For 35 years, “big name” writers have visited the New York State Writers Institute at the University of Albany to read from their work and talk about their work in interviews. Soon, the Times Union reports, all of those taped sessions from roughly 2000 writers will be digitalized and made available to the public.

“John Updike is in there, tucked away. Fellow novelists Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Norman Mailer, Russel Banks. The filmmaker Edward Burns. The poets Derek Walcott and John Ashbery, who both died last year. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow—the first visiting writer from 1984, just a year after William Kennedy created the Institute.”

Some of the earliest recordings were made on reel-to-reel tape. Digitalizing everything is a huge undertaking, but Institute director Paul Grondahl thinks they can complete the task in about a year.

Not all of the 2000 writers interviewed yielded literary gems.

“It’s this sea of incredible literature magic that happened here,” Grondahl said. “But you gotta dig deep to find the pearls. You gotta dive down.

Until then, scholars and the merely curious can access snippets that have been posted on The Writers Institute You Tube channel or keep checking luna.albany.edu for progress.

The Harvard Crimson reported on Wednesday that the newly acquired Updike archive includes “two unpublished Updike novels, slated to come out in twenty years,” that have “already been guaranteed to the Library for study.” According to curator Leslie A. Morris, “There will be a lot of surprises, I’m sure.”Crimson writer Michelle B. Timmerman reported that the current archive takes up 308 linear feet and that it “will take an estimated two years to sort through.”

The Houghton just requested an institutional membership in The John Updike Society (Welcome!), and Leslie Morris clarified a few things for us:

“There are two early, unpublished pieces in the Updike archive: Home and Go Away. These have been on deposit with us for many years, with access restricted by John Updike to those who had his written permission. The Literary Estate has requested that the two novels be restricted for 20 years, until 1 October 2029. Additionally, the newly acquired materials will not be available for research until catalogued, a process estimated to take about two years (some materials, such as his own publications and annotated books from his library, will be available more quickly). The material that was given to the Library during John Updike’s lifetime, listed here, will continue to be available for research until we reach the point where we are ready to ‘fold it in’ to the rest.”