Don't Shoot the Gentile (review)

This memoir recounts the adventures of a very young and naïve non-Mormon instructor from Colorado who signed on to teach at a junior college in rural Utah in 1963. The author had just graduated with a master of arts degree from Colorado State University. On an impulse, he applied for a position at the College of Southern Utah in Cedar City and ended up teaching an astonishing potpourri of courses—basic journalism, photography, creative writing, advanced essay, feature article writing, vocabulary building, and freshman composition. He had had prior teaching experience with only the last of these courses. It was a situation ripe with opportunities for irony and humor, which the author, writing some fifty years later, has exploited with skill.

A practicing Presbyterian, Work was startled to find the town and campus so dominated by Mormons that even non-Mormon faculty members were cautious where they smoked, drank liquor, or otherwise violated the expectations of their teetotaling neighbors and colleagues. Among other surprises, Work discovered that he was considered a Gentile, a universal Mormon term for any non-Mormon. On a hunt with liberal Mormon friends, he was endangered by crossfire, causing one of his companions to shout, "Don't shoot the Gentile, or we'll have to hire another one"—the tongue-in-cheek implication being that Work had been hired as a token non-Mormon who would have to be replaced by another non-Mormon in order to maintain a show of religious diversity in their public institution (111).

Work also makes congenial fun of the dialect he encountered in Cedar City: "In the speech of southern Utah we would use a fark to eat the cheesecake that came from the restaurant fredge. The farewell speeches following our mell would give us a tarrable nostalgia and maybe brang a tar to the eye, which would glisten in the candle's flickering yallow flame" (13). (The writer of this review could add the following to this list: Marmon for Mormon, harse for horse, harrible for horrible.)

As might be expected, Work is willing to make himself the butt of his humor. He reports having registered the theft of his car with the city police only to have them inform him a few days later that they had found it in a college parking lot. As it turned out, Work himself had parked it there one morning but walked home in the afternoon as he usually did, forgetting entirely that he had driven to school that day.

In a more serious tone, Work praises a number of his associates at the college for what they taught him about the art of teaching. For example, while lecturing on literature he learned the value of humor from a colleague who "made Johnny Carson look like a rank amateur" (39). Interestingly, Work taught no less a person than the college president the art of keeping a clean desk. His desktop was cleared of all clutter, he informed the president, because it was so small that it forced him to file his papers rather than let them pile up. A couple of days later, he arrived at his office to find that the president, tired of disorder, had commandeered the small desk for himself and given Work his own "executive-size slab of walnut with two file cabinet pedestals"— which, as Work reports, inevitably became loaded with clutter (46).

After two years in Cedar City, Work and his wife decided their future lay in Colorado. Work acquired a PhD and pursued a long and fruitful career as a professor of English at Colorado State University, specializing in western literature, nature writing, and creative nonfiction. He has served a term as president of the Western Literature Association, has written a number of rangeland Westerns, and has made the western novels and stories of other writers available through critical editions.