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SubscribeWe recently connected with Dana Miller and have shared our conversation below.
Dana, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?
Wow, this is a gorgeous, incisive question that requires an encyclopedia of responses to even halfway paint the reality of the true answer. Let me just start by saying that I was raised in a world of extreme kindness by my parents and grandparents, so it took me a very long time in life to learn that a lot of other people did not have such open doors, did not believe in the things that I did because they had not had that eternal quilt of care wrapped around them since birth, and thus they would have all sorts of strange reactions to the way I take up space because I did and do. There is a kind of holy punishment that the underbelly of society will give you if you come from a place without motive. The emotionally starved tend to trade on hidden agendas and use transactional thinking as a currency, and I live in what I call a philosophical “One Face Place” where, not only are there no secret dealings under the dust, there’s just no need to not say the truth of what you want, where you’re going, or how you plan to move. I think I realized way late that it was the lack of that kind of tranquil transparency in others that would make me unable to guess at the distance between what they would say and what they would do.
The kindness that has defined my life stretches through every avenue of it, in great and small ways–which are actually the greatest ways. It is in things like my Mom always calling whenever she’s out anywhere to see if she can stop by my house and bring me something to eat, my Dad always leaving me little goodies of every variety from guitar straps to music magazines to find in my room when I come to stay with him, my stepmom Karen putting little moonflower vines she grew in yogurt cups for me to take home to my own garden, my stepdad Kerry forever fixing things at my house and finding fun events for us to attend, and my sister Lindsey talking me into feeling okay about taking a rest (something I never do without some form of brute force being involved). Then, don’t even get me started on the kindness of my incredible friends that do so much for me as well! I wish I could give everyone a cheering section like mine because, my goodness, but the world would be a much happier place! People like my friend Liridon Hajrizi, who has been with me through thick and thin for over 20 years. People like Mitchell Williford, whom I can call for absolutely anything at any time of day and he’ll be there to do it. You can’t invent friends like Devin Downs, without whom I would have neither the right kind of belief in my own magic nor any MacBook worth owning, or Stella Safo, who goes out of her way to send me awesome writing opportunities and checks on how I’m doing all the time even though she’s a time-sapped physician with a tiny baby to raise. I cannot overstate the worth and win-giving my life enjoys because of pals like Stacey Heale, who is never too busy to validate my most inexplicable excitements and offer me very real understanding of my greatest hurts, or Seth Hendershot, who freely helps me with everything from finding bass players to birthday party venues and does it all quoting obscure movies we watched and loved together a lifetime ago but everyone else ignored. It’s important to say that some of these friends, like my wonderful Rhys Griffiths, who has been one of the most solid companions I’ve ever met, but particularly in a time when quite a few others around us were proving themselves beyond porous, are all the way in Wales or in England like the great Richard Fitz-Thomas, whom I have laughed harder with and at than any other human living. I could just go on and on and on, but to emphasize that real friendship doesn’t need any planning, maps, tickets, or proximity is a big bullet point, I think, to seeing how you can find the universality of kindness in so many variegated forms.
I think what I really mean to say with all of this is that I have had the inordinate good fortune in my life for kindness not to ever be an event, but a way of life. I think that is how it is meant to be, but seldom is for many others. It was unkindness that was the “event” for me that I had to learn how to navigate because I just did not have deep experience with that before a pretty late age, which I guess says a lot about the kind of company I’ve been lucky to keep. Every day, no matter what inevitably-morning hour I am going to bed, I write down all the incredibly sweet things that happened to me during that day in my gratitude journal. I record it all not just because I want to forget nothing, but because I really believe that the writing of it is like a little gold filigree that preserves and expands it somehow. It brings more good things, and it gives me the capacity to hopefully be for someone else like all these people I’ve named and so many others in my life have been for me.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Want to watch me sing you the answer to this one, make a fabulously awful pun, and unintentionally tarnish the brilliant croon of the beautiful and legendary Ricky Nelson all at once? “Well, I’m a traveling pen, made a lot of blots…..all over the world…. and in e-ver-y essay I broke the heart of at least one surly churl.” Haha! It’s funny because it’s true! Gosh, this is so existential and not, isn’t it? What am I…? I am the rainbow piranha-betta in the backlit bamboo of big sounds. I am the nymph of the neon. When I do it right, which isn’t that often by my own estimation, I am a salacious scholar and a sparkling sleuth of the syllables.
