John Updike Society member Lang Zimmerman, whom society members may have met at the most recent conference in Reading, Pa., has become the first U.S.-based lifetime benefactor. Zimmerman is vice president of Yelcot, a family-owned communications company based in Mountain Home, Arkansas, and is also commissioner for the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. In a note he added that his donation was written, appropriately, using a pen made from Updike’s dogwood tree.

The new dues structure announced in August included options to become a lifetime member ($500) and a lifetime benefactor ($1000). So far no one has chosen to become a lifetime member, but Zimmerman now joins Takashi Nakatani as the society’s lifetime benefactors.

The new dues structure taking effect on January 1, 2016 includes a lifetime membership ($500) and lifetime benefactor membership ($1000). With The John Updike Childhood Home restoration in progress, the timing couldn’t be better for members to take advantage of these options and help the museum project move forward at the same time.

Professor Takashi Nakatani, of Yokohama City University, Japan, has generously stepped forward to become the first lifetime benefactor. Professor Nakatani has been an active member of the society since the beginning, moderating a panel at the First Biennial Conference at Alvernia and presenting papers at the Second Biennial Conference at Suffolk and the Third Biennial Conference at Alvernia. He has also taken several research trips on his own to Updike collections in Boston and Reading.

At the 3rd Biennial Conference pre-conference social (l to r): Yue Wang, James Plath, Carla Alexandra Ferreira, and Takashi Nakatani.

The general membership elected Matthew Shipe to fill the open seat vacated when Jack De Bellis stepped down. Shipe begins a three-year term, starting immediately.

Shipe recently won the Emerging Writers Prize given by The John Updike Review, and he has been a member of the society since 2010. A lecturer and coordinator of Advanced Writing at Washington University in St. Louis, he wrote his dissertation on John Updike’s collected short fiction, and his work has appeared in The John Updike Review, Philip Roth Studies, Critical Insights: Raymond Carver (Salem Press, 2013), Roth and Celebrity (Lexington Books, 2013), and Perspectives on Barry Hannah (University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

On May 3, John Updike Society president James Plath was invested as the R. Forrest Colwell Chair of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, where he has taught for the past 27 years. The appointment is for six years, renewable for five-year terms thereafter. The committee cited his work on Hemingway and Updike, his work with student organizations, and his long-term service on both major committees and the Faculty-Staff Recognition Committee.

Here is the article.

Thanks to the 60 members of The John Updike Society who paid their 2015 dues promptly, and to the members who added a donation for our continuing work on The John Updike Childhood Home:  Gerald J. Connors, Steven J. Malcolm, Elizabeth Updike Cobblah, Livia Lloyd-Hawkins, Robert M. Luscher, Joseph Moser, Joseph Truitt, Bryan L. Bodwell, Mary Carol Fee, Kevin R. Fox, Richard Seabrook, Kevin Schehr, Carole and Richard Sherr, Jay Althouse, Kasuko Kashihara, Sylvie Mathé, Deana and Gardiner “Gary”  Rigg, and Rev. Leslie Smith.

That makes 60 down, and 200 to go. And for people wanting to join the society, dues are  a remarkably low $25 per year for regular members and $20 per year for retirees and graduate students. Send your check (made payable to The John Updike Society) along with name, preferred snail mail and email address, and phone (to contact only if your information becomes outdated) to: James Plath, Dept. of English, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL  61702-2900.

Because The John Updike Society went very quickly from an author society of 35 members to a 501 c 3 non-profit organization of 250+ members with a six-figure budget and the responsibility of restoring and maintaining The John Updike Childhood Home, the board decided at their October 4, 2014 board meeting to alter the composition and election structure of the board to reflect current sound practices among non-profits of similar size and mission. It was decided that two new board members would be added, with a nominating committee composed of board members bringing forth names of candidates who fit the current needs of the board. Board members then voted and extended an invitation to the two who received the most votes: Biljana Dojčinović, Associate Professor, Dept. of Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Serbia, and Robert Luscher, Professor of English, University of Nebraska at Kearney. Both accepted and begin serving three-year terms immediately, joining current board members Jim Plath (president), Jim Schiff (vice-president and editor of The John Updike Review), Peter Bailey (secretary), Marshall Boswell (Treasurer), and directors Sylvie Mathé and Don Greiner.

At the October meeting, the board also determined that two positions should be converted into general membership seats, to be decided by an election in which all members vote. The first three-year position to be filled is the seat vacated by Jack De Bellis, who resigned last year in order to make way for “new blood.” The board is grateful for De Bellis’s tireless service and will miss his presence. But he will continue to advise on an informal basis. Members soon will receive calls for nomination from the secretary regarding the election.

Biljana Dojčinović is the director of the national project Кnjiženstvo—theory and history of women’s writing in Serbian until 1915 and editor-in-chief of Knjiženstvo, A Journal in Literature, Gender and Culture. She has been a member of The John Updike Society since its founding and a member of the editorial board of The John Updike Review since 2010. Her Ph.D. was focused on the narrative strategies in John Updike’s novels, and in 2007 she published a monograph in Serbian on Cartographer of the Modern World: The Novels of John Updike. She is also the author of numerous essays on Updike’s works and other topics, as well as five more academic books.

Rob Luscher is the author of John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction and “Updike’s Olinger Stories: New Light among the Shadows. He has also published essays on Updike and his short fiction in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the Blackwell Companion to the American Short Story, Eureka Studies in Short Fiction, and The John Updike Review. Beyond Updike, his scholarship focuses on the short story sequence, with published essays on volumes of short fiction by Ernest Gaines, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Clark Blaise, and Robert Olen Butler. He has been a member of The John Updike Society since its founding, and in addition to teaching at the University of Nebraska at Kearney he also serves as Faculty Coordinator of the Thompson Scholars Learning Community.