Jenny Slate's Fiancé Ben Shattuck is Living Out Every English Major's Dream
Yesterday, Jenny Slate announced her engagement to writer and art curator Ben Shattuck—who many were quick to point out is definitely not Chris Evans (who dated Slate on and off throughout 2018). Capt. Evans is a great dude, no doubt—but have you done a Google creep on Shattuck yet?
Before you do: There’s a fantasy that nearly every English major has at some point, which usually comes around sophomore year when you spend too much time in an intro lit course with the naturalists. You’re hanging out at Thoreau’s cabin, and keeping a diary alongside Darwin. But eventually you have to give that up as professors start saying that can’t make a living out of writing from attics in northeast Connecticut.
A post shared by Ben Shattuck (@benshattuck_art) on Sep 9, 2019 at 4:47pm PDT
If I had known I could be Ben Shattuck when I grew up, I’d definitely be writing poetry in a handbound journal instead of mashing keys in a Google Doc. Shattuck, who just won the Pushcart Prize for best short story, has a resume that reads like a wanderlust bucket list: graduate of Iowa Writers Workshop, studied painting in southern Norway, and a teaching gig in New Zealand. Now, he’s the lead curator at a gallery in Massachusetts (where they once had an exhibition of work from monks and nuns at monasteries), and the director of a weeklong writer’s workshop near Cape Cod. He also paints, beautifully, of course.
And that’s all in addition to Shattuck’s essays and short stories, which, yeah, read like he went to Walden too many times. “I like to think of the people I personally know placed in deep history,” he told Catapult after one of his stories was published in Pen America Best Debut Short Stories in 2017. “I can never write in present day—a character always ends up carrying a lantern by page two.” At the time, he was in full Hardy mode and was working on a novel about a young farmer inspired by the notes he saw in an actual young farmer’s diary.
A post shared by Jenny Slate (@jennyslate) on Sep 9, 2019 at 4:49pm PDT
His essays for Salon are something to behold: An investigation of the apparent ghosts living (alongside a paranormal-hunting team) at his grandma’s house, a serious inquiry into whether or not a sea serpent exists in Gloucester, and a deep dive on whether or not you can actually be swallowed by a whale without dying. Best of all, for the Paris Review, he meditated over the time he was carrying a wooden boat across icy ground, slipped, and chopped off a half inch of his middle finger, an essay that reads like Bronte meets body horror: “I lost the geology of my finger, now a wash of snow down a fractured mountain crest, cut with surgical scars.”
It’s good to know that there are still Ben Shattuck—dudes who grew up on old Massachusetts farmland, bang out some Victorian jams, and get the girl. Anyway, in honor of his engagement and the changing seasons, here’s Shattuck on zugunruhe, a German word that translates to “migratory restlessness.” Never rest, Ben.
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