Our History
Ever since the founding of the first PEN group in London in 1921 by Jonathan Galsworthy and other authors, all PEN organizations around the world have been, at their core, assemblies of writers who wish to protect and promote the written word. For this first issue of our newsletter, we asked the writer who got PEN New England started twenty years ago to tell us how it began.
In 1978 the Boston area was a literary backwater. Book authors were virtually invisible; there were no prose writers' organizations and only a couple of reading series. Along with J. Anthony Lukas and Aileen Ward, then living in Cambridge, I applied to PEN American Center in New York for money to start a New England branch of this distinguished international writers' organization. To our surprise, they said yes.
Our inaugural event, held at the Boston Athenaeum, was an upbeat panel, "Why I live 'Here' Not 'There'," with John Updike; Robert manning, editor of The Atlantic Monthly; and poet Ruth Whitman. You were supposed to understand that "here" meant Boston and "there" meant New York.
In the beginning, everything was informal. We had no secretarial or administrative help. We had no stationary or telephone. By default—no one else wanted to do it—I ran the outfit; I was chair, secretary, and treasurer. We had a board who sat down together a couple of times a year to plan events to take place approximately once a month from September to June, always including an opening party, a "discovery" evening to introduce new writers, and a picnic in the garden of the Longfellow House. Each event was produced by the board member who suggested it; that meant he or she did the planning, organizing, publicity, and catering. Because there were so few book writers in the area, we added the designation "Affiliate" to our membership, so that anyone who sent in $10 would be put on the mailing list and receive invitations to meetings. We called ourselves PEN New England.
Finding a permanent home seemed hopeless. For one reason or another, none of them worked out. Among other places we landed temporarily over the first decade were: Lesley College, Boston University, the St. Botolph Club, the Boston Public Library, Horticulture Hall, the Bunting Institute, and Harvard's Lamont Library. Among many hard-working writers who served on the board were Gish Jen, Justin Kaplan, Megan Marshall, Gail Mazur, William Novak, Robert Nozick, Carol Oles, Lloyd Schwartz, and Sam Shem.
Some of our meetings worked very well, a few flopped. In the first catagory" a "Conversation" between Justin Kaplan and Richard Rhodes; a panel on "Rejection" with John Updike and Leslie Epstein; a panel on autobiographical fiction and poetry with Elizabeth Hardwick; a panel on writing about war with Tim O'Brien (he and James Carroll, in the audience, got into a scrappy conversation); a panel on screenwriting with Alice Hoffman; and a quiz with Bill Novak throwing trivia questions at four literary batters.
After ten years, a weary chair gladly gave over the management of this by-now venerable institution to a new team.