I am no longer updating this blog! Please visit us on Facebook!
www.facebook.com/groups/136792936397032/

Please go to our newly updated website, www.ruthsuckow.org,
where you will find information about the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association, our annual meetings, and Ruth Suckow's life and work.

I also blog at bloggingbasicswithcherie.blogspot.com and at
my geeky grandma website.

Thanks, Cherie Dargan, webmaster, www.ruthsuckow.org

Annual Meeting Reminder -- June 8, 2013

Annual Meeting, 2013 -- Road trip to Hawarden! Our annual meeting will be Saturday, June 8. The Hawarden Public Library will host our meeting at 10 a.m. President Barbara Lounsberry plans to keep the business meeting to an hour or less, so that we can discuss "The John Wood Case" at 11. Then folks can have lunch or tour the Hawarden sites, whatever they wish. Mike and I visited the Hawarden library several years ago; they have a nice display of Suckow's books. The Suckow birthplace is here, part of a historic village. We were only able to peek inside the windows, so it will be nice to see inside.

OUR ANNUAL MEETING IS COMING UP JUNE 9TH: PLEASE JOIN US TO DISCUSS HER BOOK NEW HOPE. The Ruth Suckow MemorialAssociation, http://www.ruthsuckow.org/, will be focusing on the book New Hope for our annual meeting this year on Saturday, June 9th, 2012. We will meet at the Cedar Falls Public Library in Cedar Falls, Iowa. We welcome you to join us as we discuss this book. This year marks 120 years since Ruth Suckow's birth. Her legacy goes beyond the genre of regional writing and even the label of realism does not adequately describe her ability to describe the everyday lives of people living in the small towns of Iowa in the early to mid 1900s. While some of the expressions in the dialogue might be a little dated,her books and short stories focus on many themes still relevant today. As a Community College teacher, I use one of her short stories in my Introduction to Literature class and find students are able to identify with the characters and themes. I've just started reading New Hope and look forward to posting a complete review later on.

2012 Annual Meeting

COMING SOON......OUR ANNUAL MEETING, SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012

Now we are looking forward to our next Annual Meeting, set for Saturday, June 9th at the Cedar Falls Pulic Library in Cedar Falls, Iowa. We will be meeting in the large meeting room up on the second floor of the library: please join us.

Our book for the 2012 meeting is New Hope.

New picture of Ruth

This picture was taken in 1931.

Announcing our new website

We did a major revamp of the Ruth Suckow website, and response has been positive.
Please check it out: http://www.ruthsuckow.org/

It's a whole new look, with a lot of new content and numerous photos not included on the older website, which went back to 2006 and was the result of a lot of hard work by Michael Dargan. The new website has the same URL, so if someone found us a couple of years ago, we haven't "moved."

We now have pages for the Birthplace, Earlville, and Ferner Nuhn, among other things.

We did a formal introduction of the new website at our Annual meeting last year, June 11, 2011.

Ruth Suckow's legacy

I was pondering Suckow's legacy as I looked over some dates, and realized that her first short story was published 90 years ago ("Uprooted," Feb. 1921). Our book selection for the 2011 annual meeting, Country People, was published in 1924.

It has been 51 years since her death, 119 years since her birth, and 22 years since Ferner's death. Our Association was formed 45 years ago.

And yet, each semester as I teach my Introduction to Literature class, I continue to find that my students understand her story "A Rural Community," and can relate with Ralph, the main character, who finds his home town changed and yet unchanged. Suckow's gift for the description of the midwestern small town streets, fields, and characters resonates with them.