The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Why We Love Atlanta
ATLANTA WRITERS CLUB
The Atlanta Writers Club is the city's premier organization for writers of many kinds, with a membership now numbering over 700, offering two conferences per year that bring agents and editors to the writers, as well as monthly meetings with guest speakers chosen for their success and their mentoring skills, along with workshops and critique groups for member support.
For more information on the history and present concerns and offerings of AWC, provided by the current president Ron Aiken, go to www.AtlantaWritersClub.org. To learn more about conferences, check the website at www.AtlantaWritersConference.com.
INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE WEINSTEIN, past President and present Conference Director of Atlanta Writers Club.
BK Tell us something about the history of AWC and your affiliation with it.
GW
The Atlanta Writers Club was founded in 1914 by Margaret Mitchell’s editor at The Atlanta Constitution and other literary luminaries of the era. Its goal is to teach the craft and business of writing. I learned of it in 2001 and found it to be a valuable resource for networking and education. Members were welcoming; I made friends there quickly and started to volunteer, filling every board position until I became president in 2004. At that point, I implemented some changes to promote more participation: changing the meeting time from a Thursday night to Saturday afternoon and moving the location from midtown to the northern perimeter. Membership took off, which enabled us to launch critique groups, participate in the Decatur Book Festival, and begin to offer writing workshops as well as scholarships to college students.
In 2007, I was succeeded by a terrific president, Marty Aftewicz, who encouraged me to develop the Atlanta Writers Conference. We trialed it in 2008 with an outside manager, and then I started to run it as of 2009. Now we offer it twice a year, and industry professionals consider it “the gold standard of writers conferences.”
Our 18th Atlanta Writers Conference was held May 4-5, 2018. We had our largest number of participants to date at 215, with a record 38 awards made by our guest literary agents and acquisition editors for best manuscript samples and best pitches.
Our next conference will be on November 2-3, 2018, at the Westin Atlanta Airport Hotel. I anticipate launching it in June.
The AWC itself also is currently enjoying its largest membership ever, with more than 700 writers, and we’re able to contribute more scholarships and donate to an increasing number of literary causes in metro Atlanta.
BK When I think of cultural Atlanta, I think of the museums devoted to art and art history as well as Atlanta history, the symphony, the opera and dance companies, including Calo Gitano, a flamenco company that gives an international flavor to the city, and of the many theater venues, including Mask Theatre, a unique combination of theater, dance, and masking that we are also covering in this issue. Atlanta is rich in performing arts, both resident companies and venues for touring events. How do you see that cultural wealth, and how do groups like the Atlanta Writers Club, Working Title Playwrights, Decatur Book Festival and Georgia Center for the Book complement the other offerings and draw from them?
GW
Metro Atlanta is tremendous for those who are fans (consumers) of the arts, for all the reasons you stated. The area also is home to thousands of people who create those arts, including literature, poetry, playwrighting, and screenwriting. Readers inside and outside the perimeter are fortunate to be able to meet and glean insights from so much local talent at venues such as the Decatur Book Festival and the Georgia Center for the Book. And that talent is nurtured in organizations including the Atlanta Writers Club, Working Title Playwrights, and others.
BK What, in AWC’s more than 100 years of history, do you think of its role in the cultural life of the city?
GW
For the first seventy or so years of its existence, the Atlanta Writers Club was a fixture of intown Atlanta cultural life. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and its forebears featured summaries of club meetings; Celestine Sibley mentioned it often in her columns; and luminaries such as Margaret Mitchell and Carl Sandburg would interact with its members. However, it was also an elitist, invitation-only, exclusively white enclave. Over the past thirty years, its influence has waned as other artistic groups have gained attention and the general public’s interest in books has declined. However, on the positive side, the AWC has become much more diverse and inclusive: a far better representation of metro area residents. I much prefer being part of an organization that welcomes everyone but dwells in relative obscurity than being in the spotlight while shunning so many of its potential contributors.
BK Besides the cultural context, in what ways is Atlanta a good home for writers?
GW
The metro area is so large that, no matter where writers live and work, there are other writers who are nearby. This creates a huge, very diverse community for networking and learning about the craft as well as opportunities to advance their writing ambitions. The area is so rich in history, and it is multiracial, multicultural, pan-sexual, and inclusive in other ways, all of which provides writers with unlimited resources to enrich their work.
BK You are instrumental in bringing the writing world to Atlanta through conferences: editors, agents, speakers, teachers. Tell us something about the general benefits of these conferences and about some individual success stories.
GW
For each of our twice-yearly Atlanta Writers Conferences, I recruit a dozen literary agents and acquisition editors seeking a wide variety of fiction genres and nonfiction topics. Our participants can receive manuscript feedback from these individuals and pitch them about their books in hopes of being considered for representation (from agents) or outright purchase (from editors). I also bring in other industry professionals—screenwriting experts, freelance editors, marketers—as well as successful local authors, to teach more about the craft and business of writing.
