The second edition of Sue Nell's first book is now available on Kindle and in paperback on Amazon:
Out of Red Dirt (And Up Cowbell Hill):
a collection of growing up stories from the Oklahoma
riverbeds to the Colorado Rockies
"I am...red dirt, acorns and elm trees, 'little lambs eat ivy' under the bay window, bubbly tar...and sixty-four frilly dresses...surrounded by four adoring brothers in the Daily Oklahoman."
"Little Nell" Phillips took root amid the waving wheat in the iron rich soils of Oklahoma in the 50's and 60's. She learned to "pick up from the left and serve from the right," (or is it "pick up from the right and serve from the left?") under the watchful eye and bow tie of her paternal grandfather and Oklahoma City’s first three-term mayor, Allen Morgan Street. She tasted tea and boiled custard with her grandmother, and pulled Nanny's toes after a "stwaberry" breakfast prepared by Papa, a lady's man. She was Lula's "Bright Eyes, shining in the dark" as she rode on the housekeeper's hip, listened to her Jesus songs and watched her fry chicken and roll out homemade biscuits. Summers, Little Nell rode old Ranger with her dad, Gramps, and trusted him "just around the next bend" -- and once into a raging forest fire. Sue Nell Phillips' first collection of stories, now available through Amazon and Kindle books, features the relationships that guided her early childhood: the people who shared Emily Post and Ann Landers, daring adventures and downright stupidity, and a "nascent sense of injustice" in the land of sweetness and wind that "comes right behind the rain." Click here to find my book on AMAZON.com ______________________________________________ And check out what others have said about Sue Nell's book, including Jane Kirkpatrick, New York Times bestseller and award-winning author: There are people who write their family stories down; and then there are memoirists like award-winning author Patricia Hampl and now Sue Nell Street Phillips who tell family stories - and introduce us to ourselves. Ms. Phillips' Out of Red Dirt is infused with poetic opening lines like "I am red dirt, acorns and elm trees, and 'little lambs eat ivy' under the bay window, bubbly black tar on Guilford Lane, rainwater rushing over my legs in the gutter under pouring July skies." It gets even better. In this memoir we live inside the wild and nurturing lives of the Streets detailed in ways that celebrate family, language and the American west. How I wish I'd known all those Streets, so strong, singular and yet universal; but wait: through Ms. Phillips fabulous writing, I do know them and love them. And so will you. Jane Kirkpatrick, New York Times bestselling author. * * * "I am sixty-four frilly dresses, a pink diaper on a post in the front yard which reads, “It’s a girl”, a doll in a slave’s cradle on wheels surrounded by four “adoring brothers” in the Daily Oklahoman. I am the youngest and smallest and only girl, whether in the backyard with the entire neighborhood playing Mother May I, Red Light-Green Light, or Punch the Nose on the Icebox, crocodile tears streaming down my cheeks, “No I can’t count to a hundred!”, or in the front yard watching Bill and Richard Lee, Peter Hoffman and the Lisle boys, and all the others playing football in Hoffman’s yard because it’s flat with no weeds, unlike ours. I am the youngest and smallest and only girl with seven tense grandsons around the roasted turkey and the cranberry sherbet for cleansing the palate, and Granddaddy Street at the head; Granddaddy who will decide the “sayer of grace” this year. (He dies before it falls on me, the youngest and smallest and only girl.)" I cannot write like this. Oh, how I wish I could. Sue Nell Phillips . . . tells a story like no other. When you finish, you want to be in her family and you want to write a story about your own family, hoping you remember the funny and touching details like she does . . . don't miss out! Mimi Graves, Bend, OR * * * Whether you come to Colorado first as infant, adult, or somewhere in between, you will never again be immune to the enchanting phrase, “Going to the mountains.” The magical mantra echoes through Sue Nell Street Phillips’ collection of mountain stories plucked from summers at her family’s Cowbell Hill cabin, and nestled into tales of the “red-dirt” life she lived in the rest of each year in Oklahoma. The Street family has summered on Cowbell for decades. Their cabin was the first of a group of structures built on the west end of the hill by several Oklahoma families in the 1920s and 30s. Sue Nell and her parents and brothers (four of them!) spent a month every summer at the cabin, and from those memories her new book has grown. Sue Nell was “the youngest and smallest and only girl,” and her memoir gives you a sense of life experienced by peeking around the grown-ups’ knees. The language she uses is so evocative, and the characters she grew up around are so perfectly described, you feel like her memories are your own. Nanny and Papa, Lula the housekeeper, Grandmother and Granddaddy Street, and Sue Nell’s parents, Gordon and Nell—each is portrayed lovingly and vividly from crystal-clear recollections. “Out of Red Dirt” is a nice handful of a book that you can pick up and read one story at a time or all in one sitting. The parts about Oklahoma are so colorful you don’t even want to rush past them to get to the mountain bits! But those bits will make you feel like you’re rediscovering our part of the Colorado mountains, just the way they used to be. Edie DeWeese, author and former editor of The Allenspark Wind, Allenspark, Colorado Also from Sue Nell:
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