How I discovered Ruth Suckow, Iowa Writer

Post date: Apr 17, 2016 11:30:51 PM

Blog Post for April 17, 2016

People have asked me how I ever got involved with the Ruth Suckow organization. Sometimes I joke that I got involved because of a date with Mike, a librarian and former English teacher. One of his good friends—and former UNI teacher, Barbara Lounsberry—was the President of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association, and Mike thought it was something that an English teacher like me would enjoy. I found out later that it was one of Barbara’s mentors who had gotten her involved: retired Professor George Day. So, there we were in a van driving to the Annual Meeting of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association (RSMA) in Earlville, Iowa, back in the late 1990s, where I discovered a remarkable writer born and raised in Iowa: Ruth Suckow, 1892-1960.

I found myself fascinated with Ruth Suckow’s life and literary legacy in equal measures. Suckow kept bees in Earlville to support her writing in her early years: the library there now bears her name, and there is also the Ruth Suckow Park. The romantic aspect of marrying a much younger man and the wonderful way they supported each other’s work through 30 years was also admirable. However, after Mike and Barb and I did a presentation for the Iowa Library Association a few years later, using one of Suckow’s short stories, “A Rural Community,” I was hooked as a literature teacher and reader.

Ferner Nuhn, Ruth Suckow’s husband, founded the RSMA organization after her death in 1960 with a handful of friends and his second wife, Georgia, who was also Ruth’s cousin. Throughout the years, a number of scholars, librarians, teachers, and readers have joined the RSMA. Their hard work has resulted in the reprinting of several of her books, numerous articles being written, several books about her life and fiction, the creation of the Ruth Suckow website, Wikipedia entries on Suckow and her husband, and most recently, the inclusion of ten of Suckow’s stories on the Iowa Digital Heritage website.

How had I done a Master’s Degree in English at Iowa State University, including taking multiple literature courses, and never heard of Ruth Suckow? I read her short stories and novels, and started doing research on her life. I married my boyfriend, we joined the Board of the RSMA, and Mike created the first Suckow website and wrote a Wikipedia article about her. I wrote the Wikipedia article about Ferner Nuhn and later took over the Suckow website. I started hunting down old copies of her books online: after all, if you can’t find her work, how can anyone read her stories and novels?

I used her short story, “A Rural Community,” (1922) with my Literature class, and discovered that my Community college students related to Ralph, the main character, who takes the train back to his home town to visit his aging foster parents, retired farmers. He finds out that while some things have changed, many things have stayed the same. His foster parents worry about his single status and his father suggests looking up his high school sweetheart; his mother feeds him a wonderful lunch of fried chicken and mashed potatoes, and tells Ralph that he is one of their children--and my students get hungry reading the description of the food, and laugh at the idea of fixing him up with his old sweetheart. Almost a hundred years have passed since Suckow crafted the story of a successful man getting off the train to visit the old folks, but my students “get it.” Suckow’s work has universal meaning: you don’t have to grow up on a farm or live in a small town to understand the story.

Suckow’s work was highly thought of during the 1920s and 1930s and her short stories appeared in more than 50 anthologies between the 1920s and 1940s: then, something changed and most of her work was out of print by the 1960s. Some people suggest that Regionalism fell out of favor, or that after WW2, her style of writing was not considered as relevant. By the way, Suckow is not the only female writer to become obscure: have you ever heard of Susan Glaspell, Bess Streeter Aldrich or Alice French?

Feminist scholars like Showalter think the women writers of Suckow’s generation were marginalized “because their subjects…narrative strategies, and/or their linguistic, syntactical and thematic conventions were at odds with the prevailing literary modes that were set by patriarchal men. [1]

As noted, most of Suckow’s books were out of print by the 1960s, until Country People and Iowa Interiors were reprinted in 1977. Then A Ruth Suckow Omnibus was published in 1988, followed by The Folks in 1992, giving new readers opportunities to discover Suckow. There was a resurgence of interest in her work during the 1970s through the 1990s, with the reprinting of those four books. Scholars began looking at Suckow’s work differently: an article called her “Iowa’s First Feminist Author.”[2]

Several years ago I had the opportunity to be on the “Talk Of Iowa” show, on Iowa Public Radio, and was interviewed, along with Buena Vista Dean Paul Theobald and his wife Maureen, about a partnership of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association with Rural lit Rally, a website devoted to preserving the literature of the Midwest. The Board of the Rural Lit Rally was going to read and discuss “A Rural Community” with my Community College Literature students; we set up a special Facebook page, and my students posted responses back and forth with the Rural lit Rally folks scattered around the country.[3]

As part of the interview, I read several descriptive passages from “A Rural Community,” including the final passage, and found the reception to Suckow’s writing quite moving. At the end of the story, Ralph goes back to the train station and waits for his train. He gets onboard and settles down, reflecting:

…he was aware that since he had stepped off the train in the morning, the current of his thoughts had changed. He felt steadied, deeply satisfied. He looked toward the dark pastures beyond the row of dusky willow trees. They widened slowly into the open country which lay silent, significant, motionless, immense, under the stars, with its sense of something abiding.[4]

Listeners who had never heard of Ruth Suckow felt a sense of her connection to the Iowa hills, farms and small towns and her poetic description of them. While almost one hundred years have passed since Ralph stepped off that train, many of us in this century have shared his experience of exploring the world, coming home, and reconnecting with the Iowa hills and people we loved as children.

[1]Cited in Daly, Foreward to New Hope. A Bur Oak Book. (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1998), xv. Showalter 125

[2]Mary Jane Sweet. “Ruth Suckow: Iowa’s First Feminist Author.” Cedar Falls Record. June 15, 1982.

[3] Rural Lit Rally and Suckow.

http://www.ruthsuckow.org/home/rsma-news

[4] Suckow. “Rural Community.”

For more information, visit The Ruth Suckow website (www.ruthsuckow.org)

http://www.iowaheritage.org/ (10 total) for Ruth Suckow Short Stories Collection

Last Updated April 17, 2016