Through the conferences, participants can advance their writing ambitions, learn more about the complex publishing industry, and even make their dreams come true. Exhibit A for the latter is Becky Albertalli, who secured an agent through one of our conferences. The agent sold her debut young adult manuscript, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, to HarperCollins three days later. That first novel is now available in twenty languages and has been made into the major motion picture Love, Simon, which was released on March 18, 2018. Exhibit B is Roger Johns, who attracted a St. Martin’s Press acquisition editor at an Atlanta Writers Conference; she acquired his debut mystery Dark River Rising, which came out in August 2017, and he’s represented by an agent he also met at one of our earlier conferences. Another example: An agent signed Emily Carpenter after our conference and landed a multi-book deal for her with an Amazon imprint. Emily’s first two books were bestsellers and her third novel, Every Single Secret, came out on May 1, 2018.
BK Can you describe, for those who don’t know, how slow the publishing process seems and what to do while waiting for a manuscript to be read by an editor who may have requested it?
GW
It can take a year or more to find a literary agent who falls in love with your manuscript and agrees to represent you. Then, it can take a year or more for that agent to find an editor to fall in love with that manuscript and agree to acquire it. After acquisition, the book might not be released for twelve to eighteen months. This is the timeline for traditional publishing through the big New York publishers. Small and regional publishers can make decisions and produce books much faster, and often don’t require an agent, but their author advances (upfront money paid to the author) and royalties tend to be less and they have difficulty getting the book noticed by well-known industry reviewers and placed on bookstore shelves.
Authors who choose the self-publishing route face the same or worse problems with reviews and placement, and the self-published authors also must become an expert at every step in the process—from book layout and cover design to marketing and publicity—or hire others to do these vital tasks. All these decisions are made within a marketplace that sees over two million new self-published titles and nearly a million traditionally published titles every year.
In the end, authors’ decisions about which path to follow are based on their desire for control of the product, process, and profits versus their willingness to cede control in return for the chance at broader distribution, greater visibility, and higher sales. For authors seeking a traditional publisher, the best advice I can give while they wait for those wheels to turn is to keep writing. No publisher wants a “one-book wonder”—if they do offer a contract, it will probably be for two or more books—so start working on your next manuscript. Worst case, if things fall through with the first one, you’ll have a second book for consideration.
BK How has your own writing been nourished and supported by your participation in AWC?
GW
The contacts I’ve made through the Atlanta Writers Club enabled me to improve my writing craft immeasurably, network with incredible regional and national authors, and understand the publishing business far better than I used to. My best friends are all people I met in the AWC. In addition, the AWC provided my calling: my mission to help other writers make their dreams come true through our twice-yearly conferences, the continued growth of the club, and our chance to provide scholarships and other outreach that helps adults and young people in the community.
BK Where did the name eQuill come from as the title of the AWC newsletter?
GW
When I joined the Atlanta Writers Club in 2001, they had long-produced a monthly paper newsletter called “The Quill,” because of the quill in our logo, and mailed it to the members. After I became president, we launched our website and put our newsletter online, which made it “The eQuill.” I definitely don’t miss those days of laboring at the copy machine and then affixing stamps ad nauseum!
BK I'd like to hear more about the development of your writing career which, I believe you say on the website, started in 2000. What were you doing while waiting to write, and how did you know when you would begin? Who was George Weinstein prior to 2000 and what is the scope of your work now?
GW
Actually, I’ve written all my life. At age 6, I started writing plays for my stuffed animals to act out to entertain my brother and sister.
BK I love that!
GW
In my teen years, I wrote stories and submitted them without success to science fiction and fantasy magazines. During high school and college, the courses I excelled in required writing. In 1991, I wooed my wife-to-be with handwritten love letters (and parlayed that experience into my first national publication, “Twenty-three and a Half Love Letters” for A Cup of Comfort for Writers). In 2000, I got serious about writing novels, but none of these were published until 2012, beginning with Hardscrabble Road.
BK What is the story behind the story of Hardscrabble Road? How did you come to write of that particular place and time and character?
GW
It's helpful to have primary sources available when writing historical fiction, especially when many of the events portrayed have elements of truth in them. A decade before I started writing Hardscrabble Road, I was already jotting down stories my father-in-law, Vernon, told after dinner and supper (as the paterfamilias of a proper Southern household, he never used the term "lunch"). His tales about sharecropping and life as the poorest of the poor during the Great Depression and war years—some blood-curdling, some heartbreaking, some humorous—captivated me. The novel is a fictionalized account of my father-in-law’s gritty childhood in South Georgia during those years.
His reminiscences evoked a time, place, and set of experiences (violent, tragic, spooky, and sometimes hilarious) utterly different from my boring, suburban, middle-class, late-20th-century upbringing in Maryland. The longer he talked, the more he slipped back into the accent and speech patterns of his youth, enabling me to capture the flavor of his sentences as well as the content. The stories fascinated me, and from the first one I heard, I thought they could be an outstanding backdrop for a novel.
BK Tell us about that, about coming to the material from a very different background of your own and entering a new world so thoroughly that you could write convincingly about a time and place and people that you experienced only through hearsay.
