Rogers: Aspen Words was key to changing my life

Aspen Words is a sail hoisted into a wind I never knew, rudder all but useless. Life will never be the same.

I lurked around the edges of the annual conference last week, attending public craft talks, taking familiar cold spray during my 15 minutes with a book editor, worming my way in to the Book Ball — all to smell the sea, feel the breeze, remembering, remembering my turn on deck in the core experience workshopping with aspiring peers and heroic author-teacher figures.

Emotionally, at least for me, there’s a bit of the hurricane in the air, roiling with heightened hopes you can’t keep down and deeper disappointments in the moment, too. There are stakes, after all. This is our precious art, revelations of our souls we are sharing and hoping maybe to sell. We’re ripe and vulnerable to rejection.

But this raises the excitement, too. Life gains flavor and meaning with the terrible knowledge it will end. Rejection plays something of the same role with art, I think, at least in the sense no one escapes the net.

Perhaps the biggest lesson has nothing to do with the words themselves, but how we reconcile ourselves to our writing lives. Our world, after all, spins on the cold fact that 1%-3% of completed manuscripts will find their way to publication with a publishing house.

We’re talking lottery odds here, except writing a novel, say, is no quick pick.

The gantlet only begins with getting in a conference like Aspen Words, one of the top ones in country. Roughly a quarter of the applicants for the workshops are accepted. Agents will ask a few of those who make it as participants to send them some work. There’s a slight chance they’ll sign someone from a conference, maybe.

But listen to the agents and they face the same wall. Rejection. Rejection. Rejection. They pitch editors, and editors pitch their publishing houses. Obviously, some of all these hopes and dreams eventually reach publication. The agents and editors at conferences like Aspen Words have sold and worked with enough to make their day jobs in the business work.

The authors who teach the workshops serve as proof this is possible, guiding lights. Hard to imagine them struggling, having surmounted all those hurdles. Still, I know plenty whose next work languishes in the same great evil stew of the unpublished even with their connections and their obvious talent. Only as good as your next book, then, and lots more rejection in the meantime.

So nearly all of them must keep day jobs, like me. Mine affords me a neat dodge from the frustrations of not getting my “wisdom” out into the world. Indeed, very sadly for the world, I enjoy wider readership than the vast bulk of the published authors. The James Pattersons and J.K. Rowlings, the Ann Patchetts and Richard Powers, fit among the privileged few who can make a full career from their books alone.

Them’s the odds. Not that any of the aspiring authors — our mentors call us “emerging” in our workshops and in panel discussions — believe this at heart. The bane and beauty of being an individual human is that when it comes to dreams, the odds simply don’t apply to us. A whole lot of impossible magic happens as a result of this insanity.

I’ve become acquainted with the pain of my aspiring and my acclaimed friends, and of course from my own fantasy, when they are frustrated with the failure to get that next work published. Also the joy at a breakthrough! It does happen, too.

Still, this is just to recognize the currents and tides and steepness of the waves, the strength of the storm. Aspen Words changed my life not for this, the backdrop, but its role in an epiphany that has meant everything to me.

What I discovered exploring this world later in life, fiction writing, was not only the implicit reckoning with ambition, but my meditative art. This is what unmoored me and took me skittering into an entirely new horizon simply in the daily act of sitting down and immediately reaching my limits in writing and storytelling.

The early morning practice, the alpha and theta zone I enter, the humility the little egomaniac inside must confront on the blank page, and letting go of concern about quality freed me.

Rejection/success remain as life/death will, of course, but my higher value became the story and the art itself. We don’t have to be heard by the world in order to get the marrow from creation itself.

So that sail, that wind? Pure transcendence. At least until it’s time to send agents my queries.

Aspen Times Editor Don Rogers can be reached at drogers@aspentimes.com