There’s little pity in the world for the unemployed young professional. The country is in crisis, of course, and there are plenty of people facing much greater challenges. For the yuppie set in D.C., the recession is often just some abstract concept, after all most of us still have our day jobs. Most of us complain about our day jobs.
It would be easy to call Matthew Biedlingmaier a nut. After getting laid off from a progressive non-profit, he decided to start a print literary magazine. In Washington, D.C. And he wanted to pay his writers. It’s hard enough for people who write for web sites—ventures with little overhead—to get paid. Biedlingmaier’s hard work has paid off, though, and his magazine, The New Professional is about to release its second issue this month. Issue one was released in print and online earlier this year.
The upcoming issue of The New Professional features the standard magazine fare: art and music reviews, interviews, and short fiction. The items are top notch and could appear in a nationally circulated magazine, though they do have a distinctive D.C. flair. There is an interview with acclaimed filmmaker John Waters, but also an interview with a D.C.-based actor from The Wire. There is an interview piece with Jimmy Eat World, as well as a look at the D.C. band The Vita Ruins. Also featured is writer Edmund White and photographer Amy Arbus. It’s an eclectic mix of extremely well written work, and it’s encouraging to see this sort of thing blossom in a city that generally revolves around very short news cycles and trending topics.
I sat down with Biedlingmaier to talk about the origins of The New Professional and where the publication is headed.
What inspired you to create The New Professional?
I’ve always been interested in literature and the arts, and after I was laid off and spent literally six months looking for work, always hearing the same thing—that I was smart and well-educated but that I didn’t have the experience necessary for the positions to which I was applying—I said, “Fuck it. I’m going to make my own experience.”
Among other things, my father was a small business owner. He passed away when I was fourteen, and while most of the memories I have of him are choppy and blurred at best, I distinctly remember the way his face would light up when he spoke about starting a company from the ground up. I’ve always wanted to do something like that—take an idea and go through the steps to make it an actuality. In my opinion, there’s no training that can prepare you for something like that; you just have to do it and see what happens.
Beyond that, starting The New Professional has afforded me the opportunity to be totally creative, and to explore that creativity on my own. Of course, the goal is for this magazine to succeed and to make a dent in the arts and culture scenes here in D.C., but if it fails, I’ll take the experience with me in whatever I do next. In the end, I’m proud of the magazine, and having orchestrated interviews with one of my favorite filmmakers (John Waters), my favorite photographer (Amy Arbus), two of my favorite writers (David Leavitt and Edmund White), and an actor on the greatest television series of all time (The Wire), isn’t all that bad either.
