Ruth Suckow

by

Ruth Suckow’s Birthplace & Annual Meeting

Ruth Suckow

Ruth Suckow, Iowa writer

Fans of Ruth Suckow, an Iowa writer, will want to attend the annual meeting of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association this Saturday, June 7, at 10 a.m., at the Cedar Falls Public Library in Cedar Falls, Iowa.  The society will discuss business in the morning, and after lunch you can attend a free discussion of Ruth’s memoir, “Myself,” from her book, Some Others and Myself.

You can get more information from:  lounsberry@gmail.com or cheriedargan@gmail.com

Because I love Suckow’s work, I am reposting an old entry about Suckow’s birthplace from my old blog.

Here it is.

Ruth Suckow’s Birthplace, Hawarden, Iowa

If you don’t live in the Midwest, you don’t know who Ruth Suckow is. If you do live in the Midwest, you don’t know who Ruth Suckow is.

So who is Ruth Suckow?

(a) A wealthy farmer who invented a hybrid corn in Hawarden, Iowa?
(b) A folk artist from Hawarden, Iowa?
(c) A writer of novels about small-town life in Iowa?

Ruth Suckow, Grinnel, Iowa, 1914

Ruth Suckow, Grinnell, Iowa, 1914

If you picked the last option, you are right. Suckow (1892-1960) was born in Hawarden, Iowa.  She  was a popular writer in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Her fictional chronicles of small-town Midwestern life are quiet, simple, and undramatic, yet astonishingly moving even today. If you like  the fiction of Bess Streeter Aldrich and Maud Hart Lovelace, you will enjoy Suckow’s famous novels, The Folks and New Hope, both in print (University of Iowa Press).

I didn’t discover Ruth’s work till I moved back to Iowa and began to collect her books at book sales. I was charmed by her 1942 novel, New Hope, a fictional account of Hawarden at the turn of the century.

Ruth Suckow's birthplace

Ruth Suckow’s birthplace, Hawarden, Iowa

When I learned that Ruth Suckow’s house had been restored, I knew I had to take the tour. On the long drive to Hawarden, a lovely small town in the Missouri River valley near the Loess Hills, I read aloud parts of New Hope to my husband/driver.

Our kind guide, who wore a Ruth Suckow t-shirt and gave us a Ruth Suckow bookmark, told us she was reading New Hope in preparation for the book discussion at the 2012 Ruth Suckow Memorial Society meeting.

She said it had taken volunteers 20 years to restore the house, and they had just refinished the floors and hung the lace curtains from a thrift shop. It was the parsonage for the Congregationalist church, where Ruth’s father was the minister.

Suckow, front parlor

The front parlor

Ruth was an expert on church-centered social life in small towns. Her father’s work took the family to pastorates in Hawarden, Le Mars, Algona, Manchester, Grinnell, and Earlville. While her father wrote his sermons, she played in his study, where you can now see her typewriter and the desk her husband gave her.

Suckow's desk and typewriter

Desk and typewriter

You can also see Ruth’s father’s typewriter. On the sheet of paper is a poem. His own interest in writing may have influenced her.

Ruth's father's typewriter

Ruth’s father’s typewriter and a poem

The six-room house is tiny from the outside, but inside it seems spacious. (We noticed this same phenomenon at Willa Cather’s house in Red Cloud, Nebraska.) There are high ceilings and lots of light from floor-to-ceiling windows. These days it is hard to believe a family could be comfortable here, but the quiet–no electronic diversions, no three-car garages, no expensive hobbies–may have nurtured creativity. How much easier to write when there are few distractions.

There are displays of her books, clippings and pictures…

Ruth Suckow's Books

Ruth Suckow’s Books

We loved our visit there, and it is definitely worth the trip. There are no books or t-shirts for sale–it’s totally uncommercial. In some writers’ museum-houses–I don’t mean commercial places like Mark Twain’s house in Hannibal, or even Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House in Concord–I often feel I get to know the writers.

by

American Blogger!

Ruth Suckow

Ruth Suckow

Regional women writers get short shrift.

I’m thinking particularly of Midwestern writers.  Perhaps you’ve read Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather’s My Antonia (I recommend her stunning novels, The Professor’s House and A Lost Lady), or Pulitzer and Orange Prize winner Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or Home.

You are less likely to know Margaret Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Able McLaughlins (1924), a chilling, compelling novel, set during the Civil War, about a woman who is raped  and how she and her fiance courageously deal with her pregnancy.  There is also playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell, who won the Pulitzer for her play Alison’s House, and whose collection of stories, Her America:  A Jury of Her Peers and Other Stories, was published by University of Iowa Press.

And then there are the Midwestern women writers who didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize.

Ruth Suckow (1892-1960), an Iowa-born novelist of the 20th century who wrote very quiet, simple novels about small-town life in the Midwest, has many devoted supporters.  The Ruth Suckow Memorial Society has worked hard to promote her books, and will hold its annual meeting on Saturday, June 8, at the Hawarden Public Library in Hawarden, Iowa, Suckow’s birthplace.  The business meeting starts at 10, and  the discussion of her novel, The John Wood Case, begins at 11.  Afterwards you can tour the six-room house where the Suckow family  lived.

Her novels are not classics.  I won’t lie to you.  She is, however, historically important if you’re interested in Midwestern women’s lives at the turn of the (last) century. The daughter of a Congregationalist minister, she followed her father to many towns in Iowa and even studied bee-keeping in Colorado.  In her novels, she describes the daily  lives of women whose  social lives revolve around the church, as her own life did growing up.  She details their preparations for Thanksgiving festivals, Christmas services, choir practice, kaffeeklatsches, fudge-making, church suppers, flirtations at choir practice, and marriage.

new-hope-ruth-suckow-paperback-cover-artI enjoyed The Folks and New Hope, two of Suckow’s novels reissued by the University of Iowa Press.  Some of her books are available as e-books.

LINKS TO AMERICAN BLOGS!

Yes, I’m an Anglophile. Yes, I read mostly English books.  Yes, I read many English blogs. But  last week some of my favorite English bloggers BEGAN  TO SOUND EXACTLY LIKE MISS READ.  I was reading Dovegreyreader and Mary Beard, and they sounded like the same person.

It’s disconcerting, so I am taking a short break from their blogs.

Anyway, I have gone all-American this week: here are a few links to American blogs.

I recommend:

1.  Ellen Moody’s beautifully written and intense blog about her husband’s cancer, “A Visit to the Surgeon” (Under the Sign of Syliva Two).

2.  D. G. Myers on Claire Messud, a novelist who replied angrily to a Publishers Weekly writer who asked if she’d want to be friends with the heroine of her novel, The Woman Upstairs (A Commonplace Reader).

3.  Borderline Ph.D. on “The Unthinkable Thought of Borderline Pride. ”  After a decade of publication of frank mental illness memoirs in the ’90s, the depressed, bipolar, and others have gone underground, leaving autism the most-written-about brain disease.  I don’t quite know how borderline personality disorder fits in, because I haven’t heard much about it, but Borderline Ph.D.states her case and good luck to her.

4.  The novelist Jay McInerney’s blog on the PEN Freedom to Write award and the award to Roth for service, “The Weight of the Word.”