My interest in taboos led me to this unique columnist with McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Dani Burlison. Read the following interview and discover new types of taboos, how to write about them and how to become a succesful writer:
A non-stop-writing taboo-unlocking armchair anthropologist
“Don’t stop writing and don’t try to be something you’re not.” Columnist Dani Burlison stopped writing once during her young adult years, because a boyfriend read her work and told her it was “awful.” When she started again, she felt embarrassed to show her work to anyone. In spite of now receiving six rejection letters over the past two weeks, she learned her lesson and will never stop writing again.
Burlison began her obsession with reading at the age of 4. She shamelessly labels herself as the “nerd” in the advanced reading classes she took in school. When she ran out of books in between visits to the library, she would write her own stuff. This evolved into a passion for writing poetry in her teenage years, until the boyfriend made her stop writing for several years. Getting back on the horse wasn’t easy, but many years and ups and downs later, in the fall of 2011, she became runner-up in the annual column contest with the publishing company McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
Mid-life crisis turning into a columnist career
At the time she entered the contest, Burlison’s life was at a crossroad. “I guess since I am in my late thirties you could call it a mid-life crisis,” she says. She was urgently looking for a way to improve her chances of making money as a writer and was considering going back to school for an MFA (Master of Fine Arts). When she became runner-up, she thought to herself, “F*** more grad school and more student loans! Writing for McSweeney’s is better than any of that.” And that was the beginning of an unlocking of social taboos through the written word.
Dendrophilia and other social taboos
Burlison is fascinated by “the weird s*** that people are into.” Talking about these things that might be too “odd” or “uncomfortable” to talk about is exactly the idea behind her column, which she describes as a brutally honest, humorous anthropological study of people.
The column “Dendrophilia and Other Social Taboos” is named after one of the oddest and most painful taboos, Burlison can think of. Dendrophiliacs are people who have sex with or are aroused by trees. “I’ve actually met a few people who have done this, although they were on LSD or something,” she says.
Humor as an essential ingredient
Burlison emphasizes the characteristic humorous edge that she wraps around the social taboos. She describes herself as a humoristic armchair anthropologist, self-taught herbalist, closet singer, soon to be beekeeper, and a hippie with a pagan-leaning outlook on life and a penchant for indie rock, hip hop, tattoos, good beer and gossip. In one of her columns she refers to herself as a feminist and also recently tweeted a link to a video discussing females’ roles in the Oscar movies.
Above all though, she sees herself as a single mom having a blast with her two daughters. “The other day I was banging away on deadlines and one daughter was working on her novel or drawing and the other was working on an incredible sculpture for an upcoming art show and we were all singing along to Elvis Costello and Built to Spill. It was one of the happiest moments of my week,” she recalls.
Inspirational voices
Other than finding a great deal of inspiration in her daughters, she finds the greatest inspirations are the voices of songwriters. “Tom Waits lives nearby and whenever I see him I try to brush up against him to snatch some of his creative energy. I know it sounds creepy but he’s like this magical creature,” she says.
She also subscribes to writer Nick Flynn on Facebook, and when she questions if her writing is too much, she often finds herself thinking “What would Nick Flynn do?” However, Burlison weighs evolving her own style of writing and encourages others to do the same: “It is great to have writers we look up to but we should never, ever try to write like them. I really believe that each person has his or her own voice.”
She believes the best way to find your own voice is to never stop writing and that her own written voice is still developing – and probably always will be. Therefore, Burlison will never stop writing, regardless of what her boyfriends say or the number of rejection letters she receives.
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Burlisons column can be found here.
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