Author Brings "Joy for Beginners" to Mercer Island

Best selling author Erica Bauermeister charmed her audience of book lovers at the on Mercer Island last May 7 with her views on writing, a reading of her bestseller “The School of Essential Ingredients” and her upcoming novel, “Joy for Beginners”

“As the fourth daughter of five, I learned to observe people and figure out what they weren’t saying,” she said “I spent two years in Italy getting into a mindset distinctly different than mine — that’s why I do fiction, to get inside other people’s heads. You take all the parts of life you care about and put them together — I wrote School of Essential Ingredients for me, I never expected it to sell.”

A native of California, Bauermeister moved to Seattle in 1982 to get her PhD in English and American Literature from the University of Washington.

“I saw the downtown area, and said to myself, I’m going to live here,” she said. “It was the first place in my life that felt like home.”

Bauermeister knew she wanted to write from an early age, when she wrote negative short stories starring thinly veiled caricatures of her sisters.

“But it wasn’t until I was in college and read Tillie Olson’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing” that I realized you could make art out of the ordinary lives of people,” she said.

Yet though she’d written two non fiction titles, “500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide” and “Let’s Hear it for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14,” Bauermeister felt she wasn’t “wise” enough to produce a work of fiction.

“I had to grow up a lot,” she said. “The School of Essential Ingredients” took a long time to write—I started in 2001, but didn’t finish until 2008,” she said.  

In 2006, Bauermeister had a tough year, in which her father died of Parkinson’s disease and two friends died of cancer, noting that her grief seemed to propel her forward to finish her novel. “I wrote 70 percent of it that year, and when (my dad) died I knew how to end it, the whole thing felt so shepherded,” she said. “I sent it out to 8 publishers and it sold in 12 hours, which is so different than anything I was used to, or expected.” The School of Essential Ingredients hit the New York Times and IndieBound bestseller lists and is sold in 24 countries around the world.

“I so loved this book that I read it and bought a copy for my boyfriend,” said Island resident Hannah Bressler. “I wanted to come and see (the author) because I think she understands the sensuality of food and relationships.” “I agree,” adds Bressler’s boyfriend, Nate Hill. “I loved that everything about (the book) was interesting.”

Mercer Island Arts Council is sponsoring a series of films, lectures and book readings about food, so they felt that Bauermeister’s books fit right into their theme. “Erica makes ordinary life extraordinary in her fiction,” said MIAC member Megan Hand. “We are fortunate that she can tell us not only about the makings of the School of Essential Ingredients, but Mercer Islanders get to be the first to hear excerpts of her new book, ‘Joy For Beginners.’”

Both books follow the lives of 8 people, the first takes 8 students through a restaurant cooking course, and Joy for Beginners involves 8 friends who, when meeting to celebrate one characters recovery from cancer, make a pact to each do one thing in the next year that is new, difficult or scary.

“I get my ideas in one thunderclap; I was in a cooking class in Italy and I had this image of what would happen if you took 8 strangers and had them learning this one activity together for a long time?,” said Bauermeister. “So then for “Joy for Beginners” I did the opposite and I used 8 friends who, because of their bond, are able to go out into the world, getting past fear and into joy. For “School” I was trying to get people to pay attention to their internal senses, and what I wanted to do with “Joy” was take those senses outward.”

Bauermeister is also part of a philanthropic writers group called “Seattle 7 Writers” that includes former MIAC book event participant Garth Stein, author of “The Art of Racing in the Rain.” The group just completed a performance art fundraiser called “The Novel Live!,” a relay-race of writers who each wrote part of a novel in two hour shifts in front of a live audience for 6 days at Richard Hugo House in Seattle. The event raised $10,000 for literacy groups in Seattle and resulted in a book called “The Hotel Angeline.”

In response to a comment that her characters are vivid and become favorites, Bauermeister said, “I believe it’s a writers responsibility to take care of their characters; they deserve to be heard and sympathized with, and not used for my own devices,” she said. “Since each character is someone’s favorite, I wanted to make them multi-faceted and have the book read on several levels, so you could read it for plot, or characters, or for the little details that are planted throughout the book. Some of us are still that kid who sits on the sidelines and notices the small moments of life that make the world a richer place.

Joy For Beginners will be available at on June 9.