Today we’d like to introduce you to Dana Miller.
Hi Dana, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in Atlanta on March 1, 1977 at the old Crawford Long Hospital–a Crawford Long birth certificate being something like the old “404” area code when it comes to the ultimate tell for old-school ATLiens who have been here since way before the 70s! My family has been here in Atlanta now for five generations and counting. My Mom grew up in Avondale and worked in animal research at the CDC for the entirety of her career, and my Dad was raised in Little Five Points and Tony Valley in Decatur. He has been a staple of the local Atlanta music scene for over 60 years now, playing guitar professionally for both himself and a long list of other notable musicians who have hired him on as a side man over the years. I was raised in the simultaneous settings of a magical 27-acre horse farm in Dacula, Georgia, and a wonderful suburban home in a lovely subdivision in Marietta, Georgia, running positively and irretrievably wild alongside my younger sister, Lindsey, with free access to ponies, go-carts, swimming pools, trampolines, Girl Scouts, trips to Stone Mountain, and annual themed parties for everything from St. Patrick’s to Halloween that have extended the duration of my life, only intensifying in magnitude the older I have gotten. That tradition of my personality got tied later on to me wanting to emulate my favorite author, Elizabeth Bowen. She was known to be as good at hosting in her giant Anglo-Irish house as she was at writing, and if you are familiar with her oeuvre, you know that’s no small statement. I’m still trying to match her pen-for-pen and am nowhere close, but the 2024 birthday theme has been decided, and it’s “The Last of the First-Wave Grunge Boys.” I never leave those boys in my mind or clothing choices anyway, but it’ll be a day of full homage for everyone else, and I’m torn being going as Layne Staley or Scott Weiland–feel free to come out and hang with us in the flannel world if you like as you’re always invited! As you can probably tell, from my parents and step-parents I have taken a deep and abiding love for pure-hearted fun, books, knowledge, travel, laughter, wildlife, flowers, and most especially: music
When I was in high school, I had my already literary eyes utterly upgraded by two English teachers and one AP Physics teacher—the late and greatest Brenda Pelham, the inimitable and Winnie-the-Pooh-like Michele Berryman, and the tie-dyed legend that is Larry “Doc” Neace, better known as “HCL” to my mad crew of mavericks and me. All of these teachers are still active parts of my life and those that are still on this side of the rainbow still come to those ridiculously over-the-top birthday parties! Maybe that is why I set out that early, at only 14 years of age, to become as much like them as I could. It was truly a simple motive. I just wanted to be as cool as they were.
I graduated from The University of Georgia with my Bachelor’s in English Education in 1999, spending a magical and formative time in 1998 at Oxford University in England as an exchange student. I was a raging Anglophile many, many moons before I made it to Oxford, but that year sealed the spiritual blood bond between me and the United Kingdom forever. Though I spent every waking hour that I wasn’t studying (which, granted, were precious few) roaming the streets fervently looking for Radiohead because I couldn’t get over the electric bliss of being in their hometown, I still say that my dons at Oxford got the best work out of me that I’ve ever produced, literary, academic, or otherwise and I’ve gone back to both the town and the University nearly every three years since. Oxford elevated not just my mind but my entire aesthetic way of going in the world irreversibly. Once you know that people can be that extraordinary, it is impossible to look back and, frankly, I found it a waste of time to want anything less than the level of acute interest, alive-mindedness, and general greatness that is the absolute norm there.
What I gleaned from Professor Fiona Stafford of Somerville College and the much-missed late Dr. David Bradshaw of Worcester College about so much more than just the Shakespeare and the Virginia Woolf that they were respectively teaching me could not be measured by any instrument or scale currently available to humankind. I can only say with assurance that everyone deserves teachers like this, and if I had it within my power to provide the likes of a Bradshaw or Stafford to each person on the planet, I would do so in a split second or less. It is likewise written into my last will and testament that my mortal stardust is to haunt those hallowed grounds as well when the time comes for me to head on over and check on Tom Petty and Kurt Cobain. The relationship between my entire life force and the specialness of Oxford is something that will extend past my life because that is just the density of it.
I got my Master of Arts in English Literature from Georgia State University when I got home, and I completed all of my coursework for my Doctorate in Modern Irish Literature while I was working my first two teaching jobs. At that time, I was working for the Gwinnett County School System at approximately 65 hours per week, driving down to Atlanta every night to take my graduate classes, getting home around midnight each evening, and then getting back up again at 4am to do it all over. I mention that only because people have always made much of my so-called “energy” levels but, to me, Mach 6 has always been a normal speed for a slow day, and that’s been true no matter who I was working for or what I was doing. I’ve always been on rock-n-roll time, a true night owl who gets 9+ winds long after 9pm, so none of this has ever fazed me, and I’m slightly uncomfortable taking any kind of social accolade for it. I just felt like it was what anyone does to get what they want in life: work.