To give you a more straightforward answer, I really am just a strange form of laparoscopic linguist with some serious graphomania to burn, so I write as a lifetime compulsion more than anything. I love words, languages, and music to complete unstoppered addiction. I chase down the folks making the best of all of the above and make more words about them! That compulsion has turned into a careening career now, which I both cannot ever fully believe or give enough thanks for. From collusion with the incomparable, incredible people that career has placed me beside has come immeasurable creative gain that I use in and out of the writing itself. When I say “writing,” it is everything from poetry to rock journalism to nonfiction now. If there’s anything to know or articulate about the kind of writing I do, it is that mine is pretty arcane! I’m not a blogger and I don’t mind telling anyone that I can’t abide the word “content.” It makes my stomach do a gross little kickflip because it makes words seem like a product you could buy and ingest. Mine are meant to eat you! I am every day trying so hard to be a particolored part of a much older and wider tradition that includes women writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Camille Paglia, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Lillian Roxon, and Patti Smith. These are the women I am always trying to emulate in one way or another, but particularly in the way of caliber of cultural impact. I’ve got a strong sense that a dent like these dames can’t be made if all you’re making is something that is ultimately designed to be of the moment, to be forgotten, displaced, obsolete, and disposed of tomorrow. You can’t bluff the cutting edge. I get a kick out of people telling me, as they so often do, that I’m “shooting myself in the foot” for flatly refusing to have any social media. As if a coerced screw-date with Silicon Valley were now the same as a credential. I have the same response to those people as I always did back when only Facebook existed: “I’d rather walk with two bleeding feet than look at my own creation and know that it didn’t mean anything anymore, or mean anything more than the click of the conformist clique.” Everything that has happened to me and for me has come without any of that and I would liken what I do to handing out cassingles from the back of a truck. You’ve got to physically be there when it happens, and the finite physicalness is the whole thing that makes it cool. Word of mouth travels much faster than I think some people have the courage to trust anymore, and it does so with infinitely more integrity. It’s so much more fun and bond-forming to hear about something from a friend or a sibling, and then you’ve got to hunt that thing down. All the people you’ll meet as you embark on your adventure to do just that are the prizes you don’t even know you’re getting when you first head out.
When I started writing for a living, it was a thing that drip-fed itself more than something I sought out, and the only explanation I can give for that is that I was submitting 14,000-word chunks of what I hoped were quill-chills, not clickbait. I would write for a band or a single performer and from that would come unsolicited requests from that band or performer’s friends, management, or PR to write for others. I feel very proud that this happened organically because it is the only way I can prove to myself that I might have written something worth keeping, worth remembering in the evergreen way. Why are people so afraid of saying they want to be remembered hugely, by the way? I’ve been saying that since I was a nonverbal baby and thinking it even longer than that. When it’s my time to ride the spirit horse to the other side, I want to be burned atop a pyre of all my most beautiful book-creations and fey belongings, with a raven skull in one hand and a bison hoof in the other, damn it! Ha! My best mates will build that for me, and then any one of the Fontaines DC boys can give my eulogy–which better be intensely poetic and occur in pentameter–and Inhaler will play the after party….because what was I here for if not all this and more? Ha!
At the traceable beginning of all this, the best of my interior friends and I would playfully refer to “Strawberryfin Sounds” as the imaginary imprint and record label I was operating in secret, signing all the best underground Irish bands I was writing for and releasing my own stuff–poetic, longform, and songwise–with feral abandon. I drew the logo for it, a funky strawberry with a mermaid’s tail for a stem, for the first time probably twenty years ago as part of a free-range doodle I was working on when I should have been listening in a Master’s class. The image was meant to draw on a mishmash of a great many loves of mine–The Beatles, the film Across the Universe, and the double meaning of the word “sounds” as it applies to both music and water, my two most natural elements. Just a couple of years before this moment, the world-bending wunderkinds at Comes With Fries—the best creative collective in the history of the world in case you need to know—digitized that hand-drawn image for me as I began the process of formally working on this full-length nonfiction work I’m currently writing about music producers. I guess Strawberryfin Sounds was off and running in the tangible from that point forward.
