Lois Phillips Hudson

Lois Phillips Hudson was born in Jamestown, North Dakota on August 24, 1927, to Carl Wayne Phillips and Aline Runner Phillips; she was the eldest of three daughters born to the couple. Aline Runner was a teacher with a degree in chemistry, but left the field to become a farm wife when she married Carl, who was a largely self-educated man. The Phillips family lived and farmed outside Cleveland, North Dakota until, ruined by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, they were forced to migrate to Washington State in 1935. On their journey, they spent several months as migrant workers moving from location to location, following the crops' picking seasons for available work. During this time, the Phillips girls were considered outsiders in the communities which they passed through, and their educations were not taken seriously by the schools they were placed in, as is depicted in the short story "Children of the Harvest." On arriving finally in Seattle, they found a small house in the Ballard neighborhood, where Carl operated a gas station. Ultimately, the family bought the farm of a man who was unable to pay his taxes. The farm was located on the East Side of Lake Washington, outside the town of Redmond.

Contents

• Life
• Death
• Awards
• Works
• Criticism
• References

Lois became the first editor of the Redmond Recorder as an 18-year-old in the 1940s. She went on to graduate from the College (now University) of Puget Sound in Tacoma, where she edited the yearbook. After spending a year teaching junior high school English in Shelton, Washington, she had saved enough money to enter the master's degree program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her lack of funds necessitated her completing the degree in one year. She married Randolph Hudson, a fellow Cornell graduate student in English, in 1952, and the couple moved to California, where their two daughters, Laura and Lucy, were born.

She was granted an honorary doctorate by North Dakota State University in 1965; Lawrence Welk also received an honorary doctorate from NDSU at the same ceremony. At the time, he traded Hudson an autographed album in exchange for an autographed copy of The Bones of Plenty.

Hudson subsequently taught at both North Dakota State University and the University of Washington, from which she retired in 1992.

A prolific writer, her best known works are her novel, The Bones of Plenty, and the collection of short stories Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle. Both chronicled the years of the Great Depression in our agricultural heartland. Although both books appear to be highly autobiographical, Hudson often reminded people that they were in fact works of fiction.

Other works include two manuscripts unpublished at the time of Hudson's death. The first of these is partly memoir and partly a history of the Redmond, Washington area. Entitled "Unrestorable Habitat: Microsoft Is My Neighbor Now," the work was published in a generally unedited form in March, 2014 (Foreverland Press).

The second work, which is novel about the early history of California, The Kindly Fruits of the Earth, is currently under review for possible publication.

Additionally, Hudson published a multitude of short stories in a number of publications both nationally (Harper's, The New Yorker, The Reporter) and regionally/locally in Washington (Puget Soundings, a magazine published by the Junior League of Seattle).

Hudson was an active environmentalist, who, in addition to publishing many articles on the subject, performed service as a salmon watcher on the Sammamish River. She also wrote extensively on the changes that took place in her chosen home city of Redmond, Washington, over a 65-year period; a topic she was invited to speak about to the Redmond Historical Society. While living in California, she wrote a piece entitled "Four-Lane Menace To California's Redwoods" (published August 12, 1965 in The Reporter), about a freeway project that would cut through the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.

An avid bicyclist, Hudson had the habit of writing in the morning, and then taking a ten-mile bike ride along the Sammamish River in the afternoon. Her love of the outdoors extended to hiking, swimming and canoeing.