What I wanted shifted greatly and unexpectedly during my time teaching because I came to learn the hardest way anyone could that there was no landscape set up anymore to welcome the rockstar teachers like the ones that had raised me. I adored my students and my subject in equal measure, and I made this known in my every word and deed, very often going staunchly and defiantly against what the administration would have misnamed as “permission” to do. From my standpoint, I was in that school under a strict contractual obligation to one holy thing only: the enhancement of the individual lives of the people sitting in my classroom. As far as I was concerned, the seriousness of that exchange not only had nothing to do with the out-of-touch suits in the big office but was also none of their business.
When it got to a point that I was fighting tooth and nail every hour of my work day just to give my students the same kinds of experiences that had so molded me–trips to the Shakespeare Tavern, candlelit readings of MacBeth, excursions to The Renaissance Festival–I knew it was time for my heart to admit what I think my head must have known way before my mouth could say it. I was in a futile war. I taught at Georgia Military College and Brown Mackie College for a short time after I left public school just to see if the spark that could accept the sparkle might be living someplace else scholastic. While I met and befriended incredible, priceless people at all these places, nothing that needed to be exercised about whatever I had to give was even getting three steps out of the paddock in the world of Pedagogy.
I have always been a writer. Any member of my family can tell you how early that started or show you the crudely written lists I would make from age five forward of everything from things I wanted to name my future pets to other countries in which I intended to live (England, of course, being one of them). So, it’s funny and informative to examine how I was so strong-willed and crystal-clear about what I was and what I could do, yet I had never allowed myself even the interior thought that I could do any of it as a profession, nor ever considered that anyone would care to see me do that (least of all me). I started writing professionally on the side while I was still teaching as a means of saving my brain, really, from the doldrums I was living in at work every day. I slowly built my writer’s portfolio in those early days by writing for bands like The Muffs, The Raconteurs, Royal Blood, and Skegss whenever I got the chance. Because of my Dad and my long history of going to every show of any band I loved up and down the East Coast for simply decades, it wasn’t long before my personal and professional threads within music began not just to overlap but to start weaving intricate tapestries I could not have conceived of even with my famously feral imagination.
Before I knew it, I had gone from seeking out the PR companies and managers that took care of the bands I loved to being contacted directly multiple times per day by those same companies and managers on their bands’ behalf. The honor and privilege of that has never left me. Every day that I hear from one of these irreplaceable musicians that they would like me to sprinkle a bit of glitter-ink on something that they are doing–an album, a tour, a song, a video–I am overwhelmed with joy at being asked.
It took me far longer than I think it should have to realize that I was in a unique position to offer something different to the bands I loved the most, but it took me no time at all to realize that this feeling of intense unity and limitless love that comes whenever I am writing for them is how we should all feel about the way we spend our time on this Earth. I have been “living by my pen,” as Jane Austen would say, for 15 years now and I feel like with the particular timbre of the work I’ve done, if anyone was going to say I had a signature, it would be that I have married the Goonie fun of my childhood with the dual educations in music and higher callings that I got from my parents and Oxford.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Goodness, no. Even the glass countertop of my coffee table isn’t smooth! Ha! I have had a great many steep challenges in my life and career, and I am by no means inattentive or careless enough to believe that those are all behind me. Life is a spectrograph, not a line chart, and I’m sure there will be more hurdles to jump. What the ones I have endured and survived thus far have taught me, unequivocally, is that you really do have to bet on yourself. No matter who you think you have standing next to you when the rubber meets the road, it is only you who can do the work. Only you can push hard enough to make something exceptional happen of your talents, and only you will have to answer for what people get wrong about your abilities and the extent to which they will try to punish you for their mistakes.
If I were to distill my greatest problems in life down to something palatable, I would say it is the misconceptions of what I am that have been heaped on me by people who had no intention whatsoever of doing the work to see or feel what I actually am. I have learned that the world at large exacts a heavy price for women who live cleanly, willfully, and totally outside of the paradigms of girlfriend, wife, mother, nurturer, and so forth. People have a difficult and divided time understanding a woman who is moved by none of the above, and I’ve always been that woman. I’m listening to something else–something on a wider frequency–and while I foolishly spent the greater part of the first half of my life bold-faced assuming everyone was independent to that same degree, it took me some super-hard knocks to learn that not only were they not, they were going to vociferously work out their various projected insecurities about their own distance from that kind of freedom on me because I did have it. That has taken the form of everything from shockingly two-faced friends and partners, people with agendas even they were not conscious yet of having, public slander, verbal and physical attacks, and even hard-boiled attempts at professional decimation and character assassination.
