Ned's Memorial Page

 

	Ned Shank February 19, 1956 - November 30, 2000
Ned Shank was "bearded and beaming, brimming with good cheer" (Southern Living), a man who "actively pursue(d) his preservationist activities" and was "soft-spoken but never out of focus ... love(d) conversation and telling tales as much as his wife does." (Chicago Tribune). Photo above by Andrew Kilgore. That wife was Crescent Dragonwagon.
Ned and CD were beloved partners for 23 years, collaborating creatively on many projects --- their award-winning inn, Dairy Hollow House, later the non-profit Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow --- while doing just as many individually. Crescent’s many activities are described in this site.  Ned’s included drawing, painting, writing (his first book, The Sanyasin’s First Day was published the year before his death), historic preservation, teaching, fiddle-playing, wheel pottery, and much more. Then, when he was 44, as CD wrote in the introduction to Passionate Vegetarian.
One day Ned went out on his customary and reveled-in three-times-a-week bicycle ride. It turned out not to be to the Conoco station by the lake --- the one where they rent canoes, which he had nicknamed “Canoe-Co.” It turned out to be into eternity.
"Like anything creative, there is no stopping place."         --- Ned Shank, 1973, as an Iowa high school senior, speaking about throwing pottery in the Ames High School Web: he spent his entire senior year in the ceramics studio
A writer and lifelong artist
Ned was himself a writer. In addition to his children’s book, The Sanyasin's First Day, he wrote preservation-related book reviews essays for adults, such as the one which recently appeared in the anthology Sentinels of History.  At the time of his death, he had also begun writing commentary for the local NPR affiliate, KUAF. His first such audio-essay was broadcast posthumously.
In addition, he wrote for many years for the Dairy Hollow House newsletter, called the Moos-Letter. His "Letters from the Neditor" were one of the most commented-on features of the Moos-Letter. Several have been reproduced --- with his numerous and charming cow drawings --- in a memorial book called With & Without Ned.  In addition, he illustrated the Moos-Letter and Dairy Hollow websites with countless quick cow-cartoons, such as the one to the left. The cool cow wearing shades, in the right hand corner of the logo of the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow (see right) was also one of his.
He had only begun to take himself seriously as a visual artist in the last year of his life, but the vein of his artistic practice and longing runs through his earliest years. He finished the class work required to graduate by the end of his junior year in high school, for instance, and spent most of his senior year in the clay studio, almost obsessively throwing pots. The picture at the top of this section  shows him during this phase.
Ned was a gifted painter (his ink wash of a hand and forearm appears right), and as time went on, began exploring this side of himself more and more. He also did something he'd been talking about his whole life about two years before his death --- he acted, playing Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in a local production. He was the talk of the town!
But it was only when he quit doing quick cartoon-sketches and attended life-drawing sessions that he felt he'd truly found himself. As he said to Crescent after the first he went to, "Now I know what I have been put here to do."
Seemingly, he did. In the one year it was given to him to seriously draw and paint, Ned created more than 500 drawings, sketches, ink washes, and watercolors.
Co-founder, and first executive director, of the first writers' colony in a 26-state area
"Above all, I am a writer and illustrator and person of creative abilities and bent. I value that process and know it is a risky, rare and valuable quality that deserves to be nurtured and protected. It is that endorsement and refuge which we are ultimately working to provide here at our Colony."  --- Ned Shank, August, 2000
With his wife Crescent, Ned co-founded of the non-profit  Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow. Ned, as much as anyone possibly could, understood the vital for protected, fiercely guarded uninterrupted creative time, and, as its first executive director, he worked tirelessly to bring it about through the Colony, which offers one-to-three month residencies for working writers, and is still in existence.
From 1997 through the Colony's opening in 2000 until his death, Ned worked on every phase of the institution's launch, including creating and working with a Board of Directors and a Board of Advisors,  achieving 501 (c) 3 tax-exempt status,  fundraising, development, strategic planning,  coordinating outreach to writers, the local, statewide, and regional community, and potential donors, hiring staff and overseeing / creating operations and procedures, and beginning initiatives such as that which led to the Culinary Suite, the only one of its kind in the world. The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow would not exist without his efforts. WCDH has hosted writers from all over the world, received a $160,000 gift from the Walton Family Foundation and many other significant donations, and had a growing impact on individual writers and the Northwest Arkansas community.
As his own writing lives on, so does the creative vigor with which he imbued the Colony. Many writers who never met him remain touched by his spirit.  Gretchen Ernster, a WCDH 2001 resident, wrote:
"I learned of my acceptance for residency and Ned's death simultaneously. I was struck by rief, having read in Crescent's cookbook of the couples' joint wish to 'send an invitation to the world and see who comes'. Having been here, I now know Ned's spirit continues to live strongly in the colony. He is felt in every detail, every thoughtfulness. His dream is alive as each writer experiences the joys and privileges of residency."
