Dina Greenberg
Dina Greenberg
In the Fall of 2021 Dina published her first full novel, Nermina’s Chance.
In the realm of discovering new writers, it is often by chance.
Enjoying this book. Great chance.
War sears its imprint on the human spirit in infinite ways.
After her family is murdered and her body ravaged by Serbian soldiers, Nermina Beganović’s only chance of survival is to flee her Bosnian homeland during the Balkan War, circa 1992.
Nermina’s Chance by Dina Greenberg reimagines the essence of family and plumbs the depths of a mother’s ardent connection to her daughter.
Related links for independent authors:
Willie Porter
Willy Porter is a contemporary American rock musician and singer-songwriter from Mequon, Wisconsin. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In April
Willy Porter Biography
by Richard Skelly – from Allmusic.com
Like Greg Brown, John Hammond, Leo Kottke, Stephen Fearing, Richard Shindell, Kelly Joe Phelps, and so many others, Willy Porter is often at his strongest as a solo act. He does work with a band periodically, but given the economics of touring in recent years, he seems to perform more frequently accompanying himself with guitar and mandolin. Porter honed his chops the natural way, busking across Europe and playing every little coffee house and dive bar on both sides of the Mississippi. He’s a veteran performer who takes his audiences with him on the journey. He elicits a rare kind of communication between artist and audience, mostly because he’s able to read his audiences so well.
Porter was raised near Milwaukee, and his first big breaks were playing theater-sized shows there and in Madison. As could be expected from someone from this part of the country, there’s an element of blues in Porter’s singing and songwriting and in most of his live shows, although he’s best thought of as a contemporary singer/songwriter, straight out of the world of folk music. He began playing viola, a notoriously difficult instrument to master, in his youth, but found he lacked the discipline for classical music as a career path. He had a revelation in his teens when he found Leo Kottke’s album, “6 & 12 String Guitar.” Kottke‘s playing opened up new vistas for Porter, who began playing guitar after dropping his viola studies.
As the occasion or tour dictates, you can catch Porter solo or with a backing band of veterans from Wisconsin.
K.J. Howe
K.J. Howe
Born in Toronto, Canada, KJ enjoyed a nomadic lifestyle during her early years, living in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Caribbean, which gave her an insider’s view into many different cultures. While abroad, she read every book she could find, which triggered in her a desire to create her own stories.
She attended Salzburg International Preparatory School, Neuchâtel Junior College, and Albert College before earning a Specialists Degree in Business from the University of Toronto. KJ found success in the corporate world, but her passion for travel, adventure, and stories drew her back to school where she earned a Masters in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. She is a Thriller and Barry Award nominee, and she has won several writing awards, including three Daphne du Maurier Awards for Excellent in Mystery and Suspense.
While honing her fiction skills, KJ worked as a medical, health, and fitness writer. She then became involved with the International Thriller Writers as the Executive Director of ThrillerFest, the organization’s annual conference held every July in New York City.
How To Safely Attend Summer Concerts After Being Vaccinated
Now that you have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, you may be asking yourself when it will be safe to attend a concert again? We here at Roaming The Arts would like to help you answer that question. More specifically, summer concerts are right around the corner, and we would like to give you the information you need to attend safely. Whether you will see a group of indie music artists or watch a solo performance, safety precautions should still be taken. Although the number of Americans in the US vaccinated against COVID-19 is increasing daily, the risk of contracting the virus is still high in large indoor gatherings and crowds. Here is what you need to know to attend safely.
How To Prepare For Summer Concerts
You should take a few steps before purchasing your tickets to ensure that the venue is following along with CDC guidelines for safe gatherings. Contact the venue via phone or online to check for the following things:
- Is the event located indoors or outdoors? (Indie music artists are known for large outdoor festivals)
- If the event is indoors, is their ventilation system up to code?
- Are they following social distancing guidelines?
- Are face masks required at all times?
- Is there access to sanitation stations and washing stations?
Getting answers to these questions will help ease your mind and ensure that the event is up to safety standards. If you have any issues getting straight answers from the venue, it may be safe to assume that the proper precautions have not been taken, and maybe you should skip that event.
Taking A Road Trip To That Concert?
If your concert plans include a road trip, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Although you have been vaccinated, you will inevitably be surrounded by many who are not, both on your way to the event and while at the event. A mask should be worn during any pit stops along the way, such as bathroom breaks, stopping for food, and fueling up. Also, remember to social distance by at least 6 feet and thoroughly wash your hands or sanitize them immediately after any stops.
What To Know When You Get There
Planning for your first concert outing since COVID-19 hit the US may seem daunting, but your hard work and preparation will pay off. Give yourself a little wiggle room regarding arrival time because the check-in process may require a temperature check upon entry. It is better to be at the front of a long line as opposed to the back of one! Also, make sure you have your face mask and a couple of extras just in case. Festivals featuring many indie music artists may look different this year, and you may need to plan to bring a supply of food and water for the event due to ongoing restrictions. Finally, do your best to maintain 6 feet of social distancing, although the CDC highly recommends 10 feet.
