Award-winning poet calls Basin home
Award-winning poet calls Basin home
"The greatest fear that perhaps one can have, if one has taught, is that when you retire, no one under the age of 23 will ever speak to you again." These are the words of Red Shuttleworth. English professor, baseball coach, playwright, poet and theorist, the path of Shuttleworth's life has been both broad and varied, and he seems intent on keeping it so. Retirement is fast approaching for him and he is hoping that the younger generation won't ignore him in Wal-Mart once he has stopped teaching.
Shuttleworth was born in San Francisco, but has lived in British Columbia, Texas, Nebraska and Nevada. He earned his associates in arts degree from City College of San Francisco. He then moved on to San Francisco State University, where he earned his bachelor's in speech/communications and his master's in creative writing.
He began teaching English and drama at Big Bend Community College in 1991 and was an assistant baseball coach from 1991-2000. "It's hard to be out there in the cold. It's hard on old people's bones," said Shuttleworth of his decision to quit coaching baseball, although his decision was also swayed by the fact that former head coach Glenn Johnson, whom Shuttleworth described as "a wonderful man" was leaving the program.
Red's latest literary ventures include art criticism, "Mostly representational work or interrogations of why abstract painting is still considered art, when it's really wallpaper or bed spreads," he said. He is also working on a book on community college administration. He says this is a long-term project and works on it from time to time when something occurs to him about how to run a community college. And, as always, he continues to write poems.
His collection of poetry "Western Settings" won the first Spur Award for Western Poetry in 2001 from the Western Writers of America. His poems have been published in many magazines, including Southwest Review, Ontario Review, Prairie Schooner and New Letters. In 2004, True West magazine named him the "Best living cowboy poet," even though he insists he is not exactly what could be considered a "cowboy poet," but he is still extremely proud of the honor.
His plays have been presented broadly at the Utah Shakespearean Festival, Sundance Playwrights Lab and the Sun Balley Festival of New Western Drama. In 1995 he edited an anthology of plays entitled "Lucky 13," which also included a short play that he wrote and was published by the University of Nevada Press.
Shuttleworth has known and been taught by some of the greatest poets in contemporary American history including famous poet William Dickey and acclaimed writer Kay Boyle, who were his mentors at San Francisco State.
These experiences have given him a very fine-tuned perspective on what it is to be a writer.
"You've got to be curious if you want to be a writer," he said. "One of the first things you should do is go to the Big Bend library or another library and make it a habit to, every week, look at two magazines that are outside your interest area." Shuttleworth believes that having a breadth of information available will improve a writer's chances to write well considerably.
"Writing is a skill like basketball, baseball, cooking, photography. The more you do it the better you are going to be," said Shuttleworth of the amount of practice it takes to be a good writer. "You can have a modest ability to write and be incredibly successful as a writer."
The tip that he stressed most was that "You can't have a self censor. You can't have a sense of the world looking over your shoulder as you're doing it (writing). If you start self-censoring, as a writer, you're doomed."
He takes this point even further by quoting, "Steven Krane said 'You're not responsible for what you see. You're only responsible for reporting it with as much honesty as you can bring to bear and as much skill as you can bring to bear.'"
As for his plans after retirement, which he says could be in as little as two years, Shuttleworth is contemplating travel, on an intimate level. "The world is a rich, wonderful place. There are so many things to do depending on your physical capacity, health, interest and money." He said that he would like to walk from the Canadian border down into Texas through the high plains.
"Over half the counties in the high plains have less population today than they did in 1885. I'm very curious about that part of our country, with the rest of the country growing phenomenally, that that part of the country would be losing population. And the best way to see things is on the ground."
"I would imagine that after retirement, my wife Kate, will continue working at Big Bend in the English lab and I would imagine I will travel to do readings three months out of the year and make forays into other parts of the country another month or six weeks out of the year," Shuttleworth said of his most immediate plans after retirement.
Shuttleworth also has aspirations to see the world outside of the United States. "I've probably gone passed the window of being able to do it, but in the best of all possible worlds, I would like to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, because the equatorial glaciers are melting," he said of his lofty ambitions to climb the highest mountain in Africa. But don't worry, he added, "There's a walk up route, so it's do-able, even by the elderly."
"I'd also like to do the walk up of Mount Errigal in Ireland," he said. "I'd like to do two walks in Nevada north to south and west to east. Maybe starting in Carson City and finishing in Baker. There are places I'm very curious about still.
"I fantasize about picking a dozen towns in the American West and living in each one for four months. I'm curious about these places and the people that live in them," he said.
Shuttleworth also wants to continue in the field of art criticism and writing poetry.
"My primary skills are in (poems)," he said. "There's not a heck of a market for it, but I'm at that stage where it seems reasonably easy to place poems in quality literary magazines. I can do that, I suppose, until my skills atrophy and I'm just mailing out gibberish at that point."
Shuttleworth always has his eyes wide open, looking for something to write about. Whether it is noticing rather interesting people at Wal-Mart or reading a pottery magazine, he never stops searching for his next poem.
Shuttleworth expressed his hopes for the future by quoting, "Thomas Jefferson said 'I am a revolutionary, so that my son may be a farmer, so that his son may be a poet.' So maybe if we take the Jeffersonian view, the best that we can hope for is to create a culture of art."
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