Dungiven and Other Texts presents short stories and a couple of poems published decades ago in literary journals... slightly reworked by Red Shuttleworth.

Also included are over a dozen Red Shuttleworth crayon sketches... further work in Abstract Expressionism.

Chieftain O'Cahan's priory, Dungiven, County Derry, Ireland.

 Now available in paperback from Amazon, SURF RAIN is a honed and rewritten version of The Sisters... a fiction that was first published in The Nebraska Review (a publication of the Writers' Workshop of the University of Nebraska - Omaha) in the winter of 1984.  It is an adults only story... in the tradition of the French New Novel.

 Shaggy-Haired Horses is now available as a paperback book from Amazon.

First produced at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in early 1989, the play was enlarged into a full-length play and soon premiered in St. Paul, Minnesota, at Spirit of the Horse Theatre.

The original cast of Shaggy-Haired Horses: Chelsea Wolf (Zerelda), Steve McCoy (Dingus) and Destiny Esposito (Lottie).

 

Now Wolves Had Come to Follow Them: Forty-Nine Paintings offers works that are in the Abstract Expressionist and Color Field veins.

The sort of paintings one sees in the best issues of ArtForum and in important art galleries?  Well... sort of.

 

Winter Parcels, Short Stories 'n Prose Poems, corrals nineteen texts written over the last half a hundred years, first published in literary journals, including December, Poetry Now, South Dakota Review, and Southwest Review.

The cover is a Red Shuttleworth "color field" painting. 

This short book is available on Amazon.

 Lobo, Texas, a newly available play that Red Shuttleworth has been revising and combing, summons ghosts and opponents to the death bed of a Lobo, Texas, rancher.  Lamar is in hospice care at a Van Horn rest home.  He is attended to by an officious, crazy-dutiful nurse-therapist.  Lamar takes visits from an ex wife, from a religious zealot cousin, from a research-therapist dressed in a dog costume, and from a ghost carrying Lamar's documents of sins and a death certificate.  Lamar battles, fights to win... will not cave in to death any more than he must.

 Durham Bulls 1980: A Snapshot Portfolio presents decades-old pictures of Brett Butler, Joe Cowley, Gerald Perry, Milt Thompson, and other legendary baseball players from that first, Bulls-Are-Back season in 1980.  

This photo portfolio/slim book is available on Amazon.

 

Snapshots of Writers... a Portfolio contains photographs from fifty years of Shuttleworth family photo albums.  

The photographed writers in this book:

Edward Albee   Will Bagley   Bob Boze Bell   Kay Boyle

JV Brummels   Francisco Cantu   Susan Compo

Jerry L. Crawford   Barbara Brinson Curiel

Christopher "Kit" Danowski   William Dickey   Kirk Ells

Dave Etter   Gary Gildner   Jim Harrison   Larry Holland

James Lee Hubert   Julie Jensen  Donald Justice

Dave Kelly   Kevin Kling   William Kloefkorn   Amy Koch

Ted Kooser   Herbert Lindenberger   Andrienne Marcus

Frances Mayes   Max McCoy  Barry McKinnon

Lynn Nottage   Kirk Robertson  Norman H. Russell

Vern Rutsala   Peter Sagal   Robert Schenkkan

Richard Selzer   Ciara Shuttleworth

Octavio Solis   Daniel Voll   Richard S. Wheeler

Miller Williams   Al Young  Paul Zarzyski  Paul Zimmer

Red Shuttleworth

The writers in this photo portfolio are representative of some very good, and even great,writing in the second half of the 20th American Century.

 

Two Dozen Red Shuttleworth Paintings presents the best folk art that Red has enjoyed making in spurts, on weekends, on evenings when it felt right to spread art supplies across the old kitchen table.

As well as dives into Abstract Expressionism, Red has made a number of Absurd portraits.

 Americana West: A Century of Short Plays and Monologues is an epic theatre project... containing 100 pieces set in seventeen states. 

This book edition of Americana West is a sampler... enough works for a night of theatre.  

