Ingeborg

I first met Ingeborg Lauterstein in 1988 at the Marblehead Arts Festival where she spoke at a writer’s symposium. She is a tiny woman with a sweet face and a halo of fair curls. She speaks softly in the delicious accent of her native Vienna. I bought her first two novels that day - The Water Castle and Vienna Girl - and I still have them, autographed, in my bookcase. As is evident from her novels, Ingeborg has led an amazing life.

Later, when I moved to Gloucester it seemed I ran into Ingeborg wherever I went. She would be in Leslie Wind’s jewelry studio when I stopped in to say hello, or at Betty Lou Schlemm’s house for dinner when I was invited there, or swimming at my swim club. Like me, Ingeborg is an almost daily swimmer. There is something about her that I found so intriguing - whether it was that soft, alluring accent or all this power and presence coming from someone so small, I didn’t know but I loved it every time I ran into her.

Ingeborg grew up in Vienna during the Nazi occupation. Her first novel, Water Castle, is based in that childhood and was praised by critics in Europe as one of the few novels set in that era that gave a realistic depiction of what life was really like at that time. In the late 1950s Inge came to America to attend Black Mountain College. Her original plan was to be a painter but at Black Mountain she met poet Charles Olson who was to be her mentor. She continued to study painting and dance but writing became her great passion.

Today Ingeborg lives in a beautiful, stately home in Rockpost but she writes in a tiny cottage hidden away from the rest of the world where she can be alone and focus on her work. Yesterday we met in the kitchen of her cottage with another friend Cynthia Fisk and over homemade blueberry pie and tea we discussed the confusing state of publishing today.

All three of us are novelists. Inge has published three novels, her first two through New York publishers and her most recent one on her own. She told us that after the success of her first two novels in the 1980s when she began to seek a publisher for her third novel, Shoreland, she was told her books were too literary - that today not many Americans are interested in literary fiction (I have been told the same thing about my novel The Old Mermaid’s Tale). After several years of frustrating experiences - agents who refused to return calls and then just disappeared, publishers who said her book was wonderful but there was no market for it, literary reviewers who said they no longer wrote reviews because they couldn’t stand reading most of the garbage that is being published as a novels today, Ingeborg was read to give up.

She told us she just wanted to focus on writing and forget about publishing. But, she discovered, a writer of her caliber who doesn’t publish feels incomplete. After years as a respected author and a leader in the Boston Literary Guild she had to either take a different route or give up writing. She chose to publish on her own.

“All the big publishing houses are now owned by one publisher in Germany and they have no interest in the American reading public,” she said. “They say people today don’t have time to read.” Yet dedicated fiction readers are always asking for book recommendations. It has been estimated that 5% of the American public buys 90% of the fiction published in this country.

I admire Ingeborg. She is a remarkable writer and a tough lady despite her diminutive stature. Shoreland is beginning to make the rounds of bookstores and libraries - it remains to be seen how it will fare without a big publishing house promoting it. In the mean time Inge has begun work on her fourth novel based in her life as a dancer, writer and teacher in New York City in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

“Being a European in New York City then was like being an American in Paris,” she says. I know her book will be magical.

Thanks for reading.