We were lucky to catch up with Dana Miller recently and have shared our conversation below.
Dana, thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.
This is such an exceptionally sweet and poignant question that I’m completely honored to be asked! First of all, it touches me deeply if anyone describes me as generous. I do think generous is the most important thing you can be in life, and I mean that across the spectrum of what the word can mean: generous with time, help, friendship, words, money, love, resources, connections, art, books, and treasured finds of any sort. I would almost have to invert this question in order to answer it properly because, truthfully, I have spent the better part of my life trying to comprehend people who didn’t take immediate and obvious joy in giving. Seriously, what is more fun than finding something to give your friend or sibling or a band that you really love, taking it to that person, and watching them receive it? There is not a higher happiness in the world than that so why would everyone not instinctually follow that footpath of exhilaration every day? I have, at 47, very freshly given up trying to understand those me-first-and-the-gimme-gimme people. They don’t ever transform, as I’d youthfully hoped, into Givers. The irony is those same ones will nearly always describe themselves to people who don’t know them well as being so eager to give. Ha! I think the desire to give is almost as biological a trait as eye color or height. I also think that coming from radically generous environs like I have done plays a huge part in that avoidance of scarcity-based thinking that keeps some folks who might otherwise be truly generous from ever becoming so.
Whatever generosity I could be lucky enough to have ascribed to me, there is no spiritual archaeologist needed in order to dig out the source of it all. It’s my parents and grandparents, without question. My Mom has always remained determined that I was to have and do everything that she never got the chance to have and do when she was younger. She instilled in me early a great love of hosting by virtue of always making a holiday out of every birthday, every occasion, every get-together, every afternoon. They were all worthy of a card, an event, a gathering of good people, a cupcake. My Dad always took me to find the coolest things imaginable in the least conspicuous places, and still does. I learned that a thing found is infinitely more interesting and lovable for having an untold backstory and a bit of scuff than a thing bought. My Papaw ran a flea market wherein he would take me each weekend to pick something of my choice out, which for me was forever about finding the smallest, most broken-eared, or least-likely-to-be-adopted little animal of porcelain or stuffing that I could locate in the place. I still have that menagerie of what I suppose would look to some without the right kind of eyes as a collection of cracked things, but which is in actual fact a trove of gems born of his generosity, which derived, as I believe all generosity must, from his connection to hard work, honesty, and a prescience about people. I still honor those youthful teachings in everything I do, but I am only able to see that when I focus on it.
I am so fortunate to say that living at that decibel is only customary to me, and I’d wonder why anyone would ever not choose brightness and beauty if they had a choice, which nearly everyone does, but affectations of downtroddenness or what I sometimes call “the give-up spirit” have become quite the unfortunate vogue in a rather ridiculous way these days, don’t you think? That’s not in any way to downgrade actual clinical depression, which is about as serious and real a thing as exists, but simply to note that there’s a real social danger to certain types of people picking up on the fact that the downward-facing lip will more swiftly get them something that they really shouldn’t be wanting in the first place, and we’ve inadvertently allowed a culture to develop now where saying anything “too” real (as if there could ever be such thing!) gets you mislabeled as “rude” when the reality is that the greatest, most damaging crassness in life is a polite lie. It’s the ultimate oxymoron because there truly is no such thing as a polite lie or a kind omission. You do get a great deal of backlash for being certifiably happy in this day and time, but I find the vitriolic responses I often get just for being bubbly a strange mixture of comical and pitiful. It’s brazen bliss that breeds generosity, not entitled wallowing masquerading as sensitivity. It’s been often surmised by others before me that the most generous people in the world are always those with the least materially to give. I have found that to be categorically true throughout my life, and it speaks to the inherent lesson in loss, but also to the reason why I wouldn’t necessarily think of myself as the best model of generosity because I think I have quite a lot to give–and feel very much that I should give it.
