May/June 2026 (Volume 18, Issue 3)

 

By Barbara Lounsberry

 

How does an artist take the first steps—make a start?

 

One of Iowa’s most notable writers, Ruth Suckow, shows one path in her private diary entries penned in 1919 and 1920, but only discovered in 1960 at her sudden death. Between those years Suckow published nine novels and 43 short stories. In these she captured Iowa’s small towns and farms, offered tales of Iowa love and loss, of farm couples retiring and moving to town, of women and men striving to be independent, of going away and coming home.

 

Today, Suckow (pronounced Soo-co) is enjoying a too-long-delayed “Renaissance.” One cause is the Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibit on her remarkable life and works, now in its third year of travel with no sign of stopping. A second factor is the concurrent (almost annual) centennial celebrations of her works: her first novel “Country People” (1924); her second novel “The Odyssey of a Nice Girl” (1925); and her first collection of short stories “Iowa Interiors” (1926) to be formally celebrated with a free Saturday afternoon public program on Sept. 12 at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls. Centennial celebrations of three more Suckow novels soon will come.

 

These celebrations, spotlighting specific Suckow works, have spurred new print editions of her books with rich new introductions, audio recordings of 12 of Suckow’s short stories, a reader’s theatre script of her feminist short story “A Great Mollie” (first titled “Strong as a Man”) that has received a handful of successful Iowa productions, a radio play of “The Odyssey of a Nice Girl,” many book club discussions, and more. In March 2025, more than 100 people from across the nation took part in a four-week Zoom “Senior College Course” on Suckow, hosted by the University of Iowa and taught by University of Northern Iowa Professor of English Dr. Julie Husband.

 

The new centennial edition of “Iowa Interiors,” available this fall, will feature a new color cover by Iowa City artist Claudia McGehee and her 14 new scratchboard illustrations (one for each of the 14 short stories) and an introduction by Husband and Associate Dean of the University of Northern Iowa College of Humanities, Arts, and Sciences Dr. Jim O’Loughlin. 

 

But in 1919 no short stories or novels had been published—or even written. In fact, Suckow (now 27 years old) was reckoning with family loss. Her beautiful mother, Anna Kluckhohn Suckow, had just died suddenly in Denver, Colo, where Ruth’s beloved, gifted older sister, Emma, had sought mountain air for her own struggle with tuberculosis, a battle Emma soon would lose. Ruth had joined her mother and sister in Denver in 1916; however, now what was a bereft daughter to do?

 

She responded by learning the beekeeping business. Her father, a Congregational minister and now a widower, took up a new parish in Earlville, located in Eastern Iowa. Ruth followed him there and, with his financial help, launched her 80-hive Orchard Apiary to support her beginning forays as a writer. Wearing an enormous bee hat and veil, the tiny Suckow would lug the heavy bee frames and work long hours at the honey press. On Saturdays she would drive her truck to sell her white clover honey at the Dubuque Farmer’s Market. Across the next seven years, Suckow’s Earlville honey sales funded her winters of writing in Greenwich Village in New York City.

 

 

But how is a writer to begin? Suckow, who was born in the small northwestern Iowa town of Hawarden in 1892, appears to have used her private diary as a practice ground. Fiction writers need characters, and so Suckow inks this Nov. 28, 1919, diary portrait which she titles “One of the Cousins”:

 

“This is perhaps the dearest cousin because of the things he, so quite unconsciously, seems to be. He is a quiet, painstaking, merry boy, rosy-cheeked. … In the spring, he left school because he could not bear to be away when things were beginning to grow. … One can feel the intensity of his seldom spoken love of the soil. I thought of ‘rooted in one dear perpetual place.’ He is narrow, slow to move, superficially stolid, but firm, hardy, with a suggestion of the depth and the simplicity that the land gives. His virtues are the virtues of the farm, and the farm is Iowa.”

 

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal.

 

Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibit 

A traveling exhibit chronicling the life and work of writer Ruth Suckow will visit several Iowa sites in 2026. The Ruth Suckow Memorial Association, sponsor of the exhibition with Humanities Iowa, is seeking additional host sites for 2027. To apply to host the free exhibit or to become a member or supporter of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association, visit www.ruthsuckow.org. An exhibit application form can also be requested directly from: lounsberry@gmail.com

Apr. 12-May 17 – Gibson Public Library

May 24-June 21 – Ruthven Public Library

June 28-July 26 – Nashua Public Library

Aug. 22-Nov. 15 – German American Heritage Center and Museum, Davenport

Nov. 22-Dec. 20 – Livermore Public library

 

Centennial celebration of ‘Iowa Interiors’

This free public celebration of Ruth Suckow’s first collection of short stories will be held on Saturday Sept. 12 at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls. 

1 p.m. Reader’s Theatre Production of Suckow’s short story “A Great Mollie.”

1:30 p.m. Keynote Address by Dr. Jim O’Loughlin about “Iowa Interiors” and Suckow as a short story writer.

2 p.m. Break for centennial carrot cake and cider.

2:15 p.m. “Illustrating Iowa Interiors” by Claudia McGehee.

2:35 p.m. Panel: “Contemporary Iowa Short Story Writers on ‘Iowa Interiors’ and on Suckow as a Writer of Short Fiction” with Laura Farmer, Keith Lesmeister and Marc Dickinson.

3:05 p.m. Open audience discussion.