It’s the same with the Cat Witch logo. I’ve been calling the special women heroes in my life “Cat Witches” to myself for decades. Do you think I ever even had the faintest thought when I put that drawn-by-me figure of the Cat Witch in colored pencil on my wee little website to honor those women that I’d be fielding orders for t-shirts, stickers, and bomber jackets that are now printed with that picture? You just never know what is going to resonate with people, or why, but if you’ll just put out what you wish existed in the world, I guarantee somebody else wishes it existed too and you’ll meet that person through that gift. That connection you’ll make with them is the real gift that could never be manufactured or drawn by the best artist in the world. My so-called “brand,” which I have to say is another word I really can’t stand too much of in a non-ironic context, was nothing more than a many-pronged inside joke. That inside joke is now in the process of being trademarked and has already become so much more than even the impossibly grand nonsense any of us used to laughingly make up for the future of it! I don’t sign little Gaelic grungers yet, maybe that day is coming, but I do get to enjoy the incomprehensible privilege of writing and creating words and sounds with so many of my favorite people, so many of them lifelong heroes of mine that I never even imagined meeting, much less working with. I always say that my aesthetic in life, not just in the music and words worlds, is all happening at the juncture where Cyndi Lauper is having green tea with Kurt Cobain. I call the whole shebang “neon grunge” for its razzle-dazzle rock-meets-Trapper-Keepers nature and combination of eras and elements that people think can’t seamlessly coincide but are actually conjoined twins in spirit!
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
You know, one of the things my writing life has taught me, for better or for worse, is that there are a lot of people who just don’t feel things at a very deep level at all, and that this would include the things that moved me most–like music and books. As I made my long and twisting way to putting out my own creative things, I was simultaneously put in a lot of surprising situations where I had to realize through some pretty hard tears that when people say something is their “favorite” or they “love” something, what they nearly always mean is “up to a point.” Whereas I mean the total opposite of “up to a point” when I say those words like “love” and “favorite” about anything, even something so small as a shoelace–I mean to the ends of this Earth and far beyond that! Pick lesser words if you mean lesser things is what I wish people would do, but they won’t, and because people who mean it the big way are so rare, those small-speaking people will expect you to know or somehow intuit where their sad limits live. Loving anybody who puts stipulations on the term, puts those of us without such fences in immediate sniper’s alley. So, you do have to know that, carry yourself accordingly, and when you are pouring out your whole spirit and your most sacred heart into whatever you are writing or singing, you have to have a tedious talk with yourself before you let go of it about what you are and are not okay with that meaning to others.
They say nobody really cares until you’re rich or you’re dead, and I went through a terrifying questioning period where I wasn’t sure I wanted to release anything of mine at all because I couldn’t bear the thought of some of the shallow-hearted receptions I knew would be more “normal” than not. Then I got characteristically half-didactic and half-Dionysus about it all and said, “Well, actually, I’ll just slam the symbolism and amp the imagery and crank the volume on the colors of this so loud and divisively that it will automatically weed out most of those who wouldn’t be able or willing to open their whole chest to it anyway!” Ha! Some artists are totally fine with their art meaning whatever to anyone, and I certainly don’t want to be dictating what anyone is able to get out of mine, and I surely want anyone who cares enough to pay attention to whatever I do to get whatever they need out of what I am making, but I am distinctly not okay with my stuff meaning less than any level at which it was created. So, I guess the tagline for this side of the Glitter Thicket is, “It can always mean any kind of different, and I hope it does, but it can’t ever mean less.” Less is not okay, and it’s definitely not more. What can I say, I’m a born maximalist in a minimalist’s world!
