On the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 21, the atmosphere inside Downtown Fremont\u2019s Banter Bookshop hummed with quiet excitement as a small audience gathered inside to listen to Bay Area poet Alison Luterman\u2019s reading from her newest book, Hard Listening.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hard Listening is a collection of poems in which Luterman recounts her personal journey of learning to sing, an interest sparked by being surrounded by her musician husband\u2019s instruments and having spare time during the pandemic. Luterman, who had taken online voice lessons to sing with her husband, explained that the process was both grueling and insightful.<\/p>\n
In her poem, \u201cWhat I Learned,\u201d she writes, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I stood at the piano myself and quavered and broke and reached for the high notes that weren\u2019t there and stumbled my way to beauty that I learned singing\u2019s made of sweat and spittle.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Luterman, who had taken online voice lessons to sing with her husband, explained that the process was both grueling and insightful<\/p>\n
Luterman\u2019s journey of learning to sing reminded her of the female musicians she grew up listening to and led her to reflect on the female singers who were engaged in the politics of using their voice. These are women Luterman pays homage to in her book, through works she has endearingly named her \u201cdiva poems\u201d\u2014her inspiration ranging from the voice of musician Karen Carpenter, which she fell in love with as a kid, to the resilience of Ukrainian women singing through the invasion of their country in 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Throughout the reading, Luterman invited members of the audience to request specific poems or to ask questions between readings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One key discussion point was about Luterman\u2019s writing process\u2014one audience member asked, \u201cHow do you find the words to put together?\u201d Luterman offered a candid look into her process, explaining how, at times, it\u2019s simply sitting at a computer and letting loose a \u201cstream of consciousness\u201d onto the page, and other times, it\u2019s going through many revisions of her work before it\u2019s ready to be published.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The discussion also touched on her initial inspiration. \u201cHow was it singing with your husband?\u201d one audience member asked. \u201cIt was really hard. If I was just a little off, for him, it was like hearing nails on a chalkboard,\u201d Luterman said with a laugh.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For some, the event was a first introduction to Luterman\u2019s work. Susan Hakes Taggitch, a retired attendee, came to the reading hoping to learn more about Luterman\u2019s poetry. Taggitch said, \u201cI\u2019m interested in reading more of her work now that I\u2019ve listened to this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 21, the atmosphere inside Downtown Fremont\u2019s Banter Bookshop hummed with quiet excitement…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[16139,16140,16141,128,130,129],"class_list":["post-24339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-alison-luterman","tag-banter-bookshop","tag-fremont","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}