In the photo above and to left, Inaugural poet and Prix de Rome winner Miller Williams, right, presides at the Colony's June 6, 2000, ribbon-cutting, while Ned --- tallest guy in the picture --- stands to left. (Left to right, poet Lisa Beatman, Ned, Crescent, then-administrative director Cheri White, then-board member now exec-director Sandy Wright, board member Pat Carr, Miller. Photo, Bruce Crabtree).
much honored historic preservationist
A historic preservationist by training, Ned held a BA in American Studies, with honors, from Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa (where, while still in school, he successfully nominated a historic building to the National Register of Historic Places). In 1976, he received a coveted internship with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which dispatched him, after further training, to research and write a history of Arkansas’s first state capitol. (It was in Little Rock that he and Crescent met, at a potluck dinner).
He further set his seal on Little Rock in 1979, when he approached architect Ed Cromwell, who dreamed of restoring the once-grand Capital Hotel about doing the research needed before the renovation / restoration could begin. In the 2002 book A Capital Idea: an illustrated history of the Capital Hotel, author Steven B. Weintz noted:
The factual information and details that Ned discovered amid hundreds of musty, yellowed pages of old newspapers and city directories gave … invaluable clues about the original building’s structure.
Ned's were the considered and passionate opinions of a man both nationally recognized as "Preservationist of the Year" (American Historic Hotels, 1993), and honored on a statewide and local level. In 1996, he received a special commendation from the Eureka Springs Preservation Society. He had a 20-year history of creating and working with non-profits, serving on the boards of numerous non-profit and service organizations, including the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas, the Society of Marketing Professional Services (Atlanta Chapter), the Governor’s Mansion Committee of the Capitol Zoning District Commission (Little Rock, Arkansas). The Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas created an annual posthumous award named after Ned, to be called "The Ned Shank Award for Outstanding Preservation Publication," bringing together his interests in preservation and good writing.
For despite his credentials, it was stories, not the buildings themselves so much as what they said about people, which were at the heart of Ned’s preservationism. Although he could talk technically with the best of them, preservation’s connective tissue was not building material, but people and human history, personal and social.
Ned, innkeeper extraordinaire
This same interest in people and openness to their stories is what made him such an outstanding, welcoming innkeeper. For 18 years, he was Dairy Hollow House owner-innkeeper. While Crescent served behind the scenes as chef, Ned managed guest services, inn operations, staffing, and designed all building additions, while performing and overseeing renovations and writing the much-loved "Letter from the Neditor" in the inn's Moos-Letter. (Left, Ned in the too-busy, very long days as innkeeper, at the former inn's front desk; right, with Crescent,  after dinner at the inn's restaurant, in 1997).
But, mostly, he made everyone who walked in the door feel welcome, appreciated, seen. That was his great gift, and largely because of it, the inn was praised as one of the four best in the country by USA Today, and singled out by publications like Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Conde Nast Traveler, and the New York Times. He and Crescent lectured at dozens of innkeeping, culinary, and tourism conferences around the country. The same kindness flowed into his teaching approach. He had  "enthusiasm and a wealth of information to share in an understandable way" in  workshops which were "participatory, solid, non-intimidating." and offered "problem-solving with vision and caring"  (anonymous evaluations, Professional Association of Innkeepers International). It was an "approach which is special, spiritual, and profound," (Conference Chair, Washington State Bed & Breakfast Guild).
The inn was in business from 1979 to 1998, when Ned and CD began transforming it into the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. But though Dairy Hollow House is no more, you can still taste some of the recipes which made the inn, Dairy Hollow House, famous... as well as some of Ned and CD’s home favorites. That is the strange thing about recipes: they call up the past but also bring it to life again, joining memory with immediacy and pleasure.
Ned is greatly missed, still, by the hundreds whose lives he touched. To this day, former Dairy Hollow guests discover his death and email Crescent about how much their stays, and Ned’s part in those stays meant to them.
A collaborative, creative partnership
Ned was an enthusiastic eater, and Crescent loved to cook for him. Former inn guests who still hanker for Dairy Hollow cuisine may fix it themselves at home (see Recipe Index). And they can learn, in Notes From A Cookbook Author's Husband, what it was like being around a cookbook in progress (which sometimes meant a wife in regress). He was also, always, willing to wash the dishes (we are talking at home, here, not at the restaurant). “Leave me alone in here,” he would cheerfully tell CD after she had produced some spectacular dinner which had nonetheless reduced the kitchen to a scene of virtual carnage. “You know washing dishes is like meditation for me.” When he’d completed the kitchen, down to putting the dishes away and sweeping the floor, he’d call to her, “Okay, the kitchen’s Neddified now.” Pictured right, one of the last series of photographs taken of Ned, about a week before he died, by his and CD's good friend George West. They're with Z-Cat, on the front porch of Moonshine Cottage, then Crescent's writing studio in Arkansas.
