{"id":7034,"date":"2026-07-02T07:50:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T12:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=7034"},"modified":"2026-07-12T08:08:04","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T13:08:04","slug":"from-the-updike-casitas-pietrzyk-shares-a-short-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2026\/07\/02\/from-the-updike-casitas-pietrzyk-shares-a-short-story\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Updike Casitas: Pietrzyk shares a short story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Leslie Pietrzyk, the 2025 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow, shared a link to a short story<\/a> she wrote during her two-week residency at the casitas formerly owned by John and Martha Updike, where the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner spent time golfing and writing in his later years. The casitas, located in the Santa Catalina Foothills, are owned by Jan and Jim Emery, and the annual residency is made possible by their generosity.<\/p>\n

Pietrzyk was working on her proposed project, Nothing to See Here,\u00a0<\/em>a collection of linked stories about a neighborhood girl who disappears from a Midwestern town, written not as a police procedural or\u00a0Gone Girl\u00a0<\/em>mystery, but rather to address the \u201cemotional impact of growing up in a time and place where girls and women disappear.\u201d She talks briefly about her project in this\u00a0interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lead judge Robert M. Luscher, an Updike society board member, praised Pietrzyk for tackling a \u201cvariety of significant cultural issues in its metaphoric critique of female disappearance. Though these stories of peripheral, collateral damage are set in the 1970s, sadly their themes are even more relevant today than the time during which the stories take place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pietrzyk has published three novels (Pears on a Willow Tree, A Year and a Day,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Silver Girl<\/em>), one historical novel (Reversing the River<\/em>), and two short story collections (This Angel on My Chest\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Admit This to No One<\/em>). Her story \u201cStay There\u201d won a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and she was named co-winner of the Polish American Historical Association\u2019s 2020 Creative Arts Prize for promoting \u201can awareness of the Polish experience in the Americas\u201d through her fiction. Previously she completed residencies at Hawthornden Castle, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Wolff Cottage (in Fairhope, Ala.), The Hambidge Center, and an ARGS Residency in St. Petersburg, Va.<\/p>\n

Here is the link to the short story<\/a>, which was published in New Ohio Review<\/em>, and a link to more information about the John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellowship and other grants and awards<\/a> available from The John Updike Society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leslie Pietrzyk, the 2025 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow, shared a link to a short story she wrote during her two-week residency at the casitas formerly owned by John and Martha Updike, where the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner spent time … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99,10,72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-updike-tucson-casitas-fellowship","category-publications","category-scholarships-awards"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7034"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7035,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7034\/revisions\/7035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}