, I had Ulysses in my head at all times.” Eight years earlier Updike had remarked that “the book had its origins in a little children’s book of Greek mythology which my ex-wife had as a girl and which I was just reading around in. Somewhere in it, I came across this variant, this footnote almost, to the Centaur myth. . . . And I thought, well, this is an unusual myth, especially in the sense that so few Greek myths involve the idea of sacrificing or laying down one’s life for another. . . . So, I began with the myth, and then my own father very naturally attached himself to it because he sort of loomed as a centaur in my own life at that time. The novel really took off with the myth, and for that reason the myth is really in the foreground of the novel, not in the background as in Ulysses.”

The ALA conference panel in Boston featured (l to r) Peter Bailey, Jim Plath, David Updike, and Olga Karasik-Updike. David brought his mother’s first edition of The Centaur, which had inside it a telegram of praise from one of the Soviet Union’s most famous writers—a note that Karasik-Updike read and contextualized for the audience.

Updike Society announces 2023 Schiff Travel Grant recipients

Every two years, The John Updike Society holds a conference at a site with an Updike connection to celebrate the literature and legacy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. For every conference, the society awards competitive Schiff Travel Grants to scholars to enable them to attend the conference and share their work on Updike. The grants are made possible by a generous donation from The Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation. Under-40 recipients receive $1500, while the award for Member recipients is $1000. This year’s six awardees are the most diverse that the society has sponsored to date:

Townes Fricke (U.S., under 40) is a high school senior who is applying to colleges and already looking ahead to graduate school, where he hopes to focus on how literary biography affects our cultural perceptions of writers. A writer himself, he wishes to become an academic “without being pretentious about it.” Fricke also will be a speaker at the upcoming Roth @ 90 conference and is currently working on an essay collection on the history of the “Great American Novel.” At the Updike conference in Tucson he will present his paper on “Growth is Betrayal: John Updike’s Work through the Lens of His Peers.”  The title is taken from a line in Rabbit Redux, and the peers that Fricke will focus on are John Cheever, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer.

Nemanja Glintić (China, under 40) is an assistant professor of Serbian language and literature at the Faculty of European Languages and Cultures of the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, China. Currently he is a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation focuses on the family novels of Updike and Serbian writer Danilo Kiš—two authors he deeply admires. Updike and Kiš met in Belgrade in 1978, and Kiš was the only Yugoxlav writer Updike read and publicly spoke about. The paper Glintić will present at the conference, “The Nascent Artists: John Updike’s Peter Caldwell and Danilo Kiš’ Andreas Sam,”comparatively analyzes Updike’s protagonist from The Centaur and a character from two books from Kiš’ family trilogy, The Family Circus—the novel Garden, Ashes and the short story collection Early Sorrows.

Biljana Dojčinović (Serbia, member) is a full professor at the Department for Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade. She has been a member of The John Updike Society since its founding and a member of The John Updike Review editorial board since its inception. A board member since 2014. Dojčinović directed the 5th Biennial John Updike Society Conference (2018) in Belgrade—the first JUS Conference outside U.S. Dojčinović has published seven academic books, among them the first and so far only monograph on Updike in Serbian, Cartographer of the Modern World (2007), as well as numerous articles on Updike, in both Serbian and English. In the paper she will present in Arizona, “Dedalus and Caldwell: Joyce in Updike’s The Centaur,” Dojčinović argues that the Joyce influence in The Centaur extended beyond Ulysses.  

Carla Alexandra Ferreira (Brazil, member) is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Federal University of Sao Carlos. In 2014 she taught at the University of Iowa as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar and later earned a Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina under the supervision of Updike scholar Don Greiner. She is the author of North and South Readings: perceptions of oneself and the Other in Updike’s Work (2018) and various articles and book chapters on Updike and other writers from the U.S. and U.K. She has also advised theses and dissertations on Updike and American authors and has been a member of the society since 2014. More recently she has been working on a book about Updike’s New Yorker fiction and has an essay forthcoming in The John Updike Review. In Tucson she will present a paper on “Brazilians on Brazil (1994): the novel’s reception in the South American Country,” in which she explains why Brazilians reacted as they did and what critics could not see when they first read Updike’s novel.

