hombre verde.

FRISSON | The Great Reverberation.

This project and website have arisen over the long arc of my life. I’ve felt the frisson of creating and teaching for a long time, and it hasn’t diminished. It is a reverberation—my ideas absorbed, refracted or reflected back to me as an evolutionary process. When I turn up the reverb on my guitar amplifier it sounds like I’m playing in a palace instead of the corner of a wine bistro. Similarly, I hope this website and the art that will be appearing here will parallel the wonderful conversations I’ve had for the past fifteen years in coffee shops, pubs and even at picnic tables in parks with passersby as I’ve created this art. 

 

I also very consciously began my art with the mission of getting children off cell phones and computers and instead learning math, science, art and all the disciplines by color-coding these drawings. When I’ve worked on this in K-College classrooms (e.g. my Visual Rhetoric course at Eastern Oregon University)f, I’ve also taken pains to help students recognize motifs in the art of other cultures and then transform it (rather than just copy and appropriate it) in their new drawing. 

 

I believe most parents and teachers want the same two things for their children and students: curiosity and passion. No one knows how to teach those traits/practices. However, we can create the conditions where they may arise, and we can amplify them when we discover they’re present. I hope my art grows your curiosity and passion to experiment not only in inking or coloring my drawings, but in creating your own!

​

​

BIOGRAPHY

Coyote Was Going There In Medias Res

 

During the dark winter of 1949, and not far from where an enormous meteor landed, a star cruiser from the Horsehead Nebula was crashing and kicked my pod out over Iowa. Like the exiled coneheads of Saturday Night Live I learned to make this planet my home and thrive on the rivers and lakes and in the woods of northwestern Iowa and nearby Minnesota. 

 

But I prayed for a bump and wanted mountains. So I vamoosed to Colorado College and was calmed each day by the sight of Pike’s Peak, even though the mountain was named for a fool. Interested in nearly everything, I kept my undeclared major as long as I could, then opted for political science and graduated cum laude in 1971. While there I worked summers picking melons in Arizona, supplying mud for brick masons and cementing railroad tracks and building roads with an asphalt crew in Iowa. 

 

I also studied at Ivan Illich’s C.I.D.O.C. institute in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and hitch-hiked through Europe and North Africa in 1970. After graduation I was a garbage man and music store salesman in Minneapolis, Minnesota, until I left for England. In London I worked in the infamous Ivor Mariants’ Music Centre and as a bartender in Ye Old Black Lion in West Hempstead, where fleets of illegal Irish construction workers tried nightly to drain the Guinness supply all over England. 

 

Barely saving enough to get started, I traveled with my English wife for several years around the world, from Europe through the Middle East and Central Caucasus to Southeast Asia and eventually Australia, where we hitch-hiked through the Outback for six months during the worst flood in 50 years before working in Sydney for a year. Then we headed to America via New Zealand, Fuji and Hawaii. 

 

Because it was a few years too early for international medicine or environmental law, I headed to grad school at the University of Iowa in American Studies, which included American and world literature, American intellectual history, music, anthropology, film, Spanish and more. 

 

In 1981 my wife, two-year-old daughter and I were lured by a red van with many owies to leave Iowa in search of at least more mountains. A massive road trip led from Iowa all over the West and finally to Napa, California, where we ran out of gas and money and dug in. I had teaching jobs at Napa Valley College and The Napa Adult School but also worked at Beaulieu Winery, a music store and for an architectural tours company. 

 

I completed my doctoral dissertation on the fiction of Afro-American writer Ishmael Reed in 1984 and drug the family, now with three children, to La Grande, Oregon, in 1986. Eventually I was hired and, over several decades, promoted to full professor of English, Writing and Rhetoric. I retired as Professor Emeritus in 2014. A few quick samples of my academic writing are below:

 

Multiwriting article in College Composition and Communication

https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ccc20001386

 

Link for Multiwriting Book:

https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Multiwriting-Researching-Composing-Disciplines/dp/0809327546

 

Book chapter on Ishmael Reed:

https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Response-Ishmael-Responses-Letters/dp/0313300259

 

Book chapter on Wendell Berry:

https://www.amazon.com/Wendell-Berry-American-Author/dp/0917652886

 

Fulbright Project on Sustainability and Environment in Amazon in Brazil:

http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/outreach/fulbright07/shadle.pdf

 

Review of Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory:

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/27578/summary

 

In my decades at Eastern Oregon University I was lucky to participate in life-changing National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes and Workshops:

​

> Autobiography and Native American Literature at UIC in Chicago

> The Transatlantic Slave Trade at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville

> Mayan Worlds throughout Central America

> Native Cultures of the Pacific Northwest in British Colombia and Alaska

 

I also received a Fulbright on Sustainability and the Environment in Brazil in 2007 and a spot in the Stanford University Summer Faculty Renewal Institute on Ethnic American Literature. In 2009 I taught on the Semester at Sea ship with 740 students as we made our way around the world.

 

I am Professor Emeritus in English, Writing and Rhetoric at Eastern Oregon University, where I have taught a variety of courses, including Native and Afro-American Literature, Visual Rhetoric, The Postmodern Detective Novel, Travel Literature and Science Fiction/Fact. The pedagogy I invented—“multi-writing”—asks students to marry their personal and academic passions into a project using multiple genres (styles of writing), disciplines, media and culture. A better understanding of this can be found in the book I co-wrote to spread this approach around the country: Teaching Multiwriting: Researching and Composing in Multiple Genres, Disciplines, Media and Cultures (University of Southern Illinois Press, 2007). 

 

This approach is built upon the understanding that all learning is autobiographical, and that our selves are an evolving culmination of experience and imagination. Therefore I have asked students to bring all they have learned outside of class into the classroom; said differently, the classroom has no walls. The books, book chapters, articles, poems, essays and conference presentations I have published incorporate my many hobbies, including playing jazz/blues/flamenco guitar, writing, art, wood-carving, reading, film, quilting, walking, hiking, biking, sports and travel. 

 

The samples of art displayed from this forth-coming show, Cathexis, continue to deepen my interest in breaking down walls and barriers between genres, disciplines, media and cultures. They also continue my interest in children, and a percentage of any proceeds from my art will be going to the literacy program I support that gets children of trash-pickers in the dump in Guatemala City into school (see safepassage.org). Finally, I believe art and music are special ambassadors for peace, and this links to my work with my late friend Glenn Paige’s global non-violence institute (see non-killing.org). 

 

I’ve been living in Portland since 2012. In addition to this extensive art project I’ve just completed a 274,00-word postmodern detective novel and continue to play jazz/blues guitar. 

 

I’ve traveled to 70 countries (many more than once) and had jobs as sales clerk, bank teller, construction worker, bar tender, waiter, architectural tour guide, professor, guitar teacher, agricultural worker, garbage man, landscape worker, musician and more. This travel and the many jobs have helped me develop beaucoup empathy for students, colleagues and people I interact with. 

 

Thanks so much for taking a peek at my art. I hope it will inspire you to begin to draw and color. Doing so has saved my life, and it might do the same for you. I’ll also be honored if you choose to purchase drawings or (coming soon) coloring posters.

 

You will suffer no more words!: THE END! (sort of, for now)…

 

Mark Shadle (Hombre Verde)

​