April Lindner's Blog, page 13

Something in the Night: Springsteen Nation Converges on Albany

Last Tuesday night, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played an amazing show in Albany, New York.  My friend Diane and I made the long drive to meet up with a group of our fellow hard-core Springsteen enthusiasts.

Springsteen NationAs I mentioned here, a big part of the concertgoing experience is the cameraderie of it all.  You get to know a person really well when you road trip with them, or crash on their couch...or when you undergo the pit lottery with them.  The lottery determines which holders of General Admission tickets get to spend the concert in the small area right in front of the stage.  

The pit lottery is a grueling experience. You get your wristband early in the day.  Then you kill a few hours and come back, packing into a sardine-like line, and wait for a number to be pulled out of a hat. 



Your fate rests on that number.  And after it's pulled, you stay in line, because if you leave, you lose your place.

Why go through all that?  Because there's nothing quite like standing in the pit, where you can interact with Bruce and the band, and see every nuance of what's happening onstage.  

And even if you don't get into the pit (my friends and I didn't this time around), you get to bond with some pretty great people along the way.

Jay, Lisa, me, John (in back), and JimFor better or worse, the concert going experience is more intense from the floor, where you jostle for space, and share Bruce lore with friends and strangers while you wait for the house lights to come down.

And when the show starts, things get even more intense. Tuesday night's show was, by sheer luck, the perfect bookend to the Charlotte show Diane and I saw back in April.  Both shows were far from standard, with all sorts of rarities and requests mixed in among the more expected songs.  



Bruce typically writes up a setlist and then calls audibles, departing from the plan. Though you don't see it on the above pre-written list, he made a snap decision to play 
"Something in the Night," one of the songs I've heard him perform live a number of times, but one that never fails to break my heart...in a good way:



And then there was this song request--from a daughter who wanted to give her mom the ultimate mother's day gift: a dance with Bruce.  I can't watch this video or even talk about it without getting weepy, maybe because the interaction between Bruce and the mom are so sweet, or maybe because, as a mother, I'm deeply impressed by the daughter who put this much thought and effort into her request.


Anyway, my dear friend and traveling companion Diane Wilkes has written a much more in-depth rumination on the Albany show than anything I can manage here.  She graciously gave me permission to link to it, so you can read all about her recent conversion to Bruddhism...a more zen approach to fanatical Bruce fandom.

Lucy Speaks: Book Blast and Giveaway

photo by Melody Lindner

I'm thrilled to report that the Love, Lucy book blast is underway, courtesy of my friends at Rock Star Book Tours.

The book blast commemorates the fact that Love, Lucy is available for pre-order at Amazon.  It's an MC post, which in the Young Adult book blog world means that it's written by the main character--Lucy herself, describing the ten things she loves most about backpacking in Italy.  

Check it out at one of the wonderful book blogs that are taking part.  Here are just a handful for starters:
Mostly YA Lit
Book Hounds


[Fikt]shun

And this is just the beginning!
When you're done reading Lucy's post, please enter to win a $15 Amazon bookcard.  

"I Was Her Moon": A Poem for Mother's Day by Rhina Espaillat

On this gloriously beautiful Mother's Day, I present to you one of the poems I love best.  Though this mournful poem by Rhina Espaillat is about her mother's Alzheimer's disease, at its heart it's also about so much more: the ways in which our mothers teach us language and, in doing so, shape the way we see the world--the ways in which even an adult child is still his or her mother's moon. 


Visiting Day
She still remembers me, she strokes my face.She made me in her body's deepest place

and fed me from herself.  I was her moon.
I comb her hair and feed her with a spoon

and dress her in clean clothes.  She understands;
she pats her empty purse with eager hands

and walks about the grounds with me.  She knows
but cannot always say this is a rose.

The words she taught me are the shapes I see:
because she spoke the sun, it came to be;

she called me out of nothing and I came.
Will I still be when she forgets my name?

Driving at Night, In Fog: A Little News about LOVE, LUCY

Santa Maria Novella Train Station, Florence, Italy
Yesterday I learned that Love, Lucy, my third and newest novel, is now up for pre-order at Amazon.  



