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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman’s Crystals: Difference between revisions

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{{Byline|last=Busa|first=Christopher |abstract=A long-time Provincetown resident, writer, and magazine editor describes the recently founded Norman Mailer Writers Colony and recounts the importance of Norman Mailer’s life and work to the mission of the Colony. |url=https://prmlr.us/mr03bus}}
{{Byline|last=Busa|first=Christopher |abstract=A long-time Provincetown resident, writer, and magazine editor describes the recently founded Norman Mailer Writers Colony and recounts the importance of Norman Mailer’s life and work to the mission of the Colony. |url=https://prmlr.us/mr03bus}}
NORMAN’S CRYSTALS
CHRISTOPHER BUSA
Larry Schiller, the executive director and co-founder with Norris
Mailer of the fledgling Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, told
me that a year ago he knew little about how to run a writer’s colony. He is
still trying to figure out how much he knows, now that the workshops have
begun in the large house that Norman lived in up to the time of his death.
The idea of gathering writers in this brick mini-mansion-by-the-sea is to
perpetuate the kind of life and activity that fueled Norman’s own writing.
Schiller, the photographer, filmmaker, longtime collaborator with Norman,
and a founding member of The Norman Mailer Society, envisions the Colony as something of a performance piece, an enactment that takes place in
the very house where Norman wrote the bulk of his books. Indeed, Schiller
is actively filming long segments of interactions and conversations. His concept of creating the Colony must have its model in documentary filmmaking, and may embody Boswellian lessons in Schiller’s unstoppable
commitment to this project. Johnson once said to Boswell, “Why do you
write down my sayings?”
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