GW
Throughout the 1990s, I wrote down the stories Vernon told and, around 2001, I decided I needed to weave together many of those anecdotes, develop a narrative arc, and invent some fictional characters to round out the novel I wanted to tell about perseverance and grit in the face of overwhelming odds. He eventually agreed to let me interview him at length to gather sensory memories and other minutiae and even contributed the photo on the cover, which is the only picture that exists of him and his two brothers as kids. I also talked to his two older brothers and older sister to gather their recollections.
BK Let me digress here from the Q and A pattern into conversation, with a relevant personal experience. I finished Hardscrabble Road sooner than I thought because it was so absorbing that I kept reading a longer time each sitting until one morning I couldn’t resist letting the tale tell me when to stop, and it carried me on without pause to the end.
Of the several books you’ve published, I chose to read Hardscrabble Road to start with because I noticed the setting and knew it would echo in some ways the work I have been doing for years on a novel about rural (north) Georgia, a couple of decades after the period you’re writing about. I am intimately acquainted with the dialect and diction where people say “I swannee” instead of “I swear” because to swear is to demean the name of God. I still can’t get over how you managed to include all that detail without falling into caricature.
Your novel takes place in South Georgia and mine in North Georgia. It doesn’t surprise me that our protagonists are both children of bootleggers, for moonshining is an exciting image, as I found out when I came to Atlanta after graduating high school and heard my new boyfriend ask about what my father did for a living. I told him, and he said, “Oh, cool!” That was a lesson in irony for me, having seen the profession from the standpoint of the moonshiner’s domestic life. It took me a few years to realize that my father's gift to me was in his poetic eye.
GW
Bootleggers have become romanticized characters in movies and books, which explains their enduring appeal. However, I wanted to show some real-life, not-glamorous examples and also an authentic variation I'd never seen before: the wholesaler (Papa, in my novel) who was the go-between, enabling the producers of homemade liquor to get their product in bulk to those who'd divide it into the famous mason-jar-sized consumables that the public bought. The fact that Papa never drank and despised everybody who did added another layer. My father-in-law once told me that if Papa were alive today, he'd be a clean and sober drug dealer.
BK Yes, I see his point (and his wit).
Let me ask you what you think about our synchronistic use of an image. I wrote a scene in which my protagonist, a girl in her early teens, is in a rowboat with her boyfriend who is seated behind her playing with her hair, lifting and stroking strands of it. He says, “Your hair feels like corn silk.” In your book, the much younger male protagonist, Roger (Bud) MacLeod, is wondering how a girl’s hair feels. He thinks of hemp and then of corn silk. It seems your research was so thorough (when added to the stories you heard from your father-in-law) that your own imagination found details as you needed them. I call that good field work (pun intended).
GW
I think I came to the corn silk imagery in the same way as you, just one step removed: from what I'd learned of my father-in-law's childhood, I knew many of the things he'd touched, so I used a process of elimination to get to the softest, most sensual things in his world and—having by that point in my life handled much of what he did—I ended up with corn silk as well.
BK Later on in your book, when Bud, now called Roger, is a teenager, he recalls the girl whose hair had reminded him of corn silk:
Then I smiled to myself, admitting that I found her pretty in my memory. Somehow, the fact that I never touched her beautiful braid made me envision the softest silk flowing between my fingers. Was imagination preferable to the truth? If I never found out what her hair felt like, I’d always have the best texture in my mind. I’d never be disappointed. Of course, that would mean that I never touched her hair: knowledge would be better than daydreams. (p. 277)
That is a wonderful insight. What I like about your book, besides the minute attention to details of setting and language, is that you show the potential for thoughtfulness and heartfelt expression that can and does exist among people who live in wretched conditions, and how education serves that potential even in grade school. I don’t need to tell you how relevant that kind of writing is to the world we live in now.
BK Now, considering how many different kinds of book you've written, what is it like to be so versatile?
GW
I don't think my versatility is a good thing from a business standpoint. I keep writing in different genres, which appeal to different audiences, instead of building a large readership in one genre. While some fans prefer this approach, many others—perhaps most—have gravitated toward one of my books to the exclusion of the others and want me to write more stories like that, which I seem to be incapable of doing! I think I have a low threshold for boredom, so I change genres each time to keep me excited and engaged. However, if one of my books ever hits the big time, and I receive a multi-book contract to produce more of the same, I think I could do it—while working on something completely different on the side, under a pen name.
BK Still, I think you must have enjoyed every adventure into a new genre. I know you are fully engaged running two conferences a year for AWC. Do you have any works in progress to tell us about?
GW
The kidnap thriller I just finished is about redemption through rediscovered faith and the lengths a wife and mother will go to save her family. While I’m trying to find a publisher for that, I’m collaborating with a Cuban-American writer on a humorous thriller in the vein of Carl Hiassen, with a new heroine and numerous connections to Latin America. Again, something very different than before, but, who knows, maybe this one will take off and become a series.
BK May it be so! Thanks, George.
For more information about George Weinstein, see his website: www.georgeweinstein.com.
You can also find both George Weinstein and The Atlanta Writers Club on Facebook.
Copyright 2018, Barbara Knott. All Rights Reserved.