Rural dentist morphs into nationally-known author

Dr. Nathan Jorgenson

While working on patient's teeth during the work day, Dr. Nathan Jorgenson finds himself recanting a comment he used to make to his wife: "Why would anybody want to be a writer? What a dumb thing to want to do."

Jorgenson, who grew up on a farm near Jackson, Minn., is a Fairmont, Minn. dentist who can chuckle today as he vividly remembers working in Spencer's former packing plant as a college student. He deems the two summers a "quite memorable" time.

"I spent one summer on the gut table pulling guts out of heifers and steers, and I spent one summer in the cooler. Boy, it was easy to go home and study after those summers," he said.

The 55-year-old, who modestly states, "I have a little practice in Fairmont and I work in a little room and drill little holes in little teeth and think little thoughts all day and go home and write books," also considers the last five years as being "the most important five years" of his life.

It's been a time in which Jorgenson has morphed from being a rural dentist to a nationally-known author.

"Waiting for White Horses"

His first novel, "Waiting for White Horses," was inspired by Harold Jorgenson, who worked as a cattle buyer for the same Spencer packing plant during the 1950s and 1960s.

"Dad was my best friend. When he got sick, I started writing a story to read to him when I would sit with him by his bedside in the nursing home. He passed away at about page 30 of this little story that I had," Jorgenson recalled. "I put two guys in a duck boat just because I thought that would be something Dad would want to hear, and we did a lot of that when I was a boy."

Jorgenson continued writing following his dad's death, finding the experience of penning the dynamic friendship between Grant Thorson and Will Cambell, set in the tall pines of northern Minnesota's lake country, "cathartic."

"I found a bit of a cathartic thing going on as I sat in my little room where I hide from my wife in the basement. I found two things," he said. "I found that I had characters who were saying things to each other that I needed for somebody to say to me, and I also rediscovered the written word."

Two years worth of using a No. 2 lead pencil on a legal tablet from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. several nights a week and 492 pages later, Jorgenson had finished his first novel and readers were left to answer the same question he found in his heart: Just how vulnerable am I willing to be in order to hold on to the ones I love?

"The Mulligan"

"The Mulligan," the dentist-turned-award-winning-author's second novel, was released in October 2007. The 586-page paperback chronicles the second-chance story of Joe Mix, who decides he's chosen everything wrong in life because he did what other people wanted him to do and, at 50, realizes this, quits his job, gets a divorce, runs away and "takes a mulligan out of life."

"Everybody who's my age has had days when they come home and hate their job. I just took that and ran with it. It was a fun story to tell. The first third of that book is kind of dark, and the second two-thirds was all fun," Jorgenson said of "The Mulligan," which he wrote on a dare.

"A friend of mine said, 'Anybody can write one book. Can you write two,'" he recalled. "Well, I'm working on book three and book four right now."

Jorgenson and his wife, Teresa, opted to publish both books on their own.

"When we decided that we were going to try and do this, I knew that getting books published was really difficult. If you're a New York City publisher, you're going to get about 50,000 to 75,000 query letters a year from people like me, and you're going to respond to about 2,000 of those. You're going to wind up reading about 400 manuscripts, and you're going to publish 40 novels -- and 36 of them will lose money. So, getting published is a pretty long shot. I knew that Vince Flynn, a St. Paul author, for example, had 61 rejection letters from New York City publishers and then self-published his first novel, and it was a New York Times bestseller. So I thought I'd go that route instead of five years of rejection. So we decided to form our own publishing company and just see what we could do. The day that we had to choose a name for the publishing company, it was raining like a cow (relieving itself) on a flat rock. So we decided to call it Flat Rock Publishing," Jorgenson explained.

The move, which has netted the Jorgensons profits and resulted in the 10th printing of "Waiting for White Horses," has also allowed the dentist to retain creative control of his handiworks.

In hindsight, the Minnesota dentist calls the writing and self-publishing experience he's had to date one of "real personal and professional growth."

"The growth experience of a lifetime," Jorgenson added. "If I'd have known how much work it was going to be when I started, I probably wouldn't have done it -- and I'd have missed out on all the growth and good stuff."

* Jorgenson has made it a point to speak to local Rotary clubs, including Spencer's. His novels are available at bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and Hill Avenue Book Company in Spirit Lake. They're also featured in small gift shops, such as the Barn Swallow in Okoboji, and online at Amazon.com and www.flatrockpublishing.com.