Local author writes about World War II era
Duluth News Tribune
Published Sunday, July 08, 2007
by CANDACE RENALLS
As curator of Superior’s World War II museum, Ellen Baker immersed herself in the war years, interviewing veterans and gathering artifacts for exhibits. She was inspired by the stories the veterans told — sometimes emotionally and sometimes for the first time in 60 years.
“I wanted to tell their stories through writing,” said Baker, who’s been writing fiction since she was a girl.
In 2002, during her stint at the Richard I. Bong World War II Heritage Center, Baker started work on “Keeping the House.” Her novel was quickly bought last year by Random House, which is an unusual success for a young, unknown writer. The book will be launched Tuesday with a book signing at the Bong Heritage Center.
“I knew right away this was a writer with a fresh and enormously appealing voice and storytelling strength and one who understood women and their emotional lives. What women have cared most deeply about across different eras of the 20th century,” said Kate Medina, a Random House editor. “Once I started to read her and be with her on the page, I couldn’t do anything else but keep reading.”
Baker’s novel is a multi-generational saga spanning the first half of the 20th century. Going back and forth over time, it tells the story of three generations of the Mickelson family in Pine Rapids, Wis. Dolly Magnuson — a young, frustrated housewife new to town in 1950 — becomes fascinated by the abandoned and once-grand Mickelson house. She takes it upon herself to clean up the neglected house, and along the way, the Mickelsons’ family history is slowly revealed along with family secrets. The novel explores women’s roles, young men going to war and life on the homefront through well-honed characters and period details. Intertwined are family members’ loves and betrayals, dreams and sacrifices, heartbreaks and losses.
“Ellen’s writing is so clean, so engrossing,” said Karen Fink, a publicist with Random House. “She comes across as an established writer, well-seasoned. Her character development is outstanding. I read the book last fall. The characters in her book are still with me now. You just connect with certain characters in the book. They’re real people.”
Baker’s time at the Bong Heritage Center contributed to the book’s authenticity.
“I got so much of the feeling of the book, the atmosphere of the times from the men and women I had talked to,” said Baker, 31. “They talked about war experiences and growing up during the Depression.”
EXTENSIVE RESEARCH
Born in Grand Rapids to parents who were teachers, Baker loved to read and write stories as a child. She started writing novels at age 13 and continued writing at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., and during graduate school at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
In 2001, she married Jay Baker, a soldier she met in Kentucky. When he got out of the Army the next year, the couple moved to the Twin Ports. They lived in Duluth at first and Baker became curator at the Bong Heritage Center. A year later, she wanted to spend more time writing so she took a part-time job as a bookseller at J.W. Beecroft Books & Coffee in Superior.
“I wanted to be serious about the writing,” Baker said. “I wanted to make it a priority.”
It was a good fit. Her co-workers at the bookstore encouraged her writing, even critiquing drafts of her book. She loved being surrounded by books and found time to read one or two novels a week. She wrote 20 hours a week.
Research for her novel, which spans the late 1890s to 1950, was extensive. Baker pored over old newspaper accounts of the world wars, old women’s magazines, town histories and other cultural reflections of the times to set her story amidst real events and real places. There was a trip to Camp McCoy near Tomah, Wis., where solders trained during World War II and to the former Avalon Ballroom in La Crosse, Wis., where those soldiers attended weekend dances with area girls. A visit to a Victorian bed and breakfast near Sparta, Wis., inspired Baker’s image of the staircase in the Mickelson house.
Baker created extensive profiles of her characters, including their likes and dislikes, defining moments and how others see them. She collected pictures of people she imagined her characters looked like. She drew a map of fictitious Pine Rapids, showing the streets, major points of interests and how the Bear Trap River runs through the town. She went ice skating to remind herself how it felt.
“It was a combination of reading everything I could find and going places to sense all I could,” she said. “When I needed a detail, I would research it.”
All that research paid off, Fink said.
“She nails the first half of the 20th century,” Fink said. “There are so many themes to the book that are still relevant today — the veterans, soldiers returning home, getting used to being a newlywed.”
“I’d start out with a character and flesh out the setting and details later,” Baker explained. For example, she researched 1940s cookbooks to find specific dishes, such as Salmon Puff and Sunshine Salad, because her character, Dolly, goes to great pains to create her nightly dinner menus for her husband.
TAKING FROM THE PAST
Baker worked on “Keeping the House” for three years, but her time with the fictitious Mickelson family goes back 10 years. A previous unpublished novel features the family during the summer of 1919, after a son is lost in World War I. That book was condensed into one chapter in “Keeping the House.”
A theme that emerged was women putting their dreams and desires second or they wouldn’t be accepted in the community, Baker said.
Wilma Mickelson, the family matriarch, gives up a future as a pianist when she marries John Mickelson in the 1890s and begins to have children. In the 1950s, Dolly Magnuson is frustrated by a wife’s lot of housework, meal planning, Ladies Aid meetings and tending to her husband’s needs while sacrificing her own dreams.
The experiences of Baker’s grandmothers served as inspirations. Her maternal grandmother earned a master’s degree from Radcliff College in 1935 after getting a full scholarship. But when she married a college president, her time was spent raising five children, hosting parties and helping her husband with his books.
“She was proud of her accomplishments, she loved literature,” Baker said. “I got the sense that it wasn’t fair that Grandfather got to be a famous scholar, and she didn’t have the opportunities.”
Her other grandmother endured heartbreaks, but worked hard raising her children as a single mother and making sure they got an education. Baker’s book is dedicated to both “brave women.”
the best it can be
Before seeking an agent or publisher, Baker said she tried to make sure her novel was as good as it could be.
“I didn’t want to get rejected with this one,” she said. “I wanted it to be as good as it could be right off the bat. I had gone through a lot of rejection and knew what I needed to accomplish — a multi-layered plot, fully developed characters, concise writing style and a book that’s fun to read. I wanted people to care about the characters.”
One month after she found an agent, Random House bought her novel.
“It’s very exciting,” Baker said. “I’ve always loved writing. I’ve never done it to become well known. But to be able to do what I love to do and bring it to people is a wonderful feeling.”
Baker continues to work part time at J.W. Beecroft Books & Coffee while writing a second novel for Random House about women who worked in the Twin Ports shipyards during World War II.
CANDACE RENALLS
