By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
When Renate (Muller) Wildermuth started teaching in public school, she had to take active shooter training. How to hide, how to barricade herself and students, and how to fight back if it came to that.
That’s the state of American education.
As a writer, Wildermuth found that training sparked inspiration. Her novel “Gone Before You Knew Me” is out this week.
The young adult novel takes us inside the high school in a town whose name is \\redacted in the text. Why? Well, that’s part of the mystery.
The book is a thriller with a sardonic edge. Our heroine, Talya, was dropped off in this nowhere town after the murder of her parents.
She remembers little of her past, but believes sinister forces are at work. She’s a recluse and highly observant, always seeking out clues in the shadows.
Though we watch her as she trains herself with firearms and hand-to-hand combat to be ready for whatever happens, her pen and paper, a simple spiral-bound notebook, which she calls her dossier, is her prime weapon. She writes down her observations of the people — students and teachers — and the activities occurring in [REDACTED] high.
As a teacher, Wildermuth loves that aspect of her character. “It was also very important to me that a pencil and a piece of paper are still her weapons of choice.” Already suspicious, Talya’s concern grows with the arrival of Alex, a slightly older student, who has as murky a background as she does. He’s also a hunk, just so you know, and guides Talya’s training.
Though Wildermuth has written fiction and non-fiction for years, this is her first novel penned under her real name, she said.
Wildermuth’s background includes earning a graduate degree in German with a specialty in folk tales at Bowling Green State University. She was in Bowling Green from 1991 through 1994. On campus, she discovered her love of teaching and began her studies in education. She also encouraged her future husband, David Wildermuth, to come to BGSU. He earned graduate degrees in German and political science.
They and their two children now live in the Poconos in Pennsylvania, where they both teach at Shippensburg University.
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and I was basically doing it very seriously for, like, 20 years now,” Wildermuth said in a recent telephone interview. “It’s been a long, long road, but I’ve always been scribbling things.”
Her earlier fiction, published as “Adria Townsend,” was more in the romance realm. She describes “Gone Before You Knew Me” as “a satirical spy thriller about making it out of high school.”
That Talya does not feel at home in this small, football-obsessed high school is central to the book, but not unusual in reality. “Nobody, I think, really feels like they belong in high school, “ Wildermuth said, “and so this book just takes it to the whole next level. She literally does not belong there.”
The reader sees everything through her eyes. “Is she delusional, or is she seeing what nobody else sees? That tension goes throughout the whole book,” the author said.
Nor is it actually completely resolved at the end, leaving the door open for a sequel or two.
Wildermuth recalls coming out of her active shooter training thinking: “What would my students do in that situation? So it came out of like being afraid of certain things that could happen, but also trying to be brave and think about how I would handle information.”
There was anger as well, that this was the atmosphere she and the students had to live in.
She created Talya, gave her all those conflicting feelings and showed how she and others adapt.
Wildermuth takes the possibilities to the extreme.
She said, though the book is aimed at young adults — Amazon places it in the Loner and Outsider category — she also targets teachers, who she hopes will be amused by the admitted caricature of their professional lives.
She started writing the book in Germany in 2019. Her husband was on sabbatical, and they lived in Germany. That gave her time to write. Wildermuth took three months to compose the first draft. “Unfortunately, I made the mistake of thinking it was finished, and so I spent two years pitching it to publishers and agents,” she said.
Mostly, her manuscript disappeared into the maw of the publishing industry with the occasional helpful criticism in response.
Then someone responded that “they loved the character, they loved the sense of humor, but I can take out 100 pages, and it would be a much better book. So that’s what I ended up doing. I tore it down and built it back up. It was a painful experience.”
That process took another two months to accomplish, “Then the first time I sent it out, it got picked up,” she said. “Gone Before You Knew Me” is being released on Regal House Publishing.
Looking back on the experience, Wildermuth said, she would do the writing process in reverse the next time. Maybe bringing readers the further adventures of Talya.
