Lexi's Interview with the Wonderful April Lindner (Part 2)!!!!!

Readers,

Here's part 2 of the interview!!!

April Lindner Interview (Part 2)

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

Sitcoms.  I watched a lot of them when I was little, and I still find them comforting.  I just blitzed through the first seven seasons of How I Met Your Mother and I’m a little homesick for that world and those characters.  I also have a weird and abiding love for Italian pop music.  I started listening it to practice the language, and now I love it for its own sake.

What do you like to do when not writing?

I love live music.  I go to way too many concerts.  I’ve seen Bruce Springsteen over fifty times, but there are a lot of other acts I follow.  Also I love to travel and am obsessed with learning to speak Italian; I listen to Italian radio stations, read Italian magazines, and dream of living there someday and learning to speak like a native.

Which book boyfriend would you choose?

Though I have a longstanding crush on Mr. Rochester, he would be a difficult and demanding boyfriend.  So I’ll say Henry Tilney of Northhanger Abbey.  He’s charming, witty, and deeply kind.  And he can dance!

What were you like as a teen? And in college?

In high school I was very shy.  I had a handful of very good friends and basically never spoke to anybody else.  We all hung out in the band room; Mr. Dugal the music teacher rigged it so we could all skip study hall and homeroom and just be ourselves in his orange-carpeted sanctuary.  My best friend and I hung out together and went to a lot of rock concerts, but other than that my social life was pretty quiet; I spent a lot of time in my room, writing, drawing, dreaming,and playing guitar.

When I went off to college at the University of New Hampshire, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  I moved into a special interest dorm for the creative arts—a bigger and even better version of Mr. Dugal’s band room--and was surrounded by painters, musicians, writers and actors.  I took a lot of creative writing class and felt generally thrilled to be in a bubble of young people who got to spend our days thinking about literature, writing, film, art, and music history. Also I met the guy I would go on to marry and people who to this day are among my closest friends.

What would you tell to today’s teens?

I don’t feel qualified to pass on advice to all teens, but to the ones who were shy and nerdy like me, I would borrow the words of that wise campaign aimed at gay teens who are bullied and discriminated against: it gets better.  In middle school I was bullied pretty relentlessly; in high school the popular kids were actually kind and polite, but I suffered from a kind of post traumatic stress disorder from all that earlier bullying. I still felt as though I had to hide my inner quirkiness just to pass unharmed through the world.  But once I got past high school I saw there were places in the world for someone like me; I just had to get out there, let my freak flag fly, and find my soulmates. 

What do you want your fans to know about you?

I guess that the books I choose to retell are all books that have, in one way or another, changed my life.  If they like my books, I hope they’ll go back and read (or reread) the originals. 

What do you want to tell them?

I’d like them to know that their enthusiasm for books makes my life as a writer worthwhile.  YA readers are the best readers!

Oh, and also, I’ve been blogging lately.  I’d love for them to visit my blog: www.aprillindnerwrites.blogspot.com.

Any parting words or anything you want to talk about or discuss? Feel free to write anything here.

I just want to say thank you for all the great questions!  

YAY!!! How much do you adore her? I know me and Ash love her, and CANNOT wait till the next book comes out!!!

Love,

Lexi

Lexi's April Lindner Interview (Part 1)

Readers,

Here's what y'all have been looking forward to! So let's dive right in!

Interview with April Lindner

As a teen and in college, what did you like to read?

My taste in books hasn’t changed much over the years.  I’ve always loved really thick novels that I can get lost in.  Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were my favorites then and still are now.   But I’ve always  loved contemporary novels too, and poetry.  In high school and college I was obsessed with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, poets who turned their personal lives into art.

What books are you into now?

Novels are my favorite reading material, and I tend to read a mix of YA and adult.   Right now the stack beside my bed includes Diana Peterfreund’s For Darkness Shows the Stars, and Lisa Klein’s Ophelia, both YA literary retellings.  It also includes poetry—the Collected Poems of James Merrill, and Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda.  And there’s a memoir in there, Amy Smith’s All Roads Lead to Austen, about reading Jane Austen’s novel with book groups in Latin American destination. I also just finished reading Cheryl Strayed’s wonderful memoir Wild, about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail while mourning the death of her mother and the breakup of her marriage.  For the first few chapters I kept shaking my head and wondering why anyone would want to hike the Pacific Crest Trail with its bears and rattlesnakes and scary weather, and by the end I was making plans to hike the Appalachian Trail myself…or maybe just a tiny little portion of it.

How did you decide to update the classics?

I have a passion for retellings of classic literature; I can’t seem to get enough.  It was only natural that I would want to write one of my own, and Jane Eyre seemed ripe for an update.  Writing Jane was so satisfying that I wanted to keep going, so I dug into Wuthering Heights and wrote Catherine next.

What and/or who has influenced your writing?

This is a tough question because I’ve had so many influences.  I’ve taken a lot of creative writing workshops with amazing teachers, many of them poets: Mekeel McBride, Thomas Lux, Jean Valentine, Cornelius Eady, Andrew Hudgins, Don Bogen—too many to name, really.  I’ve also studied with the fiction writers Thomas Williams and Chuck Wachtel.   And then there are the authors I’ve never met but whose books have taught me important lessons about writing: Francine Prose, Ann Patchett, and Meg Wolitzer spring to mind.  And my Mom, Grace Lindner, who helped me to fall in love with books in the first place.

We know that you’ve updated Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. What other classics are you working on or considering?

I’ve been working on a modernization of E. M. Forster’s A Room With a View, about an American backpacker in Italy whose encounter with a street musician changes her life.  I’ve just been told it will be published by Poppy in Fall or Winter 2014.

How long have you been writing?

Forever!  I’ve been writing stories and poems since I could hold a pencil.    

How long did it take to get an agent? How about to get published?

Things happened very quickly once I wrote Jane.  The first agent I queried took me on as a client, and one of the first batch of publishers she sent it to accepted it.  But that’s the tip of the iceberg.  I’d been working on my craft as a writer for decades, and have been struggling to establish myself as a poet for almost as long.  So the real answer is my whole adult life.

What would you like to tell hopeful writers?

Don’t give up.  There were many discouraging years when I was constantly sending my poems out to literary magazines and if I was very lucky I would get one acceptance a year.  But while I was sending work out I was also continuing to hone my craft.  Over time, the acceptances began coming more quickly.   No matter what, keep writing.

Also read deeply and widely.  It may seem like a paradox, but the more you read the more powerfully your own voice will emerge.  If you fall in love with one writer and read only them your voice will come out sounding like an imitation of that writer.  But if you read many writers your own voice will emerge, and it will be a blend of everyone you’ve read and your own unique sensibility.

Alright, Readers, you read it; Lucy's story is next!!! The rest of the interview is where I ask more personal questions, so stay tuned for Wednesday!

Sincerely yours,

Lexi