I suppose this may be another place of interest for you. Even when I was living in the worst hell of it all, I still always wore it like a gleaming merit badge of cool. I knew they wouldn’t be after me if I was like them, and as being nothing like them has always been top of mind in my efforts to assert myself, both inside the world of art and out, I knew this was a good thing at root. Emotional and physical scars are just the prices you pay for standing apart and standing on your own two feet. I only regret that I believed so much in so many of those kinds of people for so long. I feel that it wasted many, many viable years of my life that I could have been doing the kinds of things I’m doing now and much more. That is okay, though. I am still doing all of it with vigor, and I’ve learned now where the quicksand is when it comes to those who want me to serve as their quickie emotional lackey. I don’t give those kinds of people space inside my glitter galaxy anymore.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I write evergreen, long-form, love-driven journalism for creative people who have rightly come to believe they should avoid journalists. I also write poetry, essays for publications great and small, and am in the middle of a full-length nonfiction work on music producers that is taking me all over the globe to interview the invisible rockstars who have made all your favorite records sound the way they do, people like Anthony J. Resta, Craig Bauer, Paul Mabury, Larry Klein, James Chapman, Wayne Conolly, Cian Boylan, Bob St. John, Rodney Mills, and Steve Lillywhite, to name but an iridescent handful. The producers’ book is currently my main focus in the ink world, but I also routinely write about Irish cultural matters, films, and artists of every stripe atop my music journalism.
When I am writing for another artist, I write like an apostle, not an academic. Maybe people think my vocabulary is dripping the OED all over their nice tennis shoes, but I just write what I see, and I’m like Dave Grohl in the face of Lemmy about it–everything is a huge deal, and I truly feel that big-dealness down to my smallest atom. It is not an act. I try to render it to the page in the same style that Tak Fujimoto approached cinematography–like it was his job to show the sweet secret that the vista didn’t know you needed to know to grasp all its colors. If anything sets me apart from my peers, it must be that I don’t think proper praise is pretentious. I know praise, either denied or too freely given, to be responsible for nearly all human foibles and failings. Real praise, the kind that relies on no poisonous politesse from any party, is the highest thing worth writing on behalf of another human for. I was inordinately fortunate to be raised under a bottomless blanket of such praise, and thus it became my most reflexive, natural, and automatic response to great art, especially great music, and unforgettably special humans. I’m also from a time when people were not fearful of delineations and rungs on ladders, and I’m still not afraid of those things. I will call them what they are, not what people who have strange relationships with them wish they were. My writing is about people not forgetting how to be surprised, how to look up the right way (the way that is going to serve them), and how to go on life-changing adventures–even if they can’t physically get very far from home.
You know, when you’re looking at your desk and the things you’re trying to wrangle out of it day after day, you want it to mean something permanent. I insist on that in all things, not just my work. No one has time to spend on temporal things that fluctuate with some fad shift or some flippant person’s unexamined mood. I don’t write for those moments or those people. I write things that will stay, for the artist, for myself, and for any generations to come. My work is associated with a certain elfin esperance that I perceive quite a collection of my colleagues in this industry find not just abominably quaint but fully obnoxious! Ha! I can’t help them. I don’t ever think about them, and they certainly don’t have to read what I write. I think about music and my musicians only and about capturing what it all means in the big portrait of human life. All I’m concerned about is telling the truth in the most beautiful way possible, with the widest lens, with the tallest nod to Keatsian Romanticism, and capturing these unbelievably multi-faceted musicians to their maximum diamond-shine.
If I am different to my peers, it is only because I’m the observer who is also the do-er in that world, and my subjects instinctively know that. There is some kind of bloom-inducing alchemy that happens when a musician knows they are being closely looked at with admiration and understanding by another musician. It’s a very different feeling, I think, than being prodded in the terrarium bowl of a soundproof pen wielded by someone who treats you, even good-heartedly, like an exotic pet and who doesn’t really know what to feed you. Most of the writers in the music journalism sphere are not players, and, in too many tragically ridiculous cases, they are people who have unstated personal vendettas and internal hangups against musicians for being able to do what they cannot, both onstage and off. This results in a great ocean of venomous verbiage both online and in print that I simply have no wish to be associated with, refuse to acknowledge as valid, and will never participate in. My feeling is, if you don’t like a band, don’t write about them. The world needs no more vitriol and there are plenty of starving bands out there who would love to have your attention. If you are going to write about a band or a person, you should write from a place of love even if you don’t personally love the band or the person. You have to remember that someone does love that band or person. In most cases, lots of people do. Write like you’re talking directly to those people (because you are) and you’ll be in a good place with all souls involved, but perhaps most especially your own.