There is something instructive and powerful about the fact that when you are offered everything freely and full-time by those that love you, and you grow up fully knowing that you can have anything if you’re just willing to work for it never doubting this…it is as if the purity in that gift, the energy in the knowing, makes everything in life come easier, from the toppest triumphs to the darkest deluge. There is an embrace native to generosity of spirit. It has patience for everything because real magnanimity of heart doesn’t run out of shelf space, ever. So, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the world got used to teaching people that you should give way past when your heart gives out, and from that comes everything beautiful and worth having in this life? Wouldn’t generosity just be the most automatic function of love then? How could you hold anything back from someone you claimed to care about? That’s really how I feel so I think you always want to give everything you’ve got wherever you have the right kind of feelings for people,and that’s all the way down to strangers. You don’t have to know someone in the material sense very well to be deeply connected to them. I strongly believe we are all connected in the ethereal sense anyway. I do notice that people who are stingy with their love tend to suffer from a certain smallness of spirit in all other things, and that it does chew away at them in ways that make them measurably less giving.
What I find brutally hard about the integral importance of generosity, and what I think beats it out of so many of its born purveyors, is that it is also the character trait most actively and consistently preyed upon by those Takers of the world who do not naturally possess it, of which there are far more than many toxic-positivity people in this life would like to admit to. The power of what you can give, and are openly willing to give, will unnerve a lot of people who thought they were givers until they met you. It’s like the good fortune and reciprocity that generosity naturally brings makes a lot of people bizarrely uncomfortable, and I’ve learned the hard way that they will take that self-inflicted discomfort out on you. That kind of person tends not to know much of the equal parts suffering that comes from a giving life. They may not be able to even say it audibly inside their own minds, but they think you get too much. They don’t even measure what you have given to them, so they definitely don’t clock how much you gave to get whatever you got that they wish was their own. So, it’s interesting to watch the people that will try to pawn you off because you prioritize them in a way that they can’t face the meaning of, repay, or replicate. As a result, they’ll try to construct reduced realities for you that suit what they are not addressing in themselves, and goodness gracious but they will attack you pretty viciously if you don’t turn your eye like they want you to, like they do themselves, from that sleight-of-hand so crudely hidden in the corner of what they don’t say. Those people hate me because I call it by name, for all to hear! Ha! I think any losses you sustain from refusing to bend your sight for a non-seer aren’t losses at all and these are just the price tags of an outward facing heart. I don’t regret anything I’ve had to pay for keeping a wildly open heart; I only regret finding out so late that I would have to pay at all.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
Is glitter a marketable product outside the world of fey people like me? Ha! I would like to think that, if I am providing any service at all beyond ink sparkles and some form of page-pandemonium, it is a deep debt of service to the bands, producers, artists, and general creative dynamos that I write for. For that is what I do: I write. I have always done so, but I have not always done so at the professional level until about 15 years ago. I don’t have a workable excuse beyond my own lack of understanding of my personal powers for why it took me so quizzically long to formally do what I was clearly made for doing. I was writing constantly on my own, all my life, from earliest childhood forward, and showing it to virtually no one but my professors before Ted Chase at QRO Magazine so serendipitously asked me to write a review of what was then the new Raconteurs record. This was a meteoric biggie! Ted was a complete stranger to me at that point in time, knew nothing whatsoever about my many musical manias, and certainly could not have known how much I adore the Raconteurs! I unreservedly marvel at anything Jack White ever so much as accidentally brushed his shoulder against, like that brushed-by thing is now of the Colosseum. Detroit and Delphi have always been pretty synonymous in my mind when it comes to oracles anyway, so to get that signal from the beyond that it was looking back at me in what I thought was my invisible ink thicket meant that I needed to stare back, and with serious intention now. It was an unexpected and exhilarating joy.
