School of Essential Ingredients

Erica Bauermeister, long-time Wallingford resident and the author of the novel The School of Essential Ingredients, took a break from her book tour and writing recently to meet us at the Mosaic Coffeehouse. She shared not only some of her insights into writing, but also some of the spots around Wallingford that inspired her.

Wallyhood: Thanks so much for taking time from your book tour. Sounds like it’s been hectic.

Erica Baumeister: It has been a lot of fun and a lot of work. They say if you want to be a professional writer, 50% of your time won’t be spent writing.

W: I understand School was your first novel. Was it your first book?

EB: No, there were two non-fiction books that I coauthored first: 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide and Let’s Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. Those basically came out my experience in graduate school where there weren’t enough women authors represented in the literature. Those readers’ guides have reached lots of book  groups, which has been fantastic.

I read thousands of books as research, which ended up working really well for me. You learn as much from the books that don’t work as you do from ones that do. I learned so much by having to analyze books, to figure out what would make a book better.

W: What kinds of things did you learn?

EB: Start with a voice. It doesn’t have to be first person. That’s where the soul of the author comes through. Those are the ones that caught  me the most. It doesn’t mean it has to be autobiographical, it just means that someone took something that was deeply important to them and made it art.

I used to be an admissions officer, and I would read some student essays that just lifted off the page, that were 3D. Those kids, those authors, were the ones that you wanted to have at your school.

W: Do you like to cook?

EB: I would not call myself a chef. I would call myself someone who likes to feed people. The thing that is as important as the food, is the sharing it with people. I would rather have people at my house sharing the food with me. That’s the fourth dimension of cooking.

If you ever ask people what was their favorite meal, they’ll always start by saying “I was here, I was with these people.” It’s about the context, you’re creating an experience.

My children are now laughing at me about this, because half the time we’re eating quickly at the kitchen table.

W: Did you write School all at our stretch, or over time?

EB: Oh, it took a long time, six years between when I started it and when it was finally complete. I started it after we spent two years living in Italy, (in Bergamo, just northeast of Milan), and had moved back to Wallingford. While I was writing it, I sold real estate for a while, I renovated a house, raised two kids – the manuscript would come in and out of a drawer every four months, every six months, but I kept circling back.

W: What was it like returning to it after so much time in between? Did you see it with fresh eyes, or did you have to spin back up?

EB: It was good and bad. It was good to come back with a fresh set of eyes. It was bad in that once I rewrote an entire chapter forgetting that I’d already written it. It was weird, some sentences were exactly the same.

Then, I finished in a year after talking with  a friend who was dying of cancer. I had been working on a few projects, and she said that this was the one. She said I should write something from my heart.

W: The book is written as many separate stories that unwind almost independently of each other.

EB: Yes, I love this novel-in-stories genre that we’ve got going on. I think it’s a result of a kind of yearning that our culture has right now. We have this very disjointed, Facebook life. We really want to feel that there is coherence here. This genre is a reaction to that.

There was a lot of concern that people wouldn’t stick with the book, that they would see it as a series of short stories, but that hasn’t proved to be true. We enjoy the coincidental connections that we find in the stories we hear and tell.

W: You say the style is a reaction to the disjointed, Facebook life, but isn’t that exactly what Twitter and Facebook embody: a series of disjointed stories told by people that only tangentially connect with one another?

EB: Yes, but in the book, in the end they come together. Like how the regulars at a place like Mosaic establish relationships with the people behind the counters. Their stories touch yours over and over in time. You see it in the return to the small town newspaper, in blogs like yours. There’s so much chaos out there, we’re focusing in on the relationships, the communities we can create.

W: So you’ve lived in Wallingford since 1983. Were there any aspects of the neighborhood that came through in the book?

EB: This is going to sound strange. A lot of times something in fiction has a seed in something. You have to think metaphorically. The idea for Lillian’s restaurant, the seed, came out of the little pizza house next to Guild 45th [Wallingford Pizza House]. It struck me as so incongruous that there would be a restaurant in this little house between these two big buildings. Over times the fictional restaurant moved back from the street and changed in other ways, but that was the seed. A lot people think it’s Tilth or Chez Panisse, but it’s not.

Someone said to me that the the produce stand that Chloe goes to is the produce stand over by Rooseevelt and I thought, yes, it is. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m sure that image was in my head.

W: Do you have a favorite restaurant in Wallingford?

EB: We’ve had magical dinners at Cantinetta, when it first opened. That’s why I say it’s four dimensions: it’s the light coming through the window. It was the night The Stranger wrote a review, and they got dinged because they were too loud. I think that was us.

W: Where do you do your writing?

EB: A lot of it was written at Zoka’s and in our living room. I always use a laptop, so I often write up in bed, or on the couch.

When I have a really, really good day, I’ll write for a few hours and when I go back and read it, I can barely recognize that I wrote it. I’ll look at the page and I didn’t realize that it’s what I thought. There’s a saying, “I write to realize what I think.”

Carl was the first person to show up in my head. He was someone I didn’t know, I had never met. I was so grateful to him. I saw him as this person who had this very difficult choice. I saw him as very honorable and good. I thought there was a good chance other people woudn’t see him that way, and my job as a writer was to take care of him. In words, not in reality, in words.

I write while I walk, I write while I swim. Most of Carl’s story was written under water in my imagination. I learned this in graduate school, that the best way to write is with repetitive motion. I’d get out of the pool and go into the locker room dripping wet, and write down notes.

Walking around the Wallingford would do it, too. I used to just sit down on the curb and start writing. A lot of people around the neighborhood knew me as that woman who would sit writing on the curb.

Certain stories need a certain atmosphere. I knew that Zoka had a certain smell. Zoka had those big chairs that are so comfortable, and I knew that if I got there and that chair was taken or the smell was different, I knew it wasn’t going to work and I would just go.

W: So this is a Wallingford blog, and you’re a Wallingford author. Anything else to add?

EB: It seems like there are just two ways you can walk in Wallingford: down into the city, or towards Green Lake (which reminds me of reservoir in Central Park, because it’s where everybody goes just to be on a sunny day). The thing I love about it is the people you see over and over, like the guy giving Spanish lessons, or if it’s sunny how all the people come out. My kids have stones in the playground in the at good Shepherd Center. They’re 23 and 24 now, and they still get a kick out of going and seeing their names.

I love living here.

W: So do we. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.