Contact Us
All of us here at Roaming The Arts dedicate ourselves to helping you stay connected and plan your next outing to summer concerts here in the US. Contact us today for more information.
Eilen Jewell
From: Bernard Zuel – Music Journalist
FULL DISCLOSURE: WHY THE RULES HAVE CHANGED FOR EILEN JEWELL
MAYBE IT’S THE MIDWEST UPBRINGING of politeness and reserve that lay behind it. Maybe it’s the natural defence of someone who already was out and exposed as an artist in a corner of Americana that values the personal as much as the historical. Whatever it might be with Eilen Jewell, in about 13 years of interviewing her, she has always shown herself adept at talking about her songs and her life in a way that deflected personal revelations.
It’s not that she didn’t answer questions, but those answers made the generalities of her characters the focal point and gave just enough to let us see how she’d build relationships to them but not be defined by them. It was politely done of course, and was not without things to chew on given a sharp intelligence and an eye on American culture whether it was her love of Loretta Lyn and Howlin’ Wolf, the pay gap between the sexes, or political resistance as something of a progressive island in a state that’s anything but.
Well, things have changed with the coming record, Get Behind The Wheel. Not only has Jewell written an album that came out of the Covid-era breakup of her marriage to long-time drummer, co-manager, and co-parent, Jason Beek, and some deaths in her wider family, but she has been talking openly, frankly, about her circumstances.
It’s hard to imagine that was a comfortable transition, not least because growing up in Idaho you kept your business to yourself, but you have to wonder if it has been dragged out of her, or did she feel it was inevitable and stopped fighting.
“It is really new for me to talk about anything having to do with my personal life,” the Boise-based Jewell says. “But this time around it seemed like it would be wrong to not discuss it because this album is so, so directly influenced by everything that I’ve gone through in the past couple of years. I just feel like I would be lying if I said ‘oh, I don’t know, it’s just about people and things’ [she laughs].
“Also the pandemic taught me that that there’s something really important about sharing parts of ourselves. That’s what sharing my music is [and] I guess it dawned on me this actually could be a good thing for me, it could open me up to my fans and there’s a chance there could be some cathartic sharing on both sides.”
There probably won’t be any problems getting her fans to share their thoughts next month when she will spend several weeks in Australia (heaven knows we’re not a quiet bunch), but when you put these things out like Jewell is now doing, not only are you exposing yourself but you are setting the agenda for how things are interpreted. And this is before even considering that Beek is still playing in her band and will be on the tour.
How people interpret your songs and your album, and inevitably yourself, will be shaped by these revelations and explanations. Is that a good thing? Was it even planned?
“The label was saying you’ve got to figure out how to talk about this new album, so I was like, yeah, shoot, I’ve gotta decide how much do I want to disclose? How much do I want to set the stage for these songs?,” she says. “Because, yeah, in the past I’ve not done that and thought that the songs should stand on their own and people can interpret them how they want. People are still free to interpret them however, obviously, but this album really did occur at a particular point in time for me. It was a disaster of a moment in my life this album was born out of, beyond anything else I’ve ever experienced, and I felt this album deserved an exception to my normal rule.” It was time? At 43, maybe it’s as simple as that.
“I guess I do want to talk about this stuff, this stuff being the pandemic, the divorce that came out of that, or coincided with it, and then family losses, people near and dear to me – not even Covid-related, but just one after another,” Jewell says. “For the first time in my life it feels cathartic to talk about what was going on behind the scenes. I don’t think it’s necessary information to appreciate the album, but there’s a few Neil Young albums where I gleaned he was going through a particular thing in his life and then read later that in fact, yes that’s happening, and something about that makes me appreciate the album just a little bit more. I have a sense of who he is more.”
From a long low base of knowledge about the album so far – it’s not yet available to media, let alone the public, though we will hear some songs from it at her March shows – a title like Get Behind The Wheel suggests maybe taking control of her life, or at least setting the direction. How did she handle this resetting and reclaiming of control?
“It’s really been a mixed bag,” she confesses. “I think when I wrote that song – the song that contains that phrase ‘get behind the wheel’ is called Alive – I felt so inspired to take control and have agency, it was all very new. I was like, well, so much is crashing down around me but this is an opportunity to just up inside my life in a really authentic way. And that’s still present, but I’m also realising that it’s much harder than it sounds, and sometimes [she laughs ruefully] it’s awful.” No one would blame her for looking away.
“There’s part of me that would just love to drift around and say ‘I don’t know, someone else take the wheel: I’m getting tired already’,” says Jewell. “But I was guilty of some of that for many years, going with the flow with my career, and my personal life too … being cooperative, and they really comes at a cost eventually. You can’t keep whittling your life away like that. Eventually you realise that your heart is not fully in it, and there’s always a reckoning with that.” When she looks at who she was, even three years ago, and who she is now, how does she judge that person?
“I … think … that … person … was … somewhat,” she says slowly, before a long pause. “Somewhat overeager to find distractions. The old me really didn’t want to look at life just as it is. The old me was always kind of looking into the future, thinking about how things will be better or should be better, or the past. The here and now was something that I tended to avoid. “But all we really have is the here and now. The past is gone and the future is a fantasy.”