Sue Norton (Ireland, member) is a lecturer of English in Technological University Dublin. With Laurence W. Mazzeno she co-edited and contributed to Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom: Teaching and Texts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and European Perspectives on John Updike (Camden House, 2018). Her work on writing and literature has appeared in Critical Insights; The Journal of Scholarly Publishing; The Explicator; The Irish Journal of American Studies; and The John Updike Review. She has presented papers on John Updike’s work at several John Updike Society conferences and at two American Literature Association conferences. The paper she will present in Tucson is “Pruning the Self and Asserting Identity in ‘A Desert Encounter,” in which she posits that Updike’s multifaceted authorial presence—celebrated American author and affable American retiree—works to assert individual identity, a positing of authorial presence as a kind of retort to Roland Barthe’s idea of the writer as mere scripter, devoid of true essence.”

Pradipta Sengupta (India, member) is an associate professor of English at M.U.C.Women’s College, Burdwan, West Bengal. He wrote his Ph.D. on “The ‘Hawthorne Novels’ of John Updike” at the University of Burdwan and also completed a postdoctoral project on “Recasting Contemporary America: A Study of John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy” while a research fellow at Osmania University Center for International Programs, Hyderabad. Since then he has published on Keats, Hawthorne, Tagore, Dickens, Frost, Carey, Heller, Yeats, Emerson, and Updike, with his main areas of interest continuing to be American fiction and Indian poetics. In Tucson he will present “Yoga and Tantric Love: Inadequacy and Futility in Updike’s S.” Set against the backdrop of Arizona desert, S. details the activities of a Hindu ashram and its sham hypocritical guru, the Arhat, who expoits and uses the idiom of both Patanjali Yoga and Tantric Love to indulge in his carnal exploits wth ashram women. A close reading suggests that Updike himself abuses the principles of Pantanjali Yoga and Tantric Love, to the detriment of the novel.

Registration opens for the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Tucson

Updike came here for a handful of summers to practice his golf game before the New England weather turned hospitable. He wrote about a cherished hat he lost here in “A Desert Encounter.” And John Updike Society members will travel to Tucson, Arizona for the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in September 20-24, 2023. Here is the Updike in Tucson Registration Packet:

Serbia is a tough act to follow, but Tucson also promises to be memorable. Join us for another adventure together!

Call for Papers: 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference

Tucson, AZ – September 20-24, 2023
Papers (15-20 min.) and panels (submit names of participants) on ANY aspect of John Updike’s work or life will be considered, but topics that are especially appropriate for this conference include:

—John Updike’s poetry. His Collected Poems celebrates a 30th anniversary in 2023. Updike was serious about poetry and published ten volumes throughout this lifetime. Significantly, his first published book in 1958 was a volume of poetry (The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures), and one of his last published books in 2009 was a volume of poetry (Endpoint and Other Poems).
The Centaur, whichcelebrates a 60th anniversary in 2023. The Southwest is known for inspiring artists, and narrator Peter Caldwell is an artist.
—“A Desert Encounter,” in which Updike describes losing a favorite hat in the casita parking lot as he was trimming bushes. Also appropriate are Updike’s writings about travel, nature, and/or connections to history.
—Comparative papers on David Foster Wallace and Updike. “Penis with a thesaurus” remarks aside, Updike was an influence on Wallace, and their publications and career trajectories pose some interesting possibilities for discussion. Tucson is Wallace country; he attended the Univ. of Arizona.
Brazil, whichcelebrates a 30th anniversary in 2023 and represents one of Updike’s attempts to understand a culture other than his own.

SUBMIT PROPOSALS along with a brief bio paragraph by March 20, 2023 to Robert Luscher (luscherr@unk.edu). The number of presenters may be capped, so if your participation is dependent upon having a paper accepted you should submit your proposal sooner rather than later. Presenters must be members of The John Updike Society or join after their papers have been accepted. Annual dues are $30/year for regular membership and $25/year for students and retirees (https://blogs.iwu.edu/johnupdikesociety/join/). Decision notices will be sent within three weeks of your submission, along with registration and lodging information, if your proposal is successful. Moderators are also needed, and volunteers should send an email to Robert Luscher indicating a desire or willingness to do so. Thanks to the generosity of the Robert and Adele Schiff Family Foundation, the society is once again able to award a small number of travel grants to enable young scholars to participate.