The writing I have done since fed itself on itself, really. I didn’t and haven’t ever taken money for the writings I do for other artists because, for as much as I am the loudest trumpet in the voluntary about paying artists what they are worth—and I do very much realize I am one who has foregone that same treatment for myself–I just don’t want anything muddying the waters of what I write for another creator. I don’t want anyone to ever be able to say that what was written wasn’t exactly what I thought and felt about that person, band, or project. Whenever money comes into the picture of a journalistic project like that, you always get corporate, khaki-trousered expectations that I have zero respect for, that I will never wish to be associated with, and that I feel are inappropriate when the subject of the writing is someone else’s heart and soul. I do everything from grant-writing to ghostwriting for the money bit and I’m appreciative of all that, but the artists I insist on keeping out of the quicksand of gain. The true gain I get from working on their behalf is so much greater than anything money could buy, and it is a currency that denies the very existence of lesser transactions. Just always remember: wherever you’re buyable, you’re also viable. I live and write entirely by that.
Maybe it’s comical or maybe it’s inspirational, I can’t really tell which or if it’s both, but out of that donkey-like refusal to sully the sentimental seas in my articles about other artists came the relationships that would make the fullest showcasing of my own artistry possible and even lucrative. It’s a symmetrical little conundrum that one! In the last year, I have had the unfathomable privilege to have two full-length poetry manuscripts picked up by two vastly different presses, have written for artists that I have adored as heroes for my entire time on this Earth, and am about eighteen months into what I foresee will be about a 40-month process of production on a nonfiction book focusing on music producers that is the thrill of my life to write! So many of the friendships I have made down this ever-curving rock-n-roll highway all these years have made this book and my curation of it a reality. The internet has habitualized people to want some cutesy little routine or meme-able “program” for becoming a writer of things you love. The truth is, you have to be out there, in the wilds, on the streets, with the chaos and with the quiet too to get anywhere interesting in writing. It doesn’t come because you set your alarm for 5am every morning and make a monotonous chore or commonplace exercise out of something that should be pure inspiration, untouched energy. If there’s a lesson in that for any young writers, I think it must be a thing I always say to everyone in my life and even strangers that I meet: if you will only love things the big, BIG way with no restraint or expectations, every single thing you want in life will drop in your hands like fruit from an unshaken tree.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I have noticed that the coolest and most culturally far-reaching people in any arena are always great curators of life in one way or another, no matter how dishabille they may be in even their subconscious approach to that. I mulishly resist the idea that people need to classify and specify themselves down to just a few things they are known for. I doggedly chase anything I have even a microscopic interest in, and I aim to live long enough to become an expert at all of it. That’s my long-range goal anyway, to be the coolest crone on the block who knows it all! Ha! The people I think the most highly of and most avidly admire throughout history—my parents and grandparents, Greg Gilbert of Delays, Patti Smith, Mark Knopfler, Elizabeth Bowen–they are all so many different things at once, and it’s the starkness of the seeming outside discrepancies between those things that makes you realize that the inside of all of it is exactly the same substance–it’s all just right back to passion and the tireless pursuit of boundless knowledge, experience, and adventure. It’s right back to active curiosity, drive, and the fact that, in anything, the learning comes from the life force you give it.
One thing to know in writing, though, is that you cannot force the zone–that mystical place you drop into when you are not so much composing as you are channeling. It is schizophrenic, modulating, mad energy and you just have to realize that you are lucky on the days it chooses you because it really, truly is never the other way around. The zone can be a sparse reality or a cinematic joke you are playing within the documentary you didn’t realize you were making, but you don’t compel it; it compels you. It is the ringleader; you are the tiger through the flaming hoop, and that’s on the days it doesn’t burn you to a crisp. It definitely comes to you when it wants to, but I do notice that it only comes to me when I am fully and completely able to receive it, and that’s nearly always in the least convenient or predictable time. So, you may sit there and write for five hours in some peckish little way where the sentences have to be carved out as if in marble, and then, all of a sudden, you’ll drop in and everything will start flowing like tidal waves when you are so physically and mentally exhausted that you think you can’t possibly keep up. You will frequently find yourself pulling the car over on a busy industrial highway when you are already seditiously late to be somewhere, just to ensnare some words that seem to have sparked out from the event of the tires hitting the asphalt. Or, you may finally lay down to sleep at 4am only to have “it” kick you in the head at 4:44 with something so torrential that has to be poured out right that same moment or it will be forever lost. The sparkle will go someplace else to be born if you fail to honor its timing. My feeling is that there is no controlling or bridling the zone because it is not owned by the writer in the first place. A smart, good steward of a writer does his or her best simply to lay it down, exactly as received, when the zone says “got something for you.” Sometimes I have found it hard to put my name on what comes out of those moments because I am so hyperaware that I was just the conduit, but I think it’s good for writers to bear in mind that whatever passes through them gets forged in their colors for a reason.