They often worked together, and did for twenty-three years: formerly as co-innkeepers, then later co-authoring magazine articles, teaching and lecturing together, and on some Writers' Colony projects. Their shared interests and enthusiasm were many. Both were constant readers, devoted to fitness (Ned was an ardent bicyclist, CD a step class and weight work enthusiast), loved to cook and eat good food, enjoyed walking together when at home or elsewhere in the country, and gallery- and theatre-going when they visited cities. They were passionate and fairly adventurous travelers (and had been since they were young, as in the photo on the left, taken in their twenties under a mango tree in South India. How skinny they were!)
Once, in Washington DC, as they were mapping out a typically over-ambitious things-to-do-and-see list, CD sighed, “We’re just experience hogs.” To which Ned immediately added. “At the trough of life.”  They both then looked at each other and began, at exactly the same moment, to snort wildly in porcine imitation.
… but strong individually
Their marriage, like all marriages, was not exempt from difficult times, because difficult times are the way marriages grow and change, the way individuals in marriages become more emotionally resilient and fully adult... paradoxically, more themselves as separate human beings as and while they develop the ability to be more and more fully with each other. This is how it happened with Ned and CD, as it does for every couple willing not to not walk away, nor just to hang in there as a couple suffering, but to actually do pick-and-shovel work on themselves, individually, as opposed to thinking the partner should change. It’s mysterious, glorious and surpassingly strange that only in a deeply committed relationship is one given this opportunity quite so clearly. And eventually it turns out that “problems” in a marriage, though unpleasant and painful, aren't problems after all --- they are just part of the way marriage works.
At a particularly difficult juncture, Ned and CD experienced what Ned later described as “the pressure cooker” of a three-day therapy intensive with David Schnarch, whose simple but radical ideas about marriage and its purpose as “an elegant machine driving personal growth” took their relationship, which was already, for the most part, very good, and transformed it into something luminous. (Read some of David Schnarch’s articles to get some understanding of the Schnarch approach). For the insight and the changes their travel in this area, using the map Schnarch gave them, they remained grateful, at times awed, right up until Ned’s death.
CD, on her own, continues to feel gratitude and awe at this part of her life with Ned. The strength, the profound shifting of the interior tectonic plates, and the growing up which happened to the two of them, both as a couple and individually, as they did this work, is perhaps the only thing that got her through Ned’s loss.
“Club Ned”
The last chapter of David Schnarch’s book, Passionate Marriage is entitled “Love, Sex, and Death.” So, when CD lost Ned so abruptly on that unseasonably warm day in November, she had at least an abstract understanding of the non-negotiable fact that all marriages, even the best, end with someone leaving. This understanding was one of the few things that kept her tethered to the earth in the terrible days, weeks, and yes, years, that followed.
If you had come to this website between late 2000 and 2005, you would have found a great deal about grieving here. About four months after Ned’s death, she wrote this poem:
How It’s Done I don’t know how to not be married to you. I guess like this: I wake up every morning and you are still dead.
But, these pages are written four and a half years later, Crescent is finally well along in composting grief, the rawest of emotions, stronger than any other except love (of which it is, of course, part). Why “composting” ? Because, she thinks, you don’t “get over”, “move on,” or “heal from” grief. Rather, grief becomes part of the soil from which you grow yourself… a new self, resembling in some ways but quite different from the self you once were.
These days CD’s life is again mostly happy, although totally unlike what she had imagined her life would be. But, she does lives it again as an experience hog snuffling her snout into whatever comes along. She remains changed by Ned’s long presence in her life, and his briefer absence from it. Yet that absence, in time, becomes a kind of presence in itself. She has learned that experience, that life, cannot be edited; that the unbearably hard parts must also be snuffled.
Thus, as grief and widowhood gradually became less a core of her immediate identity, she decided to remove the many pages on grief from this site. But because so many people emailed her about this content, and because everyone grieves or will grieve, she decided to give it its own place. Thus, you can discover a little more about Ned, and a lot more about grief and grieving as she understands it, by visiting Club Ned.
All this is, in a sense, yet another gift from Ned, without whom she would never have experienced life, love, and loss with the richness that she did and still does. When her book Passionate Vegetarian was published, she dedicated it to Ned, with his dates, followed by the words “What a feast we had!”
In a way that lies beyond the loss, the flattening agony, the monotony of grief, Crescent is again feasting --- sometimes by herself, sometimes with others, sometimes with the one particular other she is spending many of her days with. But though she herself does not understand it, she still carries that “we” which was once she and Ned, with her as she returns again to life’s table.
Ned, one more time, wherever you are, I love you and thank you. --- CD