A longtime KSMU friend and contributor of stories has passed away. The West Plains Daily Quill confirmed Marideth Sisco’s death to KSMU. Sisco contributed her insights, wisdom, love of gardening and storytelling skills to Ozarks Public Radio listeners for many years on "These Ozarks Hills."
Sisco spent 20 years as an investigative and environmental writer for the West Plains Daily Quill where she earned several awards. She was a music consultant and a featured singer in the 2010 award-winning feature film “Winter’s Bone.”
Sisco was recognized as a writer in 2018 by the Quill Award for lifetime achievement from the Missouri Writers Hall of Fame.
She was named a Missouri Master Storyteller by the Missouri Folk Arts Program of the Missouri Arts Council and was a featured touring speaker for the Missouri Humanities Council.
In a 2018, "These Ozarks Hills," Sisco reflected on the loss of two pillars of the West Plains community and what that loss meant.
"When, like a pillar, someone who has been a community’s strength falls, it shakes the integrity of a community and everyone who is a part of it," she said. "Like a giant, weathered oak that has stood for centuries only to fall suddenly in a storm, we grieve its passing, but more than that, it changes our world, and our borders seem less secure."
There are many in the Ozarks who are feeling that way today about Marideth Sisco who left a legacy of pride for the place where she was born and where she lived many years of her life.
She continued in that same "These Ozarks Hills" episode to say something that perhaps might comfort those who are now struggling with her death.
"As another of those old ones who will, I’m sure, one day pass into memory before I’d choose to, It’s just my turn to suggest amid our grief that so long as we remember them, those who pass are never that far away, perhaps as close as just the other side of a door we too will enter one day, to become a part of that ever increasing community that still remembers and loves us, who watches over our days, shakes their heads at our choices, and patiently waits, just the other side of these Ozarks hills, for us someday, to come home."
Marideth Sisco was 82 years old.