As far as any applicable skills go that are actually transferrable, and without getting too Seinfeldian about it all, I’ve tried very hard to teach myself not to waste precious, non-refundable time or squander the joy in my writing life by questioning whether I “deserve” the things that come to me and through me because of it. My advice is to just “ride the lighting,” as Metallica so wisely first suggested! In fact, do all the Metallica things in life wherever you can…Ha! For myself these days, I’m just out here like the woman-writer version of Ghost in the Loop recording his glaciers with that Tascam Portacapture X8. You go where the sounds are, no matter how far. You do your best to corral the whole thing without compromising any little molecule of it in the process of bending it into word shapes. You give it all away at the end. That’s what writing for musicians you adore is like. That’s what writing in general is like. It’s totally worth all the sweat and any amount of zero sleep.
I also think that, though they have to fight infinitely harder to do so, the proverbial “Fixers” get much, much further at anything they put professional energy toward in life, particularly something as inflected with the heart as proper writing. You know Pearl Jam’s song “The Fixer,” right? Every single lyric, my friends. It took me twice an eternity to learn that being of a mind to go the full distance in any scenario, any distance necessary, no matter how far or how bloody your feet, was not only not remotely the norm for most people, but was, in fact, the rarest color of commitment you’d find in life. If you’re a Fixer—one of those people that wants to find every lost thing and “fight to get it back again”—you’ve got to learn, usually the barbarous way, that a lot of people who are more than happy to take all the repairing wonderment of you they can get at the highest possible frequency for free and for just as long as you’ll give it, are totally unwilling to go into the ring for you, “say your prayers,” or “take your side” once it inevitably comes their rightful turn to do so. I’ve learned via the experiences I’ve had within the unusual freedom that the writing life will give you that luminous things change everything when they show up in any closed environment, and this scares a lot of people, especially those who can’t see their own capability for radiance or don’t have the will, eyes, spine, or whatever else to bend the world to their will. You’ll get very badly hurt trying to put light into some of those corners like that that are hellbent never to brighten if you don’t learn quickly enough who is built to receive and reflect back what you are giving, inside and outside your actual printed words. I still have to slap my own hand away almost daily not to try to help in places where my heart will still want to even where it knows better–but being a Fixer who knows to keep your best wrenches for your own engine is the superpower of them all.
I mean think about who even gave us the song describing that kind of person and that height of alertness–Eddie Vedder–the last survivor of the most giving wave of rock men this world has ever seen. It’s certainly no coincidence. Once you learn to turn all that ultraviolet light inward and give it over to the illumination of its own sources, everything you want that is good for you is drawn to you, you aren’t spending your heart and hopes on people who have no intention to return that kind of higher love to you, and those things you dream of most are pulled by the very thing the non-Fixers were making it their business to feed on and fracture. What I know to an unshakable level of truth now is that what happens when an unflappably deliberate person joins up tightly with a happenstance person is rarely a helpful collision for the deliberate person, and can even be a fatal one in lots of ways. So, all you Fixers out there reading this, just remember: all you’ve got to do is fixate on yourself like you probably want to on someone else! Put your high primarily on the other Fixers you find along the way and the people who live to make your life bigger like you do for everybody around you. It really is the secret of saving yourself and everything else you want to see survive about your instinctive abilities, creative and beyond.
