Naperville native's first book capturing literary awards
When he was a student in the 1990s in Naperville, a young Robert W. Fieseler would hear praise from his teachers encouraging his writing, telling him they recognized he had something important to say - he just had to get it down on the page.
Still, many moments the 37-year-old journalist and author has achieved since the publication earlier this year of his first book were things he never would have expected.
Fieseler has seen his book, "Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation," help uncover a tragedy that had been swept under the rug of history.
He has read a review of his work in The New York Times, and seen it listed among Library Journal's Best Books of 2018 in the nonfiction social sciences category as well as on the 2018 Best Books of the Year list of the literary trade publication Shelf Awareness.
And this summer, he hosted his book's debut at Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville, where he appeared on an episode of owner Becky Anderson's NCTV-17 show "Authors Revealed," which Fieseler said he has been watching since he was a child. The teacher of his advanced placement U.S. history class in high school was in the audience, and Fieseler said it meant the world to him to give his book a hometown springboard.
"My book launch event was at Anderson's Bookshop, and it was packed. It was like a childhood dream come true," Fieseler said. "It's a gay boy's fairy tale. I never thought I'd someday be an adult who got to write a history book, launched at Anderson's, to an applauding crowd who loved me."
After graduating from Columbia University in 2013 as co-valedictorian with a master's degree in journalism, Fieseler used two writing fellowship grants to help fund his work on the story that became "Tinderbox."
While living in Boston with his now-husband Ryan Leitner, Fieseler began researching the Up Stairs Lounge fire from 1973 in New Orleans, which he describes as "a notoriously unsolved arson fire" that killed 31 men and one woman at a gay bar.
The blaze is the deadliest in New Orleans history and was the largest mass killing of gay people in the U.S. until the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub. But Fieseler said the Up Stairs Lounge fire quickly became a nearly forgotten moment in Louisiana, where homosexuality remained illegal until 2003.
His research eventually led him to live in New Orleans, where he and Leitner remain, to gain a better cultural understanding of the vibrant city.
"I was worried about, 'How do I write New Orleans? How do I portray it authentically?' Because the city is a character," he said. "I didn't want it to seem forced or false, given that I didn't grow up here."
Fieseler grew up in Naperville, the oldest of four children living in a house in the Winding Creek subdivision, with a father who served on the Naperville City Council from 2007 to 2015.
He still remembers "publishing" his first book in second grade at Maplebrook Elementary in Naperville Unit District 203 (it was called "Microw the Ghost") and proudly reading the spiral-bound text to his peers. By the time he graduated from Naperville Central High School in 1999, Fieseler said he was a talented writer but not a star student.
After graduating from the University of Michigan in 2003 with a degree in English, Fieseler worked at a Borders bookstore in Bolingbrook and started to launch the writing career that led him to his graduate degree and his first book.
Researching "Tinderbox" involved visiting library archives in New Orleans to read up about the fire, watching documentaries, consulting with city historians and conducting interviews over a span of years with survivors of the fire and relatives of victims. Some were tough to track because they moved away from the city after the 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Others initially turned down his request to talk.
"Some of the hardest-fought conversations I had," he said, "were the most revelatory."