Partners in the Arts: Writers George Weinstein and Kim Conrey are penning stories and life

It started with an ink-stained friendship, then got a little freaky.

George Weinstein and Kim Conrey met in a writers’ critique group in Roswell in 2009. For 10 years, they gave each other honest feedback on each other’s work, two word nerds picking apart each other’s paragraphs. Then they went to Dragon Con, the science fiction/fantasy extravaganza that takes place every year during the long Labor Day weekend in downtown Atlanta. For anthropologically minded observers, it is a time of prime people-watching. 

“We took MARTA together to the Peachtree Center station each day of the convention and spent 12 to 14 hours talking while taking in the amazing cosplay of fellow attendees and roaming among panel discussions, then taking MARTA back home,” says Weinstein, who is the author of eight books in several wide-ranging genres, including historical fiction, mystery, thriller, contemporary drama and satirical sci-fi. 

Conrey says, “Without those five long days of hearing about each other’s lives in detail and getting to know one another’s personalities and quirks, we might never have gotten together.”

She was drawn to Weinstein’s menschy kindness and wry sense of humor. Always lending a helping hand, he is known in Atlanta literary circles as the executive director of the Atlanta Writers Club as well as the director of the twice-yearly Atlanta Writers Conference and the annual Atlanta Self-Publishing Conference. His best-selling Southern Gothic novel Hardscrabble Road is a favorite with book clubs.

To Weinstein, she was the complete package: “talent, beauty, empathy, curiosity, good taste, wicked sense of humor, a commitment to helping others and much more.”

Her easy flair for prose was another turn-on, he says. 

“I can still recall stories and essays she wrote more than 15 years ago because they were so darn good. Of course, I always thought she was gorgeous, but her intelligence, compassion and inquisitiveness created a more lasting impression.”

Conrey is the author of five books in the sci-fi romance, fantasy and memoir categories, including the Ares Ascending series and the urban fantasy Nicholas Eternal. In 2003, she was named Georgia Romance Author of the Year. She blogs about living with obsessive compulsive disorder and collaborates on the podcast Wild Women Who Write. And she’s also Weinstein’s right hand as vice president of operations for the Atlanta Writers Club.

The couple lives in Marietta, where they indulge in a variety of hobbies and interests. They volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, and Conrey is a reiki master and death doula. “This may not initially seem to go with writing,” she says, “but when you think about it, it’s all about people, all about what it means to be human. Reiki [universal energy] is all about the energy that flows through people. Being a death doula is all about the culmination of the human experience — bearing witness to this beautiful journey, the joy, the pain. It’s what we live for, what we write for, what it means to truly live.”

The rest of the time, they are blissfully scribbling. Conrey calls Weinstein her “story whisperer.” She excels at characterization but sometimes struggles with transitions, which is where Weinstein steps in. And he relies on her to flag all of the parts of his novel where characters are not expressing their emotions or are coming off as “unintentionally unlikable or otherwise not true to themselves.” 

Of course, there are the occasional creative differences. 

“As in every endeavor where one devotes hundreds of hours crafting the work to match the image in one’s head, it’s not easy to hear that something is off or doesn’t work as intended,” Weinstein says, “but years of working together in a critique group has taught us to listen and sit with uncomfortable truths, to take the advice that we know is correct even if we want to resist it and to make the work better. Because that’s what critique is all about: making the writing better.”

Currently, Weinstein and Conrey are collaborating on a novel that might become a series. Initially women’s fiction based on Conrey’s childhood — growing up in a backwoods Pentecostal church in Douglasville when it was a tiny town where the Ku Klux Klan still had a menacing presence — the story has morphed into a cozy mystery thanks to Weinstein, who interjected the plot twist of a hundred-year storm flooding the church basement and revealing a long-buried skeleton. (“I have an interest in the paranormal and near-death experiences,” he says.) They hope to publish it in 2027.

Weinstein and Conrey are still regulars at Dragon Con, where it all began. This year, they marched in the parade with the Box Hero Corps, with Conrey dressed as Wonder Woman.

“Kim is so much more interesting than I am,” Weinstein says with a laugh. “We’re still recovering from that weekend.” 

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Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in magazines such as Atlanta, Garden & Gun, Men’s Journal and Country Living. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon.