by AIW Board Member Andrew W.M. Beierle
I’ve just returned from the Atlanta Gay Literary Festival, where I was invited to read from my second novel, First Person Plural. It was a sentimental journey: the first time in two years I have returned to the place I called home for more than a quarter century. A leisurely schedule allowed me to spend time in the neighborhoods in which I had lived and worked—Midtown, Virginia Highland, Druid Hills—each of which has a unique identity and a strong sense of community.
I also spent time among the community of LGBT writers who had gathered for the third such Atlanta festival, among them headliner Manil Suri, who teaches in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and is the author of the acclaimed novels The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva. Being surrounded by other writers, many of them young and exuberant about their work, energized me; being around old friends who asked me, “What are you working on now?” challenged me to think about developing new work.
As an aspiring writer in Atlanta, I labored for years in solitude on a personal quest for that elusive Holy Grail: publication. A journalist by trade, I knew plenty of other wordsmiths but not a single practitioner of the art of fiction. And so I felt my way blindly, gleaning what I could about the craft by reading voraciously, learning from my mistakes, accumulating rejection slips from an ever-increasing number of prospective agents. (One of them simply scrawled the word “No” on my cover letter and returned it to me in my SASE.)
My first success did not come until I acknowledged that I likely could not succeed on my own and reached out to another writer, the director of the creative writing program at Emory University, where I worked. He read my work and introduced me to his agent, who took me on as a client. Two years later (after no small number of rejection slips from publishers), she sold my first novel, The Winter of Our Discothèque.
Through that door I entered the community of writers and came to understand the value of developing relationships with others engaged in the pursuit of personal artistic development and publication. I attended workshops at the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Napa Valley, and Kenyon Review summer writers’ conferences, where I not only worked with such acclaimed writers as Alice McDermott and Claire Messud but also met authors—some unknown, some on the verge of literary fame—who have become friends, colleagues, and advocates of my work.
When I moved to Washington in 2008, I knew I would have to find new friends to replace those I had left behind in Atlanta. I became involved with Out and Equal, which advocates for LGBT rights and fairness in the workplace, I did pro bono work for organizations involved in national security and environmental issues, and, most importantly, I joined American Independent Writers, where I found a welcoming community which shared my passion for the written word. Just as Atlanta is composed of diverse neighborhoods—from funky Cabbagetown to elegant Buckhead—so too is the AIW community an amalgam of interests: journalism and work-for-hire; literary and popular fiction; scholarship and a broad range of nonfiction; mystery, thriller, and romance writers.
As both a journalist and a novelist, I maintain a residence in two of these “neighborhoods.” But no matter where I am, I know that I am truly at home.
__
Andrew W.M. Beierle is an AIW Board Member, a graduate of the AIW Leadership Program, and author of First Person Plural and The Winter of our Discotheque.
