Plans for the Norman Mailer Writers Colony will move one step closer to fruition next Friday in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where a reception will be held in order to begin raising the twelve to fourteen million dollars needed to launch the nonprofit foundation.
Sam Radin, the executor of Mailer’s estate; Norris Mailer, the late author’s wife; and Lawrence Schiller, a close friend and collaborator, announced a plan to form the writers colony at the conclusion of a three-hour memorial service for Mailer at Carnegie Hall on April 9, 2008, less than five months after the author died of acute renal failure. The plan calls for Mailer’s home in Provincetown, located at 627 Commercial Street, to be used for writing workshops, lectures, and seminars for fiction writers, nonfiction writers, journalists, and screenwriters. Schiller recently told the Provincetown Banner that the colony will
pair distinguished writers and scholars in residence with writing
students starting in 2009.
Along with Radin and Schiller, Norris Mailer has been traveling the country trying to raise money and attract institutional support. An advisory board of writers, including Joan Didion, Günter Grass, William Kennedy, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, has also been formed.
