In August 2021 the Society shared this notice:
The Norman Mailer Center is ceasing activities. Norman Mailer’s library and the contents of his writer’s study formerly in the center’s possession have been transferred to the E.S. Farley Library at Wilkes University. For further information, contact Suzanna Calev, University Archivist.
Wilkes is also the sponsor of the Norris Church Mailer Writing Scholarship. Established by Norman Mailer and friends in 2005, it is awarded annually to a student in the Maslow Family Graduate Creative Writing Program at Wilkes. Before their deaths, Norman Mailer and his wife Norris served on the Maslow Program’s Advisory Board. For further information, contact the Program Director, Dr. David Hicks.
So ended thirteen years of workshops, fellowships, prizes, and galas carried on in Mailer’s name, much of it alongside the Society.
A colony in Provincetown
The Norman Mailer Writers Colony was announced at the close of “The Time of His Time,” the memorial for Mailer at Carnegie Hall on April 9, 2008, by Sam Radin and Lawrence Schiller (The Mailer Review, 2008). That year Review editor Phillip Sipiora named its founders as Norris Church Mailer, Larry Schiller, Sam Radin, Mike Lennon, and Tom Staley. Schiller, who had worked with Mailer for more than three decades, did most of the planning. “The colony was one of Mailer’s dying wishes,” he told the Cape Cod Times that December; “we want to take his home and make it a center point” of the town’s arts community. In the Daily Beast he traced the idea to the house itself, on the beach in Provincetown, where Mailer had written great chunks of his books.
The Society was asked to help from the start. In his 2008 letter to members, Society president J. Michael Lennon called the Colony “precisely the sort of enterprise that Norman endorsed in his later years,” and members had been sent a packet describing the programs the Colony would offer.
The first season opened in Provincetown in May 2009 with one-week workshops; Lennon taught the methods of the New Journalism from May 31 to June 6. That July the first seven Norman Mailer Fellows, chosen from 436 applicants, spent four weeks at the Mailer home with the mentors James Magnuson and Gregory Curtis. Among them was Alex Gilvarry, whose novel From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant was then a work in progress; he later came to the Society’s conferences as a speaker. Don DeLillo visited the Fellows that first summer, and Gay Talese was to visit the next. Other alumni went on to the Society’s stages and pages too: Ronald K. Fried, a 2010 fellow, brought his play Two Mailers to the 2015 conference, and Steve Adams, of the 2009 creative nonfiction workshop, won a Pushcart Prize in 2013.
The Colony reached beyond the summer sessions. In June 2009 it gave its first Cape Cod award for exceptional writing to Salvatore Scibona, at an evening shared with the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the architect Richard Meier. The Norman Mailer Writing Awards for students, announced in Washington on February 23, 2009, were given by the Colony with the National Council of Teachers of English; the first winners came from 698 high-school and 667 college entries. A competition with British GQ followed for students in the United Kingdom.
By its fourth season, in 2012, Mailer’s living room over Cape Cod Bay was hosting one-week workshops in memoir, poetry, screenwriting, fiction, playwriting, and creative nonfiction, four-week fellowships, and a Labor Day retreat, and a donor was giving every workshop participant $250 toward fees.
The Center and its galas
The Colony became one division of a larger Norman Mailer Center, with Schiller as president. Its annual benefit, first held at Cipriani in New York on October 20, 2009, as the prologue to the Society’s Washington conference, gave Mailer prizes to Toni Morrison and, posthumously, David Halberstam; the evening drew DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Salman Rushdie. The 2010 gala honored Orhan Pamuk, Ruth Gruber, and Jann Wenner. When Norris Church Mailer died that November, her family asked that memorial gifts go to the Center, to be shared between the Colony she had co-founded and the Wilkes University MFA program.
By November 2011 the Center had raised about $870,000, and its New York gala had netted $200,000 (Executive Board minutes, 2011). Schiller proposed that the Society, too, become a division of the Center, and the Board named a committee to study the idea. In 2012 the Society sent 425 copies of The Mailer Review to the Center’s gala, where Alec Baldwin was master of ceremonies and Muhammad Ali, Joyce Carol Oates, Gay Talese, and Robert Caro were among the guests (Business Meeting minutes, 2012); the New York Times asked afterward where all the fighting writers had gone. That October the Society’s Executive Board met at the Center in Provincetown, and Schiller described his efforts to raise money to buy the Mailer house.
On the road
The Center and the Colony had used the house rent-free since Mailer’s death and hoped to buy it, with a deadline of March 2013 at a reduced price of $3.5 million. “At the end of the day, they didn’t come up with the money,” Michael Mailer said, and in June 2013 Mailer’s children put the house on the market (Boston.com, June 11, 2013; Electric Literature, July 25, 2013). The sale ended the Colony’s years in Provincetown (Provincetown Independent, August 30, 2023). That summer’s fellowships and workshops met in Brooklyn Heights, where Lennon led participants on a walking tour from the St. George to Mailer’s home at 142 Columbia Heights. In 2014 the Center’s On the Road program took its writers three weeks in Salt Lake City, where Mailer had begun The Executioner’s Song, and its sixth gala, at the New York Public Library, honored Don DeLillo, Billy Collins, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, following earlier laureates including Joyce Carol Oates, Elie Wiesel, and Maya Angelou.
In October 2015 Schiller told the Society’s Board that the Center was on hiatus while it reorganized its board and looked for a permanent home, possibly at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn; its student writing award that year drew more than 6,000 high-school entries (Executive Board minutes, 2015). On December 10, 2015, Pratt hosted the Center’s annual awards in Memorial Hall, where Gay Talese presided, the student and teacher winners were honored, and Salman Rushdie received the Lifetime Achievement Award (Pratt Institute). In 2016 the Center announced a summer poetry fellowship at Pepperdine University.
Wilkes
On February 19, 2018, Wilkes University announced that its Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing would bring the Mailer Writers Colony’s summer workshops to campus as their permanent home, with week-long workshops in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, playwriting, publishing, and screenwriting. Wilkes faculty, among them Lennon, Kaylie Jones, Bonnie Culver, Beverly Donofrio, and Colum McCann, had taught at the Colony before (Wilkes University; The Beacon, February 26, 2018). Mailer, Culver recalled, had been the first member of the program’s advisory board. That August two weeks of Colony workshops flanked the Pennsylvania Writers Conference (Revise This!, Fall 2018). It was the Colony’s last season.
Wilkes also received Mailer’s own books. Schiller gave the university Mailer’s entire 4,000-volume library, and the Norman Mailer Room in the Farley Library, first dedicated in 2000, was rededicated in 2019 with its full collection (Wilkes Magazine, Spring 2024). With the library and the study at Wilkes, the Center closed in 2021.