A workshop of readers tackles weeklong Summer Words writing conference in Snowmass Village

Stories invite us to re-engage with the world, view life from different perspectives, and become enchanted once again. About 140 writers and readers spent this week at Summer Words at the Viewline Resort in Snowmass in one of 12 workshops revolving around storytelling.

While writers typically flock to interactive workshops focusing on craft — of which Summer Words provided plenty, including the weeklong, juried book editing, fiction, memoir, middle-grade, personal essay, and fantasy as well as a non-juried open writing led by Victoria Redel — they often overlook the value of a readers retreat.

Yet, just over a dozen people, almost all writers, attended Luis Alberto Urrea’s readers retreat, which gathered for three hours every morning on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

“Writing really isn’t an act. Being a writer is a felt sense. It’s a sense of beauty,” he said on Monday morning, further setting the tone for the three-day retreat by encouraging everyone sitting around the table to form a safe and supportive community intended to continue, via an email list, long after the retreat.

His workshop delved into understory, which he introduced partially through Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory, teaching there’s more to a story than what’s directly stated.

Hemingway wrote: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”

“It’s the part you can’t see that provides the engine that moves the iceberg across the sea,” Urrea said, using the metaphor to explain understory.

While his reading list included intense stories, which a couple of participants expressed dislike for initially, by the time he finished pointing out the “genius” of the authors, even the most resistant to reading about violence or society’s dark side gained a new viewpoint and appreciation.

Blanca O’Leary, who sits on the Aspen Words advisory board, regularly attends Summer Words’ readers retreats, referring to it like a spa for the mind. She loves traveling, so she mostly reads to virtually visit regions she can’t physically go to.

“If it’s too sad, I can’t read it,” she said, explaining how, normally, she would avoid Urrea’s reading list of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” George Orwell’s “A Hanging,” and other selections and how she even became angry reading one. But she treasured how Urrea both pointed out the craft and “brought the heart into the mechanics of writing.”

“He showed empathy and what the piece is doing and how it might change (readers’) lives,” said Marcella Larsen, who attends readers retreats to step out of her daily life and “think about the world through different lenses.”

Urrea personalized the writing and reading life through his own touching stories, from growing up in the “barrio” to teaching at Harvard. He talked about stories as a bridge to developing empathy for characters.

“I love a book that changes me, even in a little way, and the more open you are, the more your life changes. You reach out to a text, and the text reaches back to you in some way that I can’t explain. There’s some force in what we’re doing, and I hope you stay attuned to it,” he said, later adding, “One person’s story can open up another person’s story, even though there’s nothing the same about it. … We are all living in some composition. We are all anthologies. Everything keeps coming back to story. … It’s all sacred. It’s all part of an amazing journey.”

Julie Cotter traveled from Australia to attend Urrea’s readers retreat, though she’s also using the trip to research an artist she’s writing about. One of her big takeaways revolved around how he blended historical timelines of World War II and his mother’s life with fiction in his latest release, “Goodnight, Irene.”

“He’s a storyteller that I want to listen to. He brings a really strong sense of humanity to his stories — they’re not dry,” Cotter said.

She appreciated the different approaches Urrea pointed out in the various readings he chose, as well as the opportunity to step out of her comfort zone, away from her home and family, to contemplate other people’s stories.

“It wasn’t a critical space; it was a caring space, where you were free to express your feelings. And I loved the people,” she said about the readers retreat.

As Urrea emphasized, stories act as “a magic mirror.”

“You see what’s in your heart, what’s in your worldview, what you’re trying to make better,” he said. “It’s an empathy bootcamp whenever you write.”

Throughout the retreat, he showed participants how reading also becomes a bootcamp in empathy with each well-crafted word, sentence, and story.