To answer a practical thing to your question, the jaw-dropping, abject, total freedom of a creative life is something you can’t even begin to describe to people who live other ways. How you can go anywhere, anytime, and stay as long as you like. How you are both always and never working. Place is radically important too, and I mean in terms of where you’re from, where you choose to stay, and where you make yourself go. Freedom definitely doesn’t mean “from hardship.” Just the reverse–you’ve got to push yourself harder than anyone else ever would, make yourself sweat in new ways every day, because it’s only you in charge of you in the fully creative life. People think of writers as being cozily tucked up at a lovely little desk with a cup of tea. It makes me giggle because it’s so the opposite of what would ever bring forth anything of worth I have ever written! Like that stereotypical idea of a bookish person’s backstory, some places are so naturally beautiful and tranquil that they’re only really useful to provide the backdrop for dreaming your way immediately out of them, because if you stay there you will become as static as the gorgeousness that has engulfed you. Notice that Vanilla hums right along, in both perfume and life paths, but Briar Rose can’t be overridden in the nose or in life when it snags your hem and cuts your skin. Which one are you going to remember and want to immortalize? The sweet little unassuming thing or the thing that made you bleed? I think they are both worthy of a poem, but I think if you study the greats in any art form, from Da Vinci all the way to David Bowie, they are all willfully putting themselves in situations that are neither familiar nor comfortable to them absolutely all the time. They never, ever stayed put. You do have to willfully wander to get anywhere so tall and transformative in art. I tell young writers all the time, “Don’t chew a pencil end at home; roll the pencil up in your sleeve like an Outsider boy would his cigarettes and go hunting the words out there! Not in your head.” Writing is more visceral than verbal, and maybe that would shock people who don’t do it, but I think you’ll find it a verifiable truth if you ask around amongst people who do. You work for the words; they don’t work for you. But they are there waiting in every vibrant and awful thing if you just take the time to notice and then put a little food in your hand for them, like you are luring an exotic bird. Your inexhaustible willingness is the only food they’ll eat.
It’s almost impossible for me to describe in simple words the spaciousnesses of my days now, comparative to how I used to have to live when I was teaching, when I belonged to so many other entities. I can only try to give an example of what the difference feels like through a tetragram or ten of talismanic music once again, so bear with me if you can! If I say that all my days feel like the song “Impact” by SG Lewis and the nights sound like Channel Tres reading me sultry stories in his natural speaking voice, does that make any sense? Inside that big, open atmosphere you get the same sentimental feeling to work with that you can find in “Arthur’s Theme” by Christopher Cross mixed with the implicit threat of “One Of These Nights” by The Eagles. If you merge the visual and emotional landscapes of Christine McVie’s “Everywhere” video with Cyndi Lauper’s “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” and put that inside Steve Perry’s every extraordinary exhalation for “Oh Sherrie,” you’re at about midday for me. Marry all of the above to the feeling and meaning in Icehouse’s “Electric Blue,” Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue,” and David Lee Roth’s “Just Like Paradise”–especially those high, squealing horse tones of Mr. Steve Vai at the break–then cast the entire thing through a lens of Boy Meets Girl’s “Waiting For a Star to Fall,” that’s the roller coaster of the freedom feeling. I hope that the outcome, that the stories I write from those unspeakably beautiful places of the mind and the map, are explainable purely in songs too. I think if what I make out of the freedom was turned into the equivalent sentence-songs I hope they are, those songs would be “Born of Frustration” by James, “Cosmic Girl” by Jamiroquai, “Fashion” by Lady Gaga, “Dance With Me” by Orleans, “Wildfire” by Michael Martin Murphy, “Got My Mind Set On You” by George Harrison, “Rhythm of the Night” by Corona, and “Outtathaway” by The Vines. And to complete the synesthesia-from-Saturn here: if I had to describe it as a taste, it would be like Bit-O-Honey mixed with Milky Way Midnight! Are you sorry you asked yet? Ha!