Full Registration Information will be posted and emailed to members soon.

The John Updike Society is a welcoming organization of 260+ members from 18 countries and 37 states that also owns and operates The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa.

Georgia postponed until 2025, Tucson announced as 2023 Updike conference site

At the annual membership meeting, this year held at the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago on Friday, May 28, society president Jim Plath announced that the board has decided to postpone The John Updike Society’s scheduled 2023 conference in the Republic of Georgia, due to uncertainty in that part of the world as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Many of our members expressed deep disappointment that we won’t be going to Georgia in 2023, but with Putin being such an aggressor and such an unstable man, we thought the responsible thing to do was to postpone that conference at Akaki Tsereteli State University until 2025, when it will be the society’s 8th biennial conference,” Plath said. Which is to say, the society’s Georgia adventure will still happen, but at a time when people can feel comfortable again about flying to a country that borders Russia.

The Updikes’ condo

TUCSON, ARIZONA was announced as the site of the 7th Biennial John Updike Society Conference, where members will have “A Desert Encounter.” Updike wrote that New Yorker story about losing his prized hat (which is now on display at The John Updike Childhood Home museum) in the parking lot of his desert condo.

Members who attend the conference will not only get to see the parking lot and condo where John and Martha Updike lived for several months each year the last six or so years of his life; they’ll get to see the inside and experience the views that Updike did when he wrote on his patio every morning. And attendees will be able to enjoy a reception at the Skyline Country Club some 150 yards away, where Updike golfed (yes, another Rabbit Open best ball tournament is a possibility) and where John and Martha frequently ate.

Saguaro National Park

There are other Updike sites in the area (like a historic inn where the Updikes always went for his birthday dinner), but an added bonus for scholars and teachers of contemporary American literature is that Tucson is also a big David Foster Wallace site (Wallace graduated from the University of Arizona MFA program in 1987), and we might visit some of those. Among other topics, a Call for Papers will invite comparative essays on Updike and Wallace.

The board thought that the first week in October would be the best time to visit the American Southwest, so “save the date.” More details will be forthcoming. At every conference, the society organizes day trips so attendees can experience the local culture and history, and of course those trips will continue.

Five properties in Tombstone are listed on the National Register of Historic Places

One possible day trip would be to experience Tombstone, which, with Dodge City, are the most iconic towns of the Old American West. It’s an hour-and-a-half drive that would give attendees a chance to see more of Arizona. There’s also the nearby San Xavier Indian Reservation of the ToHono O’odham Nation, which has a casino we might wish to visit in addition to the more cultural aspects to be experienced.

Other possible attractions: Saguaro National Park (home to the nation’s largest cacti); The University of Arizona (located in Tucson), which TripAdvisor lists as a local site worth visiting; the Mount Lemmon Skycenter observatory (Elevation 9,157 feet; Arizona is famous for its “stellar” stargazing), which features two of the largest telescopes available for public viewing in the Southwest, plus a possible SkyRide up the mountain which offers stunning views of the mountains surrounding Tucson; and the Titan Missile Museum (aka Air Force Facility Missile Site 8, a former ICBM site—now a National Historic Site) located 25 miles south of Tucson. It’s a National Historic Landmark and the only Titan II complex to survive from the late Cold War period.

San Xavier del Bac Mission

Then there’s the San Xavier del Bac Mission, the oldest intact European structure in Arizona and another National Historic Landmark, built from 1783-1797; St. Augustine Cathedral; the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (highly recommended by English faculty at UA), which offers an impressive array of flora and fauna; the Tucson Botanical Gardens, with its flowers and butterflies; and a Sonoita Valley Wine Tour, since wine-tasting is popular in the area. On the low-key side there are historic districts to walk through in Tucson, and a Sunday morning Rillito Park Farmer’s Market.

But there are a lot of additional sites that have historical significance. The board looks forward to having another adventure with our members!

St. Augustine Cathedral
Mt. Lemmon Skycenter observatory