This is a thrilling milestone for me, especially since the process of writing Love, Lucy was long and fraught with doubt.  Thinking back on it now, I'm reminded of that famous quote from E. L. Doctorow: "Writing is like driving at night in the fog.  You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." Except if you're like me, you spend huge portions of the trip pretty sure you've taken the wrong exit and are maybe even headed off a cliff.

I kept going because I fell in love with my main characters, Lucy and Jesse, and I couldn't imagine abandoning them. And because I loved writing about Italy, and about backpacking across Europe.    

Rome Termini StationAnd because I knew there was a destination worth getting to, even if I had to take some bumpy backroads to get there. 

Stay tuned: the wonderful people at Rockstar Book Tours will be hosting a book blast early next week: Lucy herself will be guest blogging on the top ten things she loves about Italy.  

"Every Hard Bulb Stirs": A Poem by Eliza Griswold

Trastevere*Today I share a poem by Eliza Griswold, one that knocked my socks off not long ago when I stumbled across it in Poetry.  And I don't love it just because it's set in Rome.
Inside the Colosseum
Griswold is quickly becoming one of my favorite contemporary poets.  This poem's killer last line is beautifully set up by all that comes before it, the juxtaposition of the hopeful, the prosaic, the unthinkable:
Ruins
A spring day oozes through Trastevere.A nun in turquoise sneakers contemplates the stairs.Ragazzi everywhere, the pus in their pimplespushing up like paperwhites in the midday sun.
Every hard bulb stirs.
The fossilized egg in my chestcracks open against my will.
I was so proud not to feel my heart.Waking means being angry
The dead man on the Congo roadwas missing an ear,which had either been eatenor someone was wearing itaround his neck.
The dead man looked like this.  No, that.
Here's a flock of touristsin matching canvas hats.This year will take from methe hardened personwho I longed to be.I am healing by mistake.Rome is also built on ruins.

A closer look
In addition to being a poet, Griswold is a Guggenheim-fellowship-winning journalist.  Her reportage and poetry come together in her new book, I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan.  It features her translations of folk couplets composed and passed on by mostly-illiterate Pashtun women.  Griswold was moved to collect and translate these poems by the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poetry, and who set herself on fire in protest.  



*The gorgeous photo of Trastevere at the top of this page was lifted from this website.  I don't know who took it, but I'd give the photographer credit if I could.

On Maps and Detours: Outlining the YA Novel

Final exams have begun on Hawk Hill.  As I type this, my Young Adult Fiction Writing students are bent over their blue books, outlining the rest of the YA novels they've begun writing this semester.  I hope to send them off into the world with the seeds of something they can keep working on in the future--something that will become a whole novel someday or, at the very least, that novel-in-a-drawer so many writers hang onto--the one they cut their teeth on, the apprentice work that enables them to go on to write another, better novel.



In this class we wrote up a storm but we also read four knockout examples of what YA can be and do--John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, David Levithan's Every Day, and Sara Zarr's How to Save a Life.  The students also chose, read and presented on YA novels that spoke to the work they were doing, either thematically or stylistically.  That way, in the limited time we had, we could at least gesture toward the wide range of books being written for a young adult audience--and for the not-quite-so-young-adults who read YA.

Over these last fifteen weeks I've gotten invested in the stories my students are telling.  This final exam plot-outlining exercise is satisfying for me too, because it gives me a glimpse into the places their novels-in-progress might go, or at least what might have been if our class could keep going.  Of course for most the very act of writing will cause the plot outline to mutate.  Characters will insist on doing and saying unexpected things, overriding some of what the writer intends.  But it's still good to have a map, even if you wind up taking unexpected detours along the way.


On a related note: if you're working on a YA novel of your own, or if you want to get started on one, please follow this link to the homepage of the Nightsun Writers Conference where I'll be leading a workshop on the Young Adult novel in July.