With coming into all of that freedom, for me, has come the need to realize and reckon with the fact that an artist’s nature is a through-and-through thing that does not confine itself to the page or the stage for its recipients either, and that what this means is the very things people want to love your work for, they will often in turn dislike you strongly for possessing in your relationship to them or in your personal life. It’s almost like they don’t want you to mean it full-time once the song goes off or they close the book if it challenges their own day-to-day existence. This is precisely what Lady Gaga was singing about in “Born This Way,” that fact of any real artist having to be forced to explain themselves to the very people that should be the most all-the-time rabid for them. The message was, “No, this isn’t an act or a song or a costumed bit of thought–this is me all the time, every day!”
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
That’s what we call “a whole lot of holy damn” to answer! Ha! So many crucial ones too that will genuinely turn the tide of your life in ways no one talks about. They are all entwined in intriguing ways too, so I’m going to try to unbraid them a little bit here so that the inherent connections between them are visible to anyone who might be trying to utilize this information. For a start, I think the most important sentence any woman-creator can learn to say is: “That’s not good enough.” If you don’t already know how, learn to say that with ease and an unapologetically totalitarian command. Never demand because demanding is asking. Command, always. Command is telling. Make sure you are telling yourself, the people around you, and the world at large exactly what you want, what you will accept, and what you absolutely will not. Lower the bar for no one, least of all yourself. The only person who should be embarrassed by the pointing out of subpar work is the one who made it, not the one who pointed out that it wasn’t magical. Insist on magic! I cannot highlight or underscore that one enough. People in general, but especially women and especially artists–so God help you if you are a woman artist!–seem to collectively fail to realize that time given is divestiture. Women are taught that nurturing and giving out of time is the same as doing for themselves, that they are meant to be edified by loss of energy, and that giving out to others rather than in to themselves is somehow a higher goodness than making the most of their own potential no matter who or what has to be shoved back for that to happen. It is the ultimate patriarchal lie of all time, and a sadistic piece of genius paternalistic mental-marketing that has done a great job of keeping untold numbers of world-changing women tied to domestic routines that disallow the dreaming required for full self-actualization.
You just have to learn to keep a great deal more of yourself for yourself, no matter who or what you are. There is an argument to be made that the true test of real interior solidity and generosity only occurs once it has been well and truly abused almost to extinction by an exterior entity. It’s certainly true that if you lined up all the devastating Takers in my life that I initially thought were friends and stood them between what I thought they loved about me versus what they actually wanted me for, it would be the grimmest gallery imaginable. I’ve learned that people surreptitiously taking advantage of something they know full well they can never really make their own or make themselves greater than will eventually grow tired of the charades they enlisted to be able to do that leeching, and they will, without exception, then try to paint the person they were so selfishly taking from as the figurehead of their self-created unrest. When you finally get those kinds of people out of your life, which you will have to do by sheer force and which took me forever, it can make you never want to give anything to anybody ever again. It can destroy your creativity completely. But what you have to strive to remember is that, for all the attempted mismanagement of your magic that absolutely will occur at the hands of dishonest people, you have lost nothing and they have lost everything once you go. It doesn’t even matter if they are smart enough to know that or not. Of all the gifts you ever gave them, they will wear your final departure like no other. Just keep in mind that Givers can always refill their own well and Takers cannot ever.
Beyond a focused alertness around preserving your openness of heart from people like that, I think the most important thing you can do to make yourself available to your best future is to closely examine where your storytelling in the past comes from. I did that at a critically early age just because I was preternaturally brash and contrary, and I’m so glad I did because it has kept me in what I would call a luxurious amount of protective light for most of my life, but I only made the decision just a few months ago that I was full-on done with the dark when it came to imbibing the works of others. Like with films, for example, how everything is now explosions and car chases and rewrites–boring and useless! Center the human heart and put some really great music to it like John Hughes would and see if you don’t feel better about all things offscreen and on. I try to steep myself in the movies that happened right before streaming for that and so many other reasons that I feel directly impact how wild my imagination can go. The language and the hope was so much better in those times. The boys were better too because they were not asking anyone’s permission to be more auteur-like in their singular strangeness. Everything wasn’t a “relatable” pity party that results in nothing but a flat line because if everyone is a sidekick, there is no one to actually save the day! Quirk is great and all, but it is quick-mindedness and fleetness of foot that rectifies wrongs in the real world, so I’ve pretty much handed my complete screen life over to PBS Passport almost exclusively now…Ha! I just think living in a world knitted in the yuck-yarn of your emotion-fed perception rather than brazen facts made bold through human fearlessness makes for a soft reality that serves no one because everything becomes commentary and nothing is character-building commotion. My rejoinder to all the folks who clamor for the necessity of the navel-gazing is, “Where’s the heady and the hilarious?”
