On December 5th, 2022, Deerfield welcomed American writer and curator Ben Shattuck ’03 to campus. In the Elizabeth Wachsman Concert Hall, Shattuck read short excerpts from his book Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau and visited select English classes the next day.
Shattuck, who studied Henry David Thoreau as a student at Deerfield, offered to visit the Academy because he feels that his book is relevant to American literature at the high school level. After Shattuck reached out, English teacher Mr. Christian Austin connected with Deerfield’s American literature teachers to discuss Shattuck’s offer.
According to Head of School John Austin, when Shattuck reached out last April, the English Department, which had been planning to incorporate transcendentalism into the curriculum, was on board right away.
Mr. Austin said, “We all immediately thought this is a great reason to revive that and get transcendentalism and Henry David Thoreau back into the common curriculum for this year, especially with the opportunity to have an expert come and talk.” Thus, English teachers asked juniors to read short stories by Thoreau and other transcendentalist authors, as well as Shattuck, in the weeks leading up to his visit. Mr. Austin anticipated that it would be a great experience, but he didn’t expect that Shattuck would “[speak] so eloquently about being a student at Deerfield and his process in becoming a writer.” He added, “That just turned out to be a bonus. It could have been an event where he spoke only about Henry David Thoreau and transcendentalism.”
For Six Walks, Shattuck tried to emulate Thoreau’s style of journaling. Shattuck said, “I’m so self-conscious and embarrassed by my journaling. It’s like: ‘I woke up today, had breakfast, had coffee.’ I just didn’t know what you would write. I’m not Thoreau. And he wrote so beautifully about his days, about his hours.”
Shattuck had always loved writing poetry. When he came to Deerfield, he began writing more prose and loved creating pages of work, which started to become an enduring interest for him. However, at college, he studied art; busy with creating paintings, he didn’t often write creatively. His interest in writing, Shattuck said, stems from his love for reading. During high school he didn’t have much time for leisurely reading, but afterwards he developed a love for fiction books and short novels. Shattuck said, “I wanted to be a part of that club of literature. Then I just started writing. Writing short stories, researching and going into it, I wrote a lot of historical fiction.” Shattuck would go into sections of the library and find obscure facts to make stories.
His time at Deerfield played an important role in Shattuck’s development as a writer. When he first arrived at the Academy, he was often homesick. He had an English teacher, Karinne Heisi, who asked everybody to write essays about their home. Shattuck said, “I remember constructing that essay and really feeling the power of written expressions and how that made me feel anchored and centered in a way that I hadn’t felt yet.” Shattuck felt destabilized by the questions he was asked himself like, “where’s my home? Where are my parents? What am I doing here? Why is it so hard?” He realized that writing can be a vessel to create stability in one’s life, adding meaning to an experience. Upon his recent return to campus, he shared that “Coming back… even as I was driving up route 91, I felt that high school nervousness, a kind of a pit in my stomach. All the feelings of adolescent anxiety came right back.”
To Shattuck, writers and artists are the most important people. Shattuck said, “I think translating what everybody is feeling or creating is important.” Shattuck ended by sharing the following piece of advice: “a book is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. It’s just creating hours in the day for yourself to work on your own material to not get caught up in whatever else is going on in the world. Really carve out an individual time for you to be alone with the canvas or the page or whatever it is to hold that time sacred.”