The Both: Aimee Mann and Ted Leo at Team Up Union Transfer

Aimee Mann and Ted Leo clearly enjoy each other's company.  Onstage, she ribs him about his nerdy proclivities for  memorizing Hobbit trivia and Paul Stanley stage banter, and he teases her right back.

It's not hard to see why these two musicians recently joined forces to write and record as The Both. At Saturday Night's show at Union Transfer, it was also clear how two fairly different sensibilities can add up to something electrifying.



I've long admired Mann's solo work, and, before that, her work with uber-Eighties band 'Til Tuesday, but I wasn't prepared for how well her acerbic folkie sensibility would meld with Leo's punk/indie rocker style.


Ted Leo on guitarHis voice is resounding and earthy where hers is ethereal and poetic.  And his guitar solos lent welcome heat to each song.  

Aimee Mann on bass
Saturday night's show included every song on The Both.  It also featured solo material from both and a Thin Lizzie cover tossed in for good measure. 

To this exile from the Eighties, the night's highlight was its penultimate number, a killer version of the 'Til Tuesday hit, "Voices Carry."


Matt Mayhall on drums
A bonus: Union Transfer is one of our favorite Philly venues, and an after-hours food truck called Mobile Awesome glowed enticingly at the curb as concertgoers wandered off into the night.  I'm not much of a hot dog fan (that would be an understatement), but Mobile Awesome's oak-smoked kimchi dog was a revelation--as tasty and searing as a Ted Leo guitar solo.

Dreaming of Greece: Hermopoulis

Greek worry beadsHermopoulis is the main port city on Syros, a sleepy island in the Cyclades.  Today, when I should have been grading, I confess I took a detour and tinkered a bit with my Greek novel, sprucing it up.  And I spent some time dreaming over these photographs of Syros, taken by my friend, colleague and travelling companion, Shawn Madison Krahmer Heal.


A street in Hermapoulis
In gorgeous technicolor
Approaching Syros

Dispatch From Hawk Hill: The Last Day of Class

Hawk Hill--our fond nickname for Saint Joseph's University--has burst into blossom just in time for the last few days of class.  This is the crazy busy time of year, with huge stacks of papers and journals to be graded, high-stakes faculty meetings to attend, and many loose ends to be tied up.

It's also time to give out course evaluations and wait awkwardly in the hallway while the students fill them out.


Summer--when I will be finishing my Greek novel draft 2.0 and polishing my poetry-collection-in-progress--is so close I can almost taste it.  

Greek Sweets

Country Road Trip: To West Virginia and Back

Spring is road trip season, and last Friday I took off on a drive from Philadelphia to Morgantown, West Virginia, to visit my sis.  She moved there earlier this year to undertake a year-long dietary internship, and her love for her adopted home town knows no bounds.




West Virginia gets a bad rap, especially among I-95-corridor types.  (Cue the jokes--some of which I've admittedly made myself--about banjo music, meth labs, and having a purty mouth.)  My sister was eager to show me what Morgantown, West Virginia is really like: a funky college town surrounded by some truly gorgeous countryside.  A neat rail-to trail path wends along the Monongahela River.  The city is home to a number of intriguing restaurants, homey brew pubs, lots of live music (including bluegrass, of course), and a charming little place called Blue Moose Coffee where we had Sunday morning quiche.

Best of all, the city's just down the road apiece from the Fiestaware Factory and its annual tent sale:


We got a little lost on our way to the tent sale, and wound up driving through some neighborhoods that did more closely conform to stereotype. I wish I'd taken a picture of the shack with "I miss you darlin" and a daisy spray-painted on the outside.  (And I really hope Darlin sees this tribute and comes home.)

The tent sale alone was worth the trip with awe-inspiring amounts of Fiestaware at binge-inspiring prices.  I was too busy digging for treasure to take pictures of the sale itself.  Luckily the outlet store was nearby--offering up a rainbow of photo opportunities:


After that, we took a drive to Tractor Supply to ogle chicks:


The weather wasn't very cooperative, or we'd have done a lot more walking.  By the time my sister saw me off on Sunday morning, the sun was finally shining:



And I'd seen enough of Morgantown to know I want to go back and see more.