The box of Books Arrives

Post date: Jun 3, 2017 11:42:11 PM

The box of Books Arrives!

There are few things like opening a box from a publisher with copies of a book that you helped to write! A box arrived today from Hastings College Press and inside I found four copies of The Midwestern Moment, a collection of essays about Midwestern writers and artists and the impact of regionalism.

My essay, “The Realistic Regionalism of Iowa’s Ruth Suckow,” argues that Suckow was more than a realist and a regionalist. “…Suckow's remarkable story-telling abilities, her realistic portrayal of characters—especially women—and her contribution to the regionalism debate” make her “an outstanding Midwestern writer and a key figure in the early twentieth Midwestern Moment in American literary history and a voice that deserves to be heard again.”

I learned a great deal from researching and writing my essay about Ruth Suckow. She didn’t care for labels like “regional” or “local” writer because she thought her stories had more universal meaning. However, reading her fiction is like taking a trip back in time: you can see the rolling hills of rural Iowa, its small towns and farms, the people who worked so hard to build up our state. Her quiet descriptive prose captures their dialogue, the food they ate, their daily routines, and their struggle against poverty and the elements.

When I first read Suckow’s short stories and novels, I thought “this is the world that my mother grew up in….that my grandmother and great grandmother knew—the farms, small towns, little schools, and churches. The impact of the Great Depression, the First World War, the bringing of electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones….”

I used to tell my students that Ruth Suckow is the most famous writer from Iowa that you’ve never heard of! We used one of her short stories, A Rural Community” in my Intro to Literature class and I always enjoyed hearing their comments about it. A man in his late 30s arrives on a train early one morning: he is back in his old home town to visit his adopted parents. Ralph is a successful journalist who travels the world and hasn’t been back in 15 years, but sends a check to his parents every Christmas. He has to ask for directions because his parents have moved to town from the farm; as he walks around, he sees all of the changes in the town and yet concludes that overall it has stayed the same.

He surprises his parents and they visit before sharing a wonderful home cooked lunch. He goes to the family cemetery with his mother to decorate graves. They visit more and Ralph gets uncomfortable when they begin asking when he is going to marry and settle down! However, he is surprised when his mother brings out a scrapbook full of his writing: she says to him over and over, “surely, you’re one of ours!” After supper his adopted siblings come in from their farms for a visit. Afterwards, he walks back to the train station to catch the midnight train.

He gets onboard and settles down, but:

…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.[i]

My students could relate to Ralph’s experience of going home and finding a new Casey’s or seeing how Main Street has added a Diner or changed the Street Lights. They crack up when his father suggests he look up his old high school girl friend and they sigh when they read about the fried chicken and all of the sides. They like the way the arrival and departure of the train frames the story and they notice her vivid description of the farm fields. The story was written in 1924 but my modern, smartphone toting College students “get it.”

I’m thankful for the opportunity to write the essay and be part of this book. I’m also happy for the focus it places on a group of writers, editors, and artists who have been largely forgotten—including John T. Frederick, the editor of a regional literary magazine called The Midland that featured many of these writers and introduced their work to the world. He gave Ruth Suckow her first chance to be published with some poetry and short stories and then introduced her to the great editor H. L. Mencken, who helped her take her writing career to the next level—national. In all, 16 of her short stories appeared in anthologies from 1924 through 1954 but regionalism was going out of literary style and most of her books were out of print by the time she died in 1960.

Then her husband Ferner (who was 11 years younger) and his second wife Georgia got together with a group of friends and formed the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association in 1966. The group worked to preserve Suckow’s legacy and their hard work resulted in the reprinting of Country People and Iowa Interiors in 1977. Later, A Ruth Suckow Omnibus was published in 1988, thanks to the efforts of Clarence Andrews, a Board Member of the RSMA. Finally, a new edition of The Folks came out in 1992 as well as a biography and book looking at Suckow’s work, making it possible for new readers to discover her work.

If you would like to read some of her short stories for free, just go to the website www.ruthsuckow.org and find the link for her short stories.

The Midwestern Moment: The Forgotten World of Early Twentieth-Century Midwestern Regionalism, 1880-1940 -- Jon K. Lauck, editor. Hastings College Press, Jun 1, 2017

ISBN 1942885490, 9781942885498 $24.99

The book will be available on Amazon by July 1^st.

It will also be available through the Hastings College Press website.

[i] Ruth Suckow, “A Rural Community,” The Midland, July 1922, 1. PDF available at http://www.ruthsuckow.org/home/ruth-suckow-s-short-stories

Last Updated June 3, 2017