We recently connected with Carrie Beamer and have shared our conversation below.

Carrie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What sort of legacy are you hoping to build. What do you think people will say about you after you are gone, what do you hope to be remembered for?

The legacy I want to leave behind for my readers is one of grit, resiliency and hope. My stories come from a place of learning that you can make mistakes or be put in a situation that can change your life drastically, but there’s always a possibility for a better future. Just because you make one life altering decision or your life and family look different from everyone else’s, doesn’t mean you’re a screw up or your family’s a mess forever.

I want people to read my books and see themselves and know that we’ve all been in hard times. We’ve all woken up and thought how can I keep going with this heartbreak or this chaos I’m in. The beauty of life is, most of the time, bad things don’t last forever if your’e willing to look for hope and do the work to change things. One thing I know about life and hard times is that you have to find humor along the way or it’s impossible to keep going.

I write characters who have a complete tragedy on their hands but they find the humor, love and resiliency it takes to keep going.

I want my legacy to be one of never giving up because that’s exactly who I am.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I write books that I wanted to read as a teen. Books that have families that are a mess and in real trouble. I always felt like my family and situation was bizarre and nobody else would understand what was happening in my house and that’s a lonely isolating feeling for a kid. My books feature teens and families that have issues that are not the norm—or maybe they are.

KEEP WHAT REMAINS and SIGNS WE DON’T SEE are stories set in the 80s and they dive into the world of teen angst and the lives we lived as teenagers that shape who we are today. I think if you ask anyone, no matter how old they are, they still feel like they did when they were in high school. Of course, we’re all much wiser but we are still who we are at our core. I like to write about the grit and resilience it takes to grow as a person growing up in a difficult situation. You’re either going to sink or swim coming out of your teenage years and exploring that through fiction is one of my favorite things to do.

My books will always be set in Kansas City. I grew up in Kansas City and I still love so much about my city. I try to highlight the weather, food and of course, the Kansas City Chiefs in my books. Go KC! As I write my third book, I hope that my first two books are making some sort of change in someone’s life. I’ve had readers message me and tell me that my book really resonated with them. One mother told me she read KEEP WHAT REMAINS with her daughter and was able to use my book to start having a very difficult but much-needed conversation with her teen. I’ve had many readers ask me how I capture mental illness in such an authentic way in my book and my answer is always the same, it’s part of my real life story. Those messages mean the world to me.

I left home at fifteen and I’m extremely thankful for those who helped me along the way. I’m proud of the choices I made to reshape things for myself when it didn’t look so promising coming out of my teen years.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

During high school I began to get in a lot of trouble. I didn’t even live at home anymore. I left home at fifteen and never looked back. Couch surfing and sleeping in friends’ cars, I still tried to find rides to school most days, but I was eventually kicked out because I no longer had a legal guardian to enroll me. I ran with the wrong crowd and got into things that basically ruin your life. It was when I found myself pregnant at sixteen that I knew I had to make a change and get my act together.

I worked odd jobs and rented an apartment using a fake birth certificate to sign a lease that I wasn’t old enough to sign. The apartment was one tiny room, and it didn’t even have carpet, it was more like the turf you see on indoor soccer fields. That one room space was all I needed to raise my son and I was going to figure it out alone. I worked two jobs and eventually got a better apartment, it wasn’t great, but it was better.

Enrolling at the local community college was a big deal for me and I was able to make it happen only taking one class at a time with my crazy work schedule. One day I was talking to my boss and he asked me what I was getting my degree in and I told him literature because I wanted to be a writer. He told me that he could get my degree paid for as long as I was on board with getting a bachelor’s degree in information technology or finance. I told him I didn’t want to get a degree in anything but literature. I wanted to be an author, plain and simple. He said if I wanted to be an author, I shouldn’t wait on the lit degree. I’ll never forget him looking at me and saying “Just start writing the books but have a degree that you can pay your bills with just in case it doesn’t work out.” That was probably some of the best advice I’ve ever received.

It took me almost fifteen years to get my degree in IT. It was about a year after I graduated that I started writing my first novel KEEP WHAT REMAINS while working full time and trying to have a family. I’d spent my whole life doubting myself and my writing abilities and I was done with that.

Once I finished my first book KEEP WHAT REMAINS, I started writing my next book SIGNS WE DON’T SEE while querying KEEP WHAT REMAINS out to publishers that I knew took on young adult contemporary books that were considered gritty fiction. Two days after Christmas in 2019, I received an email from Evernight Teen saying that they wanted to publish my book. Signing that contract was the best Christmas present ever!

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I wish I knew that there are programs out there who want to help you learn your craft for next to nothing. Everyone thinks you have to go to college for the very thing you want to do and you don’t. My degree is in IT, not writing, but I want to be a writer.

I was browsing Twitter one night and I came across a post by a teacher in the UK named Stuart White. Stuart was running a competition called WriteMentor. His competition was free and he had several newly published indie authors who were willing to spend the summer mentoring a new writer. You had to send your manuscript to one of the indie authors and hope to hell they picked you. If they selected your book, you got free editing all summer and then there’s an agent showcase at the end of the summer where you present your newly polished book to be put in front of actual literary agents.

Reading this Twitter post I realized the deadline to enter the competition was that day, so I picked an author named Sarah Barkoff who had just had her first book THE WANDERERS picked up by Evernight Teen Publishing. Reading her bio, I really liked her vibe. I went up against hundreds of unpublished authors trying to get picked and I was stunned when Sarah picked my book!

That summer, with Sarah’s guidance, I cut eight chapters from my book, cleaned up and deleted scenes that didn’t move my plot forward, got rid of several characters and rewrote my first chapter probably fifteen times. Sarah taught me how to write a query to put in the agent showcase along with my first chapter. WriteMentor changed my life because my book did get picked up by Evernight Teen and I learned the journey of the query trenches and publishing and all for free!

The WriteMentor program Stuart White is running has changed the lives of so many writers. He even has classes now. He’s amazing and did all this just to help writers learn the journey of becoming an author.

Sarah is one of my best friends now, we’ve never met in person even after three years. She lives in Florida, and I live in Missouri but we check in with each other weekly about books we’re writing, our kids and just life. Her friendship is very special and someday I will meet her in person.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/cbeamer
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clbeamer/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carrie.beamer1/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carrie-beamer-8554a64b/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CarrieBeamer2