I can’t comprehend what some writers get out of the backstabbing, cruelty, doublespeak, and ugly commentary they print about people who have had the guts to put their true selves into a creative form. I can assure anyone who does not already know it that such a thing is an act of small, sheer valor and one any person ought to be commended for attempting. This is not to say that everything that goes to ink not be founded on telling it like it is, not sugar-coating it like the corroded contemporary believers in faux-compliments would have it. I think the only true kindness in this life is the raw truth, told at full volume all the time, and I am pretty sure I am every bit as notorious in my field for a kind of radical openness that a lot of people are terrified to allow even in their private minds, much less on the page. This is the ultimate prize I am always writing to achieve–the distilled purity of a person, thing, moment, or song. The untouchably brilliant Tracy K. Smith said she wrote for “people who are weary of the limits of our conventional logic, our habitual terms of regard.” Me too, darling Tracy, and I could not ever say it better.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Absolutely everyone and everything, including the ongoing international cost of living crisis, will tell you “no,” but you must tell yourself an emphatic “yes” every single morning and be ready to mean it with your whole heart. Meaning it means a smorgasbord of things; it is a coat of many sacrificial colors but if any of this feels like sacrifice to you, you need to be doing something else. Love of the music and the work, in that order, have to be your only reasons. You have to be not just ready to work when everybody else is at their party height, you have to be half-drunk on the idea that you are working even when it seems like you are off. U2 weren’t kidding when they said “Midnight is where the day begins,” and you’ll be astonished at what you get done when you embrace the eccentricity of that lyrical truism. Grow out of the concept of weekends as fast as you can. As Henry Rollins already perfectly pointed out for all time: “there is no such thing as free time; all you have is life time.” Act and write accordingly.
Reading should become a full-on compulsion for you, a welcome and life-giving addiction, if it isn’t already. You will have to read twenty outstanding pages at least to gain the velocity in your verbs that will be needed for every one page of your own if you want your work to stand up next to the best. If you don’t read, you will find that you are in possession of neither the words nor the will to find your way in the authorial aerie. As a writer, you will be engaged in something highly analog, sincere, and individual in a world that has willfully forgotten what all of those words mean. Writing is a quiet, resolute, and intensely singular life, but there is more in it than can be found in any ten lives lived other ways. Trust the wild in the silence and the silence in the wild. It’s the only way to coax all of it into your hand.
It sounds like a Disney sentiment, and perhaps it should be, but if you will just have the courage to love things the Big way, and if you are willing to outwork everybody, especially the version of you that existed yesterday, everything you ever wanted will drop in your hands in time. Writing well is a mule’s labor. Mules make the most strugglesome and heavy things look effortless and light as sunshine on a crow’s back. They also remain proud to be mules in a world that very often no longer appreciates what long ears and strong backs are for. Wielding a pen for a living in this century is like that. Plenty will find your schedule and entire lifestyle scandalous. Ignore them. You will never be criticized by anyone doing more than you, and those doing less will never realize that that fact alone is all they are really scandalized by. Be prepared to have better friends and more hilarious memories than anyone you know.
Remember that your word is your wand. What you write will go into the official record of two lives, the people you are writing for and yourself. Keep in mind that a writer is, essentially, a professional rememberer. What you say will, to many, become instant historical fact just for the fact of it being printed. None of this is erasable and the responsibility has weight to it, so don’t conjure spells with that ink sword that you will ever want to break. Make sure everything that comes out of your hands is in the service of the artist, the art, yourself, and the truth that wears no inner armor. This is all far more work than it sounds like, but if you are writing for the right reasons, it will never feel that way, and when you come to the end of your life there will be almost no days behind you that are not in some way still living. What more halcyon legacy could anyone ever attain? Writing is frozen time, silvered by focused frenzy, and we wordsmiths are the watchmen on the wall. It is our job to see what no one does and then to turn that supra-sight into sustainable syllables.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://danalynnmiller.com/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stereojunglechild/
- Other: https://muckrack.com/dana-miller-77, https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/never-nee-fey-by-dana-miller/
Image Credits
Hector Amador – Lead Image, Heavy Metal/Garden Image, and Guitar Image Emmanuel Akinintire – Printz Board
