Overview
Stephen King has published close to 70 books in the last 50 years. In 2021, he and his wife Tabitha collected all of his available manuscript drafts into a secure, climate-controlled archive attached to their home in Bangor, Maine. Bicks was the first scholar to be granted extended access to this treasure trove of materials. She will discuss what she discovered about King’s writing process when she tracked the handwritten changes he made (macro and granular) to some of his most iconic works from the 1970s—the ones that scared her the most as a teenager. She’ll also talk about the conversations she had with King along the way, and how access to a living author, along with one’s emotional connection to their works, can both enrich and complicate archival research.
Date: Monday, June 15, 8PM EST
Guest Presenter: Caroline Bicks is the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine
Host: Gerald “Jay” Gaidmore
Presenter
Caroline Bicks is the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare, early modern culture, and horror fiction. Her academic monographs include Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England. Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, 2026) chronicles the year she spent reading early drafts of King’s iconic 1970s stories after he and his wife Tabitha granted her extended access to their personal archive in Bangor. It includes conversations she had with King about his writing process, as well as never-before-seen alternative endings she discovered to books like The Shining and Carrie. Bicks’s shorter nonfiction has appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Electric Lit, The Financial Times, and elsewhere.
Registration
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_O2ssd8ZSRDWBHYU71VHFvw
