A Writer's Biography

It's the birthday of Sue Hubbell (books by this author), born in Kalamazoo, Michigan (1935). She said: "No one expected much from little girls growing up in the 1930s in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Mine was a family of high-aspirers, but they gave up on me [...] I was left pretty much alone. I look at today's youngsters with their enrichment programs, after-school lessons and activities, busily building résumés so that they can get into Harvard and realize I was given a wonderful gift — a happy childhood of my own making. I climbed trees and sat in the tops of them for long, long periods of time. I made exquisite little villages under an old pinoak tree by the edge of a lake. I read a lot in a random sort of way. I wondered a lot because the things I was most interested in seldom were on teachers' agenda. And so I asked a lot of questions. Asking questions wasn't a good preparation for any respectable career."

She became a journalist, a bookstore manager, and a librarian at Brown University, where her husband, Paul, taught. But they weren't satisfied with their lives, and they quit their jobs and bought 99 acres in the Ozarks in southern Missouri and took up beekeeping. After 30 years of marriage, the couple divorced, and she found herself alone, middle-aged, living on a big farm, producing honey. And she started to write down her own story. She said: "I was writing for myself, and what I put on paper over the next couple of years was unlike anything I had written before. I traced the natural history of my hilltop from one springtime to the next, discovering by the second spring that I was in a new place and understanding the value of where I was. That book was A Country Year: Living the Questions (1986). Her other books include A Book of Bees (1998), Waiting for Aphrodite (1999), and From Here to There and Back Again (2004).