Lisa McEowen tries not to spell her name for people. The reason being that her name is not pronounced how it appears. She would like you to know that she is called LEE-zuh MI-KYOO-en, please and thank you. 

Her parents named her after a Cat Steven’s song called “Sad Lisa.” 

“They just liked the way that the name sounded,” she said. “It wasn’t the content of the song. It was the sound of the name.”

She was born in the 70s in Denver, Colorado, where her parents owned a used record store until the family moved to rural southwest Missouri when Lisa was a very young child. 

“They packed up what was left, their unsold stock of music,” Lisa explained. “So I had all these wonderful albums to play. I grew up with every genre of music you can imagine, so I love music. Music’s like air to me. It’s essential.” 

When she grew up and moved away, she came to college at Missouri State University, then Southwest Missouri State University, where she majored in psychology and joined the Collegiate Singers as a first soprano. 

“One of my favorite memories as a student here was being in a combined chorus with the university symphony performing the complete Handel’s Messiah at Jaunita K. Hammons,” she remembered. “When you’re part of combined voices, you cease to be an individual and you become a part of the sound and it was beautiful. Transformative.” 

The renowned oratorio is one of many holiday experiences she cherishes as part of a larger holiday season spanning from her birthday in August through Valentine’s Day in February or even in to March, when she commemorates the life of her beloved younger sister, Sara, who passed away on St. Patrick’s Day in 2018. 

Lisa describes her relationship with Sara as “peas in a pod.” They took annual sister-trips in the autumn, attended MSU baseball games in the spring, and enjoyed the holidays together.

“We both never met a celebration we didn’t like,” Lisa said. “We were both very happy to celebrate.”

One of the ways that Lisa celebrates the holidays is by watching annual movies and reading annual books. The movies she is sure to make time for around this time of year are The Bishop’s Wife, White Christmas, and A Child’s Christmas in Wales, which is a film adaptation of Dylan Thomas’ story of the same name. Three of the books she reads during the holiday season are A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote, and Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien.

At the moment, she is reading Reindeer: An Arctic Life by Tilly Smith, which is a natural history of reindeer. 

“We have a locally owned business called Austen Boutique and the young lady that runs the store has a periodic reading challenge and so she’ll give prompts,” Lisa said. “What I love about the reading challenge is it pushes me to search for and read books that I wouldn’t pick for myself. The reason I’m reading it is [the theme] was ‘pick a book that has an animal on the cover.'”

Another thing that Lisa is celebrating this month is the 30-year anniversary of working at the Duane G. Meyer Library. Over the years, she has worked in cataloguing, Special Collections, and now she is a library associate III for Resource Management & Discovery. One of her favorite things about working here has been the wonderful and diverse people she has met.

“I’ve made some of my best friends here and they are people I probably wouldn’t have made a connection with if it were not for here,” she said, making a special note of Michael Fox of Networking and Telecommunications as well as Mohammed AlHamad, a former employee of Meyer Library. 

Lisa was hired full-time on December 14, 1995 and so will celebrate three decades of service to the library this Sunday. The library isn’t the only place Lisa has served, however. She has been a big contributor to a variety of causes and organizations within the MSU ecosystem and out in the wider community. On campus, she has been the chair of the Staff Senate, she was the original conference manager for the statewide Collaborative Diversity Conference, and she has served on the planning committee for the annual Public Affairs Conference. She considers herself to be a longtime fan of the university’s public affairs mission.

“I believe it’s an intrinsically good mission and I was a fan before its inception, when we were just talking about it. So being able to do that work with public affairs is extremely meaningful to me,” she said.

Lisa has also been involved in several non-profits in southwest Missouri over the years, including the Family Violence Center, the Scottish St. Andrews Society, and Ozark Greenways. She was a co-founder of the Mens Chorus of the Ozarks and currently she facilitates a grief support group at the Lost and Found Grief Center. 

However, after so many years of service to other people, Lisa is starting to think about ways she might start to better nurture herself. There are different passions and opportunities she wants to explore, like possibly becoming a death doula, which would allow her to shepherd people through the dying process the way birth doulas help a mother to bring life into the world. Lisa is also considering opening an Etsy shop. There are a variety of things Lisa might sell because she has many hobbies. She is very into drawing and painting as well as beading and designing jewelry such as necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. 

Other hobbies and interests include cooking, collecting vintage books, reading mysteries and thrillers, going to flea markets/secondhand shops/antique stores, spending time in nature, cheering on the Denver Broncos, and singing. She enjoys singing so much that if she were exiled to a desert island, she would not make a playlist. She would sing. 

“I would rely on what I remember and whatever I felt in the moment that I wanted to hear,” she said. 

She does not seem to have a favorite genre of music. Lisa said that there is probably a song in every genre that she would like. Like many things, this seems to be emblematic of her openness to life and all it has to offer. It’s a skill she’s leaned into over the past few years as she closely cherishes the memories of her sister and her grandmother. 

“Grab all the joy and all the glimmers of life that you can and hold them to you when and where you find them,” she said. “Every beautiful thing, grab it.”