An Inspired Chat with Dana Miller

We recently had the chance to connect with Dana Miller and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Dana, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: Have you stood up for someone when it cost you something?
Wow, this is such a fabulous question for so many layered reasons…not least because of what it reveals about anyone who answers it truthfully. For me, it’s a supremely loaded one too because loyalty and valor are the two cornerstones on which I base all of my connections to anybody, personal or otherwise. I’ve recognized a lot of people in my life that I once thought to be friends to be the exact opposite for the very reason that they did not stand up for me when they had not just the chance but the responsibility to do so, or worse yet, they were happy to have me stand up for them every day in a way that they were unwilling to return the favor for when it came their time to do so. With that in mind, I’d say the person I’ve stood up best for in life is myself, and at a high cost but one that I would pay over and over because of the dividends it eventually gives back. Across the trajectory of my life, I’ve had to defend myself from wrong-headed ideas of who and what I am, from close-minded thoughts about what free women of any kind–but especially my kind–can and should be, and from my own undeveloped vision of myself in my younger years. I think integrity is always costly, but particularly where it serves anyone’s highest potential. I’ve learned that the world does not like for you to choose yourself, especially if you are a woman who has scoffed at what the traditional feminine template offers. And that is precisely why everyone, of every gender, should never fail to do just that–to choose yourself. Stand up for the you that you haven’t even met yet because you’re going to be so impressed with that person later.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I have to say that I routinely giggle at this day and age’s use of the word “brand!” If I am indeed a “brand,” it’s the most off-market, back-alley, vintage-inspired, DIY, analog-archivist, flea-market-couture thing in the world. I don’t know that I am a brand but by trade and by passion, I am definitely an inkling, a highway-hewn penwoman living a double-barreled life in words and music. That means different things on different days, but mostly it just means that I am perennially putting pen to paper in every medium, in every arena, in every direction. For others I compose everything from grant applications to ghostwritten memoirs to garish website print. I write rock journalism, art reviews, restaurant love letters, and anything related to STEM subjects and scholarly, sirenic female authors, particularly Irish ones. My own imprint is called Strawberryfin Sounds and in that realm what I produce for myself ranges from books of poetry to endless lists to the giant coffee table tome on music producers I have been creating totally on my own for nearly four years. Whatever I am doing, it is done with sparkles afoot!

Okay, so here’s a deep one: What did you believe about yourself as a child that you no longer believe?
That it wasn’t me who was the artist in the room. I spent an inordinate portion of my youthful years, all the way to age 38 actually, marveling in un-motived joy and admiration at the people around me that I believed were the “real artists.” I loved a lot of very real ones but never even considered that it might be because I was anything like them, and I also thought so many people befitting of the title of “artist” who showed in one way or another later that they never had been. All the while, I had many of those same people, as well as the best of my wonderful friends and members of my family like my sister, telling me in word and deed that perhaps I ought to look in the mirror if I was hunting that special species that was truly willing to bleed in the street for what they believe, for what they want to create–for what they must bring to fruition. The worst thing to me is to be a dabbler at daring. I never dabbled, only because I had this immovable idea that I was fully capable instilled and elevated by my parents and grandparents, coupled with a pretty radical dose of DNA-drawn rebellion. I’m so grateful for both of those elements in my nature because, as I’ve gotten older, and gone further into my natural field, I have found that these are traits that cannot ever be bought, sold, curated, or generated artificially and they are also the ones that give the most. I think an adventuresome spirit and the belief that the world is there for you to paint magic across are the “it” factors that override everything else when it comes to artistic achievement and “success” as it could be fairly defined.

What did suffering teach you that success never could?
It certainly taught me who my real-deal ride-or-die friends are and who they never had been. Spoiler alert, kids: it’s almost never who you think it is! While those lessons were some of the most fraught and heartbreaking of my life, I would not trade anything for them because without them there is no question I would have lived on in total love-built delusion about who I could rely on for the rest of my life. While that honest ignorance would surely have been more mentally blissful, it would have made my entire life a lie. Whether I ever came to know that it was a lie is irrelevant to me. The fact that I lived quite widely for 38 years before I figured that crucial lesson out is both sad and inspiring to me. I do honor the younger versions of myself who trusted at those highest levels, which is to say at the levels I was giving and continue to give. I also protect that version of me now with quiet-but-vicious litmus tests that do not allow folks near me who would take and take and take of that trusting spirit. I am proud not to have lost that energy through some of the harsh things I’ve lived through, and it’s an ongoing study for me to keep finding ways to allow that innocence to step out into the world with its newfound, shiny, knight-in-skeptical-armor bodyguard. I refuse to ever stand down to the low expectations and selfish standards of some of the people who have done the worst damage to my life, but I’ve found that the best way to dust those people and experiences into the appropriate rearview is to march forth with exactly what they tried to grasp and strangle…the innocence that they cannot replicate, reduce, or even touch.

I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
That the truth is never unkind. What is always unkind is a lie, even some of the white ones. I am very much of the opinion, and it was hard-won and hard-proven for me, that everyone needs to do their own emotional labor. You don’t get to blame others for how you feel about yourself, consciously or subconsciously. Unless someone is outright screaming at you, hitting you, or otherwise being violent in word or deed, it is not “their” words or “their” deeds that “made” you do or feel anything. It is only you and what you have not confronted in yourself yet. I have found that the vast majority of people don’t want the responsibility of owning their own nonsense as it is so much easier and more socially acceptable not to. When someone in your life holds up a mirror to you, that person is not attacking you, they are giving you the best gift you could ever receive from anyone and you should be thankful to them because the alternative is that you continue as the lowest common form of yourself…and why would that ever be okay by you? Why would that constitute friendship for someone to let you be that? Your best friends are not those that you “have things in common with” or that tell you how great you are. It’s those people who look at you honestly no matter what situation you are in, but particularly when your situation is not ideal. Those that will call you out and ask you difficult questions, not those that smile politely and agree. What happens is that being around people who make you more honest with the world has the secondary effect of making you more honest with yourself, and that is quite literally the most important thing there is when it comes to the quality of your life and what you choose to do with it.

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. What false labels are you still carrying?
There are a couple of really, truly negative ones that were shockingly and wrongly affixed onto the surface of my life by people who honestly had no business ever being in my life to start with. Those people were there at my invitation before I knew that people would come to your birthday parties, so to speak, for reasons other than that they loved you dearly. Back in those years before I realized that you can only give the big, limitless love to those few and rare in life who have the inner architecture to receive it, I let a lot of people near me who came to call me many salacious things later, and all because they could not give a name to whatever it was inside themselves that being near the eternal motion of my life had made them reflect differently on. It’s amazing what folks will try to make you accountable for that has nothing to do with you but everything to do with them. Especially their own inertia when they are looking at you run at Mach 10. While I hate that all of that happened, I do not in any way wear the mislabeling given by the misguided, no matter how they try to force me…and believe me, they try awfully hard to this day! Those are battles I am still waging, leeches I am still throwing off. I am no great guru of wisdom on these matters by any means, and I consider myself a constant student in all things, but what I know for certain from those dark experiences is that the best means of discarding what does not belong to you is to be super clear about what does…and I am lucky beyond belief to have been raised to know what those things are, and who I will always be inside them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://danalynnmiller.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stereojunglechild/
• Other: Muck Rack: https://muckrack.com/dana-miller-77