And for the third thing, I stand with both feet planted and rooted by Maya Angelou’s famous quip about courage and what it really means to any life well lived. “Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” I have seen so many horrific outcomes–from the irrevocably physical to the Cy Twombly-level abstract–for people who spent their lives under insecurities they refused to stand up to and beat down. I feel like I’ve witnessed a thousand versions of the shocking self-erosion that always occurs wherever this statement from Lady Angelou isn’t observed, isn’t known, or is ignored. Nothing kills like fear, it always results in lack of a frontier, and you’ll notice if you look closely that a lot of people spend their lives describing the contours of their cage like it’s an open horizon painted in Southwestern sunset pastels…I guess that’s how they cope with what they know is never coming, an actual horizon. I know I couldn’t cope with that, and I wish anyone stuck in that kind of hamster wheel of waste the fastest possible escape, at any cost, and I can pretty fairly guarantee that the cost will always be astronomical-but-beyond-worth-it.
Society will tell women especially to be outspoken only up to the point that they do not become outré. The world as it is presently delineated wants shocking in a straight line, even from its most vaunted vixens. They want explosive at right angles and loud at some preset, linear level that, if you trace the line, you’ll find only ever serves the status quo–which was, of course, established by a male-centric culture. As if women are to mutely make some Faustian bargain with the invisible jury of good grace never to prioritize themselves and their own progress ahead of all things or else be deemed the “wrong” kind of ‘fierce,’ a word I think has come to mean its total opposite in the post-Instagram world. Be fangless fierce but don’t dare actually be ferocious, or fearsome, the expectation says! And don’t take on any attitude at all that doesn’t leave room for boyfriends or babies, whatever you do. No matter how fabulously punkrock your hair is or how ‘iconic’ they’ve crowned you, they still expect you to coo, you know what I mean? And I won’t coo…but I’ll dang sure coup! Ha! The nonsense of it all can be the drag of your life, but I just openly mock all that pretty much every day of mine. I get a residual belly laugh at the way my own confidence in what I’m doing and refusal to do the “tiger-polite” thing so habitually gets mis-received as so-called “savagery” because I have done whatever it is I have done without the common decency of being male while doing it, and meanwhile have been over here adding to that transgression by most often holding a bigger court than all the men in the room combined anyway!….The gall of this glitter, man, I tell you! Ha!
People do get mad and distant when they can’t knock you off yourself, especially with stuff that knocked them sideways—which is always the first bat they’ll try on you, whatever beat them black and blue. Even though I never failed to take that negative reaction you’ll get for being sturdy-footed within yourself as a compliment, I did flounder in soul-bankrupting disbelief and confusion for years on years about the way this kind of unwarranted criticism and rejection–which can show up as anything from a direct attack to a blindsiding abandonment–so often comes from people in your life who really should have been your biggest cheerleaders. It’s not the strangers at all that will crucify your creativity if you don’t brace yourself; it is some of the people you love more than anyone else in this world. All of the traits for which I should’ve been most admired in my life, I have often been most aggressively admonished for, and by people I loved so much I couldn’t even leave them when that was the ground floor of what they deserved. What’s the message of that, then? What’s the lesson? I’m not sure I know, and I have found it borderline impossible to predict who these people are going to be to any foolproof standard, but I do think some people who treat you like that are meant to stay the ghost ships moored just off the ledge of your life. They are both there and not in that place you’ll topple into if you ever draw too close to something you are clearly above again. Maybe just knowing that in a total way, having that extra sting of threat in the memory to quicken your step on your expedition to the good things that are for you keeps you from letting anyone who can’t see colors into the rainbow-gabled houses of your heart ever again. Sugar Ray Robinson said, “To be a champ, you have to believe in yourself when nobody else will.” You need that and a profuse willingness to learn in order to be a magnetic writer. There can be no limits on your learning, ever, because pens and passions break in half on contact with any kind of philosophical barbwire.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
