When I was younger, dreaming of a writing future, I knew that building a career in this field can take time.
I knew that so well that my ambition was tempered by it. As a pre-teen and a teenager there was this active thought: “I won’t have a book published until I’m in my 40s, probably.” It didn’t occur to me then what a combination of effort and serendipity might accomplish. But I also didn’t yet know the investment that would be required. Even a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and literature didn’t fully prepare me for that.
Professors taught classes on how to workshop, refine the scope of essays and dial the power of a specific sentence. They offered words of encouragement and of warning for facing long, long roads of rejection. What I don’t remember any of them mentioning is the time dedicated to query letters, book proposals, pitches, or the financial investment for juried workshops — should one be so lucky to get accepted.
Those are the pieces I’ve been learning firsthand the past few years. Thankfully, I’ve had some support from my fellow writing nerds throughout the Roaring Fork Valley, including Aspen Writers Network members who meet every month to help one another tune our skills and learn about the publishing industry. Thankfully, I’ve had incredible community support, which has helped me to attend some juried workshops and writing conferences.
Last month, I got to dive into the belly of creative form work. A family friend had been encouraging me to look into opportunities to learn from Pam Houston, who, among the contemporary American West writers, is a draft horse mare who pulls her weight, stands her ground and makes one hell of an impression. She lives further south in Colorado, outside of Creede, and has written such books as “Cowboys are My Weakness” (her debut when she was just 30!) and “Deep Creek.”
Houston was also recommended to me by my teacher at last year’s Aspen Summer Words, Joshua Mohr, who teaches a long-term manuscript development program with her. Late last year, a particular workshop with her caught my eye: “Mont Blanc.” A week of creative writing refinement in Chamonix was too amazing of an opportunity to let pass by. I applied.
I was honored to be accepted based on a submission that was, and still is as of yet, an unpublished travel essay. It gave me the chance to join a baker’s dozen cohort working on various prose projects, while learning from Houston and getting our work in front of other writers’ eyes. That workshop, which ran June 14-20, is how I’ve reinvested the majority of my freelance journalism income this year. That was a privilege I hadn’t previously known: To be given the opportunity to spend money on developing my craft.
Houston doesn’t mince words with her feedback. Praise comes without ornaments or flowers, but simple statements like, “These descriptions work well,” and “That scene is powerful.” Her constructive feedback is not different, though sometimes more vociferous: “The abstraction here is holding the work back,” or, “Be mindful about the way this frustration is being aired.” She’s not one for much interiority, in part because she thinks it has become too much of a buzzword.
Over the course of the week, I learned as much from the other cohort members’ workshops as from mine; the vastly different styles expressed, even in nonfiction, even in the narration of movement and descriptions of place.
I also was able to accrue some valuable experience: a visit to the Montenvers station above the Mer du Glace, once one of Haute Savoie’s largest glaciers, now shrinking beneath shedding moraine. The geologic body has collapsed and receded hundreds of vertical and thousands of horizontal feet in just the past six years.
That’s the manuscript I’m starting, the one I brought to the workshop. The beginnings of essays about experiencing glacier-shaped places. The immensity and power of those specific kinds of frozen water, the forces that once shaped the valleys in which we live.
I’m looking forward to applying what I learned, to one day contribute in longer form to the genre Pam Houston has helped to define. Intimacy is important — I’d argue as important with place as it is with other humans.