The pieces in this collection and their order were curated by Kirk Ellis, who directed an Americana West monologues night in Old Tucson in the summer of 2019 for the WWA Players.  Kirk and I hoped to mount the entire Americana West cycle and this selection was to have received (minimally) a staged reading at a Santa Fe theatre, but... I let the artistic director of that theatre know, in a rather public fashion, that he is a "shit-heel."  So the shit-heel, naturally, dropped the project.  Nonetheless... Kirk put this night of theatre in order and I hope that some good theatre works with it... sooner than later.

 

The Chair is a short play that was too long for inclusion in the Americana West project.  It is a mother/daughter conflict born of the father's suicide and pressures of reservation life.

In Novella, a man is spoken to by some of his father's cremains... from within a hardwood urn.

The novella originates as an Italian fiction form... the fiction of truth. In our time, we call it a novella if a piece of fiction is too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel.

Novella is available for purchase on Amazon.
 

 

Heart 'n Saddle Saloon (Texts for the Theatre), by Red Shuttleworth is an assemblage of fragments, monologue poems, scenes that some theatre might with to work on.

The title piece is a fragment from a verse play, Heart 'n Saddle Saloon that was produced by University of Nevada, Las Vegas to tour to Fallon, Nevada, for the Churchill Arts Council.  This production was directed brilliantly by Michael Lugering.

Heart 'n Saddle Saloon was one of the two plays presented in Fallon in 1992.  The other free verse play was They Dream Ghost Riders... a refreshed version that was first directed by Cathy Hurst at UNLV in 1989.

The late Toni Loppnow was with the project from the first UNLV production of They Dream Ghost Riders.  Intense, innovative, dedicated, and of great talent, Toni Loppnow acted in numerous plays in Los Angeles after taking a degree from UNLV.  

 Hawk Season Notebook is the only writer's journal that Red Shuttleworth has worked through on a computer,

If you are curious as to what helps Red to build poems and plays... this book can be ordered on Amazon.

 George Lovel Manley

George Lovel Manley

November 19, 1922

(Union City, Tennessee)

to

August 29, 2004

(Columbus, Georgia)

George Lovel Manley's ashes were spread in his beloved Snowy Mountains of Wyoming.  He has a gravestone in Columbus, Georgia, but....

Agronomist by profession, he served in the Navy during World War II and in the Army during the Korean War.

After World War II, he played one season of football at the University of Tennessee - Martin.

He was a summer park ranger... here and there.

 Western Writers of America is a Rotting Carcass on a Falling-Apart Pine Cart...Pulled by a Seven-Hundred No-Talent Scribblers in Online-Purchased Ol' West Dress-up.

It was a good idea back in the middle of the last century, Western Writers of America... a group to meet once yearly to drink and offer awards for decent-enough writing to scribblers in the paperback Western genre.

In the olden days. the WWA conventions were attended by publishers and author agents.  Books sold.  There was some money to be made by the likes of Elmer Kelton and Richard Wheeler.  Some greenbacks to be made by a few other writers as well.  

Nowadays... WWA conventions are pretty much without agents and editors from book publishing outfits (save Wolfpack Publishing... nearly an in-house project from a couple of guys who must be retired California realtors).

So... what to do at conventions?  Someone came up with the notion that members (mostly gone-to-blubber) would get a kick out of parading in Ol' West get-ups.  Think: past middle-age fatty women stumbling forth in dance hall girl get-ups.  Now if that don't make you puke....

Me? WWA awarded my poetry book, Western Settings, their first Spur Award for Poetry in 2001.  So I went to the convention... to get the plaque and to see who might be pleasant to drink with... to see if there were really any writers in WWA.  I did meet Elmer Kelton that year.

So, urged by a former president of WWA who had played guitar behind Waylon Jennings a time or two, I joined the organization... ignoring what Jim Harrison had advised, Someone has to stay outside.

Spur Award, and my next pair of Spur Awards, informed the Literati that I was no longer literary... that I was somehow a cowboy poet... though I no longer owned any cows, nor rode ranchers' very nice horses at roundups.  

But I stuck with WWA for quite some time, an optimist who thought that I was among new friends who knew how to read, who aspired to read better, who aspired to learn how to write even to their limited talents.