This is all back to not pandering to a lazy, feel-good audience though, isn’t it? There’s a certain kind of person, and I might even go so far as to argue that they are a frightening majority, who doesn’t want you to tell them how to get what it is they say they truly want. They only want you to commiserate with them about not having it. They want art that affirms for them that it’s okay not to get that special something, to claim to be too tired to try, and so forth. They certainly don’t want you to get it and then be a good friend who tries to help them get it too! This was a mind-boggling middle adulthood discovery for me, and continues to be, because I have never had any interest even in my most youthful, undeveloped life in idle dreaming. If you want something, go after it until you’re either standing next to it or on the other side of the rainbow! Why would you waste time talking about wanting anything if you weren’t going to shred yourself for it? Make movies and songs and books about getting that thing. In my writing I had to learn, and I’m still learning, the way it takes a complete disaster of a day runner to make something pristine pop out on the page. You’ll have papers and Post-Its and books open, a million different completely non-obvious references all over the floor, the walls, your face, and the dog, but out of that will come the most spring-loaded, densest, most tightly coiled writing that you could ever possibly do. It is so aggravating, but it’s true! I’m always going to want a perfectly straight line drawn in four distinct neon colors using a ruler, and writing is always going be a splattery horror of hodgepodge instead. I’ve had to tune myself to that and learn to find what the everywhereness of it lets you find. It is stuff that can’t be put into square corners, lovely as those corners may be to we hyperneat! Hang a placard on me that says “Tidy Vanguard.” Just make sure the placard is made of papyrus and that I look like a Florentine painting of the 1530s while I am wearing it…Ha!
Despite my obsession with orthographic order, I do recognize that my work is creaturely to the extreme. I use all my favorite words to describe my least favorite things, and I put consideration of the woman in the picture center stage no matter what I’m writing or creating as it has been my observation that she’s always the one with the most to lose. To write something memorable, you’ve got to say what other people don’t think they are allowed to say. Anyone would tell you that I was that person a long time before my pen started to prove it on a more panoramic scale. I don’t care for the general stand-backery the internet has promoted overall, but nowhere is that more obvious than in the way it has negatively affected people’s speech patterns and in the manner in which they use and misuse words. There is little I love more than creative wordplay and people making like Shakespeare and making up new and funktastic words that combine unexpected things. I want to be clear that what I am saying here is that the languid way digital culture has shortened people’s attention spans has done the same with their vocabularies, and to a greater detriment, I think, seeing as how words are what we use to communicate with one another. People are getting very repetitive and parrot-like with even the smallest expressions. Mindnumbingly overused words like “vibe,” “mood,” “mother,” “ate,” and my least favorite of all, talking always about what an event or a habit “looks like.” You see that one really chewing the side out of the corporate world of late! When someone says something like “what does your writing routine look like,” it deforms my brain and I’m thinking, “It isn’t looking like anything, it IS.” What they are asking about in that, of course, is routine, which is the second part of the problem. There isn’t a routine because I have yet to see routine produce anything of value for anyone’s fluorescent mind. Routines are fantastic for boxing workouts and pilates programs, but not for breaking yourself out of molds you shouldn’t have been in to get where you are meant to go. That’s in writing or anything else, I would say. I might be exacting to a preposterous place when I’m writing but in life, I’m with Steve Rowland when he said, ““If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.”
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