WOW

My best friend Dana from Junior High (who is still back in Illinois) had the sweetest brother Dan. I haven't thought nor heard from him in 25 years. He found me on Facebook, and is, himself, a writer in Chicago.
He is as sweet as ever and I was mouth agape, when I got this thoughtful email from him today after he checked out my blog.
I am grateful and inspired.
**not to mention impressed with his writing as well just in a personal email, I can see his gift as well.
Thank you Dan.
xo


Trenny,

I spent a good couple hours this morning reading your blog and watching the YouTube clips that accompany your text. I must say that you have something here. You think like a punk Joan Didion and I'd say your journalism degree was worth the sweat.

This is only my reading of your work. Though, your prose is strong enough that I feel I must comment because good writing comes along so infrequently on blogs and you really need to start working-up longer pieces. Anyway, here goes my comments and (again) I hope you don't take my reading as anything more than my reading. Life has taught me that truth is perception and most times its best to stick with your stomach.

Firstly, you have quite a voice. You write in simple, declaritive sentences and waste no words. In fact, you write as if each word must be there and it works because you are careful never to clutter your sentences with useless adjectives. An old man editor at Picador once told me that you can tell a natural writer by the athleticism of their sentences. When I asked him what he meant, he just laughed--this guy helped edit Hemingway's last bad novels--and told me that good writers use their verbs like adjectives. You have that gift. I hope you go longer with it. You can write an impressionistic sentence without using an artificial adjective and that is the first major mountain in writing long-form prose.

I see that you already have an idea for a longer piece about why it took you so long to appreciate Bruce Springsteen. If you think about this for a minute, you can truly tell your story while you answer the larger question of how you came to like the carmel-dipped boss. That entry strikes me because I had the same long journey to seeing him as relevant. In fact, he almost embarrassed me and I would walk out of rooms where his songs played. I'd left at 17 and went wandering around the earth and the last thing I wanted to hear was some guy singing about my step-father getting drunk at Skinny's Tap. One day, about 15 years ago, my friend gave me NEBRASKA before I left Ireland and I listened to it while I drove around East Bradley waiting to pick Lauren up from school. "Atlantic City" got my eyes wet right on Broadway and Kennedy Drive in that busted-out factory town ("Put your best dress on. Put your hair up pretty. And meet me tonight in Atlantic City"). It struck me that everything I hated about Springsteen was what I'd spent every day since I was 17 running from: "guys in ripped jeans" as you wrote. Once I realized where I was from, I started writing about it, and my struggle for publication ended. Not that you have to write about families of war veterans, but you have a particular experience in Kankakee that sent you to NYC to find your true self and live your life. If you were to make the Springsteen blog into a longer piece, you should wrap it around some biographical story. Joan Didion does this kind of work in her essay collection SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM. She writes wonderfully about being a young woman in New York when she was really from California's Salinias Valley (farm country like Kankakee). She is great because she became elegant and beautiful and still wrote about loving to walk barefoot amongst the rows of the summer corn.

Mostly, I enjoyed how you used a short anecdote and then had a YouTube clip to make your point. When you wrote of videos (videos I remember you and sis watching in East Bradley) you were the strongest because you often related them back to an interesting biographical point. You meld self and cultural analysis together and balance things in this gray area between squint-eyed irony and sweet nostalgia. If those ideas could translate onto paper, which I think they could, you'd really have something that was both critically-sound and commercial. Remember, I am a literary novelist, the kind who can only sell 50K copies, and not an editor or an agent. But I've been doing the tango with NY Publishing for ten years--which is a minefield at times--and I know what sells at the publishing companies.

I urge you to start the slog of a book. After you pick your best ideas from the blog, you really should sit down and start that shitty first draft--I'm writing one now--which will turn into a good second and fine third but the fourth is sweet like almond gellato in Siracusa. You are a talented writer, Trenny. You can do just as good as half the people I know in publishing. And, the time to write is easy. All I've ever done is two hours in the early morning (optimal), but I write other times when things change. The idea is to just give two hours a day to your work and then leave it alone for the next day. My advice would be to think of a book of related personal essays that also contain some kind of larger political, cultural, or social frame. Your best blog entries do this already, but I'm not going to prejudice your pick so I won't tell you what I liked the most (there were many).

Sorry for the long email. This is my profession so I got pretty excited when I read your work and I saw so many ideas for book of inter-related personal essays. Let me know what you think. In the meantime, just focus on strolling little Jack through the Met and stopping before Pollack's LAVENDER MIST and letting the little guy just stare and follow the dribbles of thrown paint with his gnome eyes.

Best,

Dan