Ohhh, confetti and cripes! You do know that you’re asking this to the fabled Page-Sage of the southeastern vale, right? You’re talking to someone who dreams of a book butler who drives a Bucatti! Ha! Making this a how-much-time-have-you-got kind of question! Ha! I seriously could talk about books until you run screaming from my presence, begging to be put out of your literary and literal misery by the nearest available firing squad or hungry lion, but I can also answer this question extremely succinctly and automatically because there are two books in particular that I have always said were the bookends of my being. Those two are The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. They were both penned by teenaged girls–a fact I cannot believe someone else had to point out to me only a few years ago when more than half of all I’m ever trying to do in my own writing is champion women. The fact my favorite books were brought forth by two transatlantic young female perspectives hadn’t even occurred to me on my own, but realizing it told me so much about why those books affected me the way they did the first time I read them, and the way they continue to shape my sensibilities. I read both of these books for the first time in my 10th-grade year of high school, when I would have been approximately the same age as the authors. It is intriguing to realize that the books that had such a part in making me who I am were both written by young women who were likewise becoming who and what they were destined to become via those same books. Lots of femme self-reckoning going on!
Wuthering Heights was my first proof from the outside world that love at the decibel I had dreamed it in my own head up to that point was not only possible, but imagined by others like me, and also the only way to live up to the biggest meaning of the word in any definition. It was also the book that first radicalized me to the unseen beatitudes of girldom. I was already gleam-toothedly proud not to be a boy, though I loved my male friends more than anything in the world and still do. But the way our Emily wrote the fire and frost of Cathy on the moors was my first recognition of my own nature depicted in the art of another, and another that, seemingly, felt and saw a lot of the same things I did, just 120 years earlier and on a different continent. I encourage every young person to read that book the same second you have the opportunity. Emily and her spiralized narrative will enorm-ify your understanding of the world and lift the ceiling on your life like no other. It actually just makes you know that you don’t have a ceiling, which is even better!
Big ups to Emily also for not being afraid to talk at such a young age about how tiger-like and tyrannical real love always is. It has no manners and needs none, and I love her so much for making no apologies about how animalistic it is! There is an indigenous savagery and a storm atmosphere to it that you see Cathy and Heathcliff trying to protect. If there was a song equivalent to Wuthering Heights it would have to be something like “Wrapped Around Your Finger” by The Police or the Arty Remix of “Hey Now” by London Grammar because both of those songs are all about the shifting tides of the power dynamic and how tidal real love always is, how there’s a palpable, inexorable undertow to it that is felt way past the two people in question. Sadly, I think acknowledging that kind of love in this day and age has been mislabeled “dangerous” or “awkward,” but I do notice people who try to deny in their own lives the truth of what that book is telling tend to end up in stagnant, root-bound relationships of all sorts, more fit for decades of therapy and a quick bust-up rather than groundbreaking literature! Ha! And interestingly enough, I think maybe that people don’t realize that all these modern-day love stories that are so universally popular, like Normal People by Sally Rooney and One Day by David Nicholls, are all just riffs on the very same threads of girl-thought that comprise Wuthering Heights. Over the years, several of my sweet friends have gifted me with breathtakingly beautiful copies of Wuthering Heights in various colored, embossed leathers and such, but I still have my original tattered copy that I bought off my English teacher that very 10th-grade year in a fire-proof box in my house with a lot of other priceless treasures I couldn’t ever bear to lose.