A few years ago, I ran afoul of a number of no-talent and half-talent members.  I had been noting that the Western Writers Hall of Fame was an accumulation of mediocre writers, honored with a dusty closet in a semi-museum in Cody, Wyoming.  The WWA Writers Hall of Fame, to this very day, excludes Jim Harrison, William Kittredge, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane, Larry McMurtry, Sam Peckinpah, Sam Shepard, Ian Tyson, Hank Williams, Paul Zarzyski....  Hell, it would be a great embarrassment to be inducted into WWA's Western Writers Hall of Fame.

The harsh truth is that almost all WWA members resent the Literary Western, whether Dalva by Jim Harrison, Sam Shepard plays, or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.  The WWA scribblers are justifiably insecure about their lack of talent and the piss-poor works they generate with great ambition on zeal. Every so often a WWA scribbler will write in Roundup (the house organ... competently edited by Johnny D. Boggs, a good, though not a great writer) a weak attack on his or her betters in the Literary world.  

Where I really pissed off the dowdies and limp-dicks of WWA when when, on the Facebook site, I tried to engage the publishers of Wolfpack Publishing with the notion that they could field a better roster of writers... if only recruiting young creative writing MFA writers at the University of Montana... or just publishing oral novels, oral autobiographies of the nice girls who work at Mona's Ranch in Elko.

So I got banned from the Facebook WWA page, though it was never clear who banned me.  No agon was needed... no debate... no self-questioning about the direction of WWA.

WWA, since I had first joined in 2001, has bloated from about 450 members to over 700 members.  That might be a sweet, large increase in membership fees (to employ a couple of folks), but it meant taking in an even lower level of genre scribblers... the scribblers of romance novels.

So a group of members (Monty McCord, Vicky Rose, Quackgrass Sally, and Bob Yoho) put together a half-literate letter of complaint... to get me expelled from WWA membership.

So it got hilarious: 

The letter of complaint noted that I felt the leadership of WWA were the products of feces and intestinal gas.

The letter reminded us all that I felt that one publisher of Western fiction caters to those who can read no higher than the 9th grade level.

The letter of complaint said I actually used "cuss words" to note that the WWA leadership was composed of mattress mice and bed bugs.

The letter of complaint, said that I accorded more literary skill to my Irish Wolfhound than to just about everyone in the WWA membership.

I never got to know Elmer Kelton well, but I liked his writing, some of it, and he was a good man... a level above the current WWA mob of ass-hats scribblers who are envious of Literary writers.

WWA (Rotary meets sewing circle) should abandon interior censorship... or admit that it is aligned (in sensibility) with Jim Jong-Un, Dr. Bashar al-Assad, and others who despise free discourse.

WWA honoring Romance novels, I noted, according to those who wished me dismissed from membership, was like honoring tooth rot.

So WWA sent me a cease and desist letter.  I laughed..  Then the leadership expelled me from membership in WWA.  I was so happy to receive this award, that I got that letter professionally framed and hung it in my home gym.

As for WWA finances, the IRS should investigate.  I was a member for nearly twenty years and never once saw an independent audit.

And one of the signatories of complaint was one Quackgrass Sally.  No one could produce her bibliography, so I suspect that she received her membership thanks to a friendship with WWA's executive director.  What has Quackgrass Sally actually written that would entitle her to a full membership, much less the honor of being the Spur Awards Chair for a few years... bumbling that task?

Western Writers of America is carted onward... a rotted body... onward to the next meeting of tattered tents... few if anyone able to write above the 9th grade level.

And I am happily outside WWA.  It has taken me a couple of years to write this blog entry.  But here you have it.  As for the erstwhile friends from my WWA days, I call them all out as chickenshit cowards and moral failures.

My erstwhile friend Bob Boze Bell (publisher of True West magazine) from the last days, perhaps, of Bob believing that I was "Best Living Western Poet."  I will save my critique on the redundancy of True West magazine for another post.

 

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook (META) move to protect Putin and Russia

from too much criticism!

If you say that Russia is "raping" Ukraine, Facebook will suspend parts of your account!

If you write that Russia, with its military mobilization, only wants to "half rape" Ukraine, then Facebook will suspend your account.

Know this:

Mark Zuckerberg

Supports

Vladimir Putin and Russia!