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True StoriesPhilip Danze: First Novel for Copy Editor
Philip Danze grew up in Queens, where he attended parochial schools and devoted himself to baseball. Scouted three times by the Cubs, Giants and Yankees, he seemed headed for a career in professional baseball. But when the letter came asking him to report for spring training, he decided not to go. By now, he was enrolled at New York University taking night classes, while he worked for his father, a manufacturer of custom furniture. "I had started out at NYU as a pretty desultory student," he recalls, "The war was just over; everything was evolving." In search of the exotic burl mahoganies and rosewood veneers used to create desks and breakfronts for the likes of David Rockefeller and others, Philip traveled up and down the coasts of Central and South America. New York University was then "the center of a literary renaissance," as he recalls it, a time when Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Issac Rosenfield, and Philip Rahv were on the faculty, and Dylan Thomas, Robert Penn Warren, Alfred Kazin, Max Eastman, Mary McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor were regular guests. Saul Bellow was one of his teachers, and they became friendly. "I showed him the stories I was writing, and he gave me his blessing; said I would be a writer some day. I took that very seriously. It made [a career as a writer] something real. Stretching a single into a double didn’t seem important compared to that." Following marriage, Phil Danze moved to Staten Island where his two sons were born. The family ultimately settled in Manalapan, New Jersey. He went to work as a editor for Fairchild Publications (Conde Nast), where he remains (as copy editor on Footwear News) on a three-day schedule he negotiated in 1995. He was at Fairchild in 1972, the year the company added computers, and he spent "the next 12 years perfecting a system -- using a computer the size of a refrigerator -- that would be overturned" by the advent of the PC. "We were the first publishing company to computerize our systems," he recalls. "It was a good time, exploratory, breaking new ground." These, as well as his earlier travel experiences, surface in his fiction. CONJURING MAUD is set in Colonial West Africa at the turn of the century; its narrator traces his relationship with a British explorer to London, and back to Africa. Danze has been working since the 1970s on "a large work -- about six books in one" titled IN THE SHADOW OF THE LIONS that mixes early electronic communications with the search for oil on the mythical island of San Christobal. "The Lions are the lions of society, those who change society because of what they do," he says. CONJURING MAUD "was like taking a rib out of the big novel. Eventually, it became a novel in itself." The author also completed a novel set in 1939 that predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was turned down. Philip Danze works three days a week at Fairchild Publications. He starts his fiction writing at 5 a.m. each morning and also writes at night after work. He gave up going away on vacation because he didn't like to be away from his desk for long periods of time, and found he was more productive doing landscaping chores around his house. GreyCore Press picked his work out of hundreds of other submissions. Saul Bellow has agreed to write a jacket note. Getting Started GreyCore Press Conjuring Maude (GreyCore Press, 2001) Directory of Small Press/Magazine Editors & Publishers (Directory of Small Press/Magazine Editors & Publishers, 31st Edition) ed. Leon Fulton. Got a book in you trying to come out? Check out Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Shambhala Publications, 1998) Home | True
Stories Copyright 2001 2Young2Retire.com, All Rights Reserved
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What
does it take to become a published novelist? Perseverance and an unflagging belief in
one’s talent were two qualities that kept Philip Danze writing, despite a number of
close calls with some of the large publishing houses. He has been writing fiction since he
was at New York University during the "literary renaissance" of the 50s, and
"hasn’t had a vacation for 30 years." On September 21, 1999, he got a phone
call from GreyCore Press (Pine Bush, New York) and heard words he remembers vividly:
"Oh my gosh, this is really something." In October 2001, GreyCore Press
will publish Danze’s first novel: CONJURING MAUD.