The Outsiders was and remains like the owner’s manual for the siege engine of a life like mine. Of course and predictably, I was totally in love with Ponyboy in the book but Johnny in the film because they cast Ralph Macchio and he was the first great love of my life, and I still totally adore him–Hi Ralph! Ha! For as much as I devoured every single syllable of that book over and over again, just making sure I had left not a morsel of missed meaning anywhere within it, I still wish I had paid more serious attention to one of its most powerful and incontrovertible messages: that cool is measured a really specific way that is totally wordless, and it can’t be grown or lab-created. So, when you see those glaring discrepancies in what a lack of knowledge will bring into any interactions within a differentiated group of people, you absolutely must be prepared for a reaction, usually a damaging one. If you are Ponyboy or Johnny, meaning the emotionally alert and intellectually seeking type, 10 times out of 10 it will be you that pays whatever blood price comes from trying to generate understanding where dogma or immaturity are king.
Ponyboy was the beginning of my understanding of what it would mean to be bookish in a world that prefers brawls. Very much like me, he was in but not of the place he was from, a literary citizen of the world who was thinking far, far afield of the people immediately surrounding him and telling him who to be. The idea of literary citizenship means a lot of things to me, but one of the primary tenets is that a real poet or artist of any kind is always from everywhere and nowhere. You are entirely in and utterly out of all things, and you are operating with a constant awareness of what is going on at the atomic level with the crucial work of your pen-peers all over the globe. I’ve tried to drink in every part of what I’ve gotten from the Costa Rican pura vida ethos to the Italian idea that life is meant to be intense and fruitful to the Japanese shinto silence mantras. I think if people stay put in one lane, no matter what they are into or how they want to move, their lives very quickly begin to lack profundity and I think it needs to be stated out loud that this isn’t the same thing as being “simple,” like you’ll hear some of them call that unenviable condition. Design a life you don’t need a break from and every day becomes both a holiday and a school day, and I absolutely believe that is the way people are meant to live. As Ponyboy found out, albeit in a devastatingly hard way, your brain changes in that kind of open atmosphere where every day is different to the next, and always for the positive. I’m still exclusively partial to the boys like him in real life who have not let biology or the accepted bad habits of others bend their brains. When you’re the only person who believes in what you’re doing, it can be really easy to get slapped out of that belief by the stark reality of the disbelief in others, and if you’re going to make it at anything in life, you can’t let that happen. I’m also keenly aware that both of these books are about a really fine-drawn kind of rebellion. The kind that lasts a lifetime if you’re loyal to yourself.
More recently, and perhaps, even more predictably, Bono’s book, very aptly titled Surrender, has been my resolute rolodex for a life unsurrendered in any but the good ways. I’ve read it all the way through twice, and it sits on my desk with an exploding notebook next to it of quotes and ideas and lessons I have taken out of it. I refer to it like a spiritual dictionary or philosophical thesaurus at least twice a week. Since childhood, Bono has always explained me to myself, but never more so than when he decided to explain himself to himself in full-length form. Someone simultaneously thank him and thump him for being so in my brain! Ha! Bono’s book is Bhagavad-Gitan in its biblicalness, and the allegories it spins on apply to us all. Let me be clear that you could outright hate U2 and still get everything you needed to make much muchness of your life from his words in it. And let me be the most clear in saying that I do so much more than love U2 with all my heart; I live by them with all my heart too. So, that book for me continues to chart the sky.
For some reason, people never expect me to name Sylvester Stallone as a writer of importance in my own creation, but he is. Hugely. I have immense respect for him in general, but an unspeakable amount for the way he wrote his way to the life he wanted—and by hand, no less! When they would not cast him, he wrote the character he knew he deserved and became a timeless cross-cultural icon for it. That’s the way it’s always done, no matter what your art is or style of going may be. I just got back from Philadelphia where I did a reading at the incomparably amazing Harriett’s Book Shop—which every single person on Earth, reader or not, needs to visit immediately, by the way—so I’ve got Rocky on the brain even more than normal. He is the Italian Stallion so I’m going to be The Gaelic Glitter Stick, I’ve decided. Ha! I may not hit as hard, but you might wear the mark of me longer since words are the ultimate weapon, aren’t they? It’s alright; my rhetorical roundhouses will only give you bejeweled bruises that you can wear more than once! Ha!
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Dave Walker
