Lived Lit ?s for Lorena

Literacy interview questions—Lorena Alexander

A) Can you dig back to your very first, primal literacy experiences? Was reading encouraged explicitly and materially (was there plenty of stuff lying around to read? did you go to the library or bookstores?)? What do you remember about learning to read and write? Were their particular people who encouraged you to read and write, stoked a spark into a flame? Or, in contrast, was there anything/anyone you found that retarded your literacy growth or dampened your interest? What level of education did your parents receive? What kinds of work did they do?

Can you recall a watershed literacy experience? If so, was it in school? Out of school? Was it a particular author?

B) How would you characterize your school experience with regard to literacy? What about out of school? Did you read on your own / write on your own? Did the not-for-school stuff radically diverge from what you read/wrote in school, for school? Looking back, what turned you off the most about your literacy education? What experience or experiences in school were positive and why?

C) I know you said your Catholic schools were progressive, but how did you adjust from writing for St. Francis and Holy Family to writing features on metal bands, to put the contrast most glaringly? Was it a leap you’d made in doing writing for your school paper or how did you make that transition?

D) Did you find the writing you did in your psychology classes to be useful to your development as a writer/journalist? Why or how?

E) Does writing or reading occupy a similar place for you that music does? I was curious if you have read or do read a lot of poetry and find the rhythm of the language akin to music? Do you think song lyrics should be considered a subsection of poetic writing? (I find it interesting how some lyrics read flat on the page but when put to music they surge somehow and become many orders more meaningful and powerful than just reading them by themselves….Also there is music, like the Clash, where I can’t make out more than 5 consecutive words and it doesn’t take away from my enjoyment at all…)

F) Describe the various kinds of rock journalism you’ve done…In addition to features and interviews for Faces and Electric City, the promotional stuff you did for KAJEM and Dialogues, and band bios, what other genres did you tackle? Did you do stuff like liner notes and record reviews? Music news?

I consider writing about music very difficult to do well. What are some of the challenges you found in trying to do music justice with words? Among music writers, who do you admire and why?

Some reviewers are famously snide and harsh. If you wrote reviews and came up against something you loathed, would you pan it, pass it to someone else, or just ask to be excused from critiquing it?

G) Were you under severe deadline pressure? How did that affect your writing? Did the flakiness of rock acts ever put you in a bad place/up against an issue closing?

I have seen some early Dylan interviews in which he is extremely combative and difficult, ridiculing the premises of the journalist’s questions, deriding the publications he works for, etc. Did you have encounters like this? How did you fill the page when the musician was being such a pill?

H) Do you have any literacy goals for yourself in the future? Got any aspirations to write literature? Do you keep a journal? Write traditional letters?

I) What role does reading play in your life? Is it something you use to escape, for pleasure, to learn, to expand your interior world? All of these, some of these, none of these?

J) You mentioned your friendship with newspaper journalists and authors. Do you find that they (or yourself as a writer) share traits in common with musicians? Is the creative process used to write music and lyrics similar as writing words? Do you think it springs from the same place?

K) Can you compare or contrast the experience of listening to music to reading or writing? There is something primal about listening to live music. Like when you are standing between a stack of Marshall amps and just being assaulted by sound…Can literacy ever compare with that or is it unfair to ask it to?

Ka) What kind of music do you gravitate to and do you find the reading and writing you do shares that mood or attitude?

Kb) Do you think music writing on the Web (blogging, etc.) is of lesser quality than print journalism? Do you think being in print offers more legitimacy or gets taken more seriously by people in the trade, musicians, etc.?

L) Has writing or reading helped to cope with the significant losses of people in your life?

M) I’ve appreciated watching your relation to the jargon of insurance. It is easy to write it off with the definition Fowler uses: “talk that is both ugly sounding and hard to understand.” But I prefer Richard Lanham’s definition of it being a style that “serves special groups, interests, and activities.” Your approach seems to echo his when he says “If you cannot reform nonsense, you may learn to banquet off it.” Is ISO a feast or more of a dog’s breakfast for you?

N) How do you walk the line between giving the insurance writing wonks their head and reining them in when they’ve crossed some kind of linguistically inviolable line, either of sense or sensibility? Does the fight ever become too much and have you ever thrown in the towel?