Coming Late 2017
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Welcome from DM Denton
2017
My full name is Diane M Denton (nee DiGiacomo), a native of Western New York. As an author and artist, I find my voice in poetry and prose, in silence and retreat, in truth and imagination. Through observation and study, inspired by music, art, nature and the contradictions of the creative spirit, I love to wander into the past to discover stories of interest and meaning for the present, writing from my love of language and the belief that what is left unsaid is the most affecting of all.
My writing life began as a child retreating into stories and poems. Early on I developed an interest in history, while my participation in and appreciation of music was encouraged through memories shared about my maternal grandmother, who was a concert pianist and monologue entertainer known throughout Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. My early pursuits also included drawing and painting—and acting, which I eventually gave up, admitting that my inclination for drama was better written than acted out, my imagination more consistent than my courage.
My writing life began as a child retreating into stories and poems. Early on I developed an interest in history, while my participation in and appreciation of music was encouraged through memories shared about my maternal grandmother, who was a concert pianist and monologue entertainer known throughout Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. My early pursuits also included drawing and painting—and acting, which I eventually gave up, admitting that my inclination for drama was better written than acted out, my imagination more consistent than my courage.
Reaching out to the thinker, dreamer & aesthete ...
1971
My educational journey took me from Theater Arts and Communication at SUNY Brockport, to a History and Literature major at Daemen College (formerly Rosary Hill College) in Amherst, NY; culminating in a dream-fulfilling semester at Wroxton College, England (run by Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey), not far from Stratford Upon Avon, Warwick, Woodstock, Oxford, as well as the picturesque Cotswolds.
Not least because of a fateful encounter, I impetuously remained in Wroxton for sixteen years—a yellow-stoned village with thatched cottages, a duck pond, and twelfth century church and abbey turned Jacobean manor house. I lived, for better or worse, right off the pages of Fielding, the Brontes, Austin, Hardy, DH Lawrence, and even Dickens, surrounded by the beautiful hills, woods and fields of the Oxfordshire countryside, and all kinds of colorful characters. This truly turned out to be a life-changing experience that resonates in my personal and professional endeavors to this day.
I returned to the US in 1990, to a rural area of Western New York State where I reside in a cozy log cabin, with my eighty-something mother and a multitude of cats.
Not least because of a fateful encounter, I impetuously remained in Wroxton for sixteen years—a yellow-stoned village with thatched cottages, a duck pond, and twelfth century church and abbey turned Jacobean manor house. I lived, for better or worse, right off the pages of Fielding, the Brontes, Austin, Hardy, DH Lawrence, and even Dickens, surrounded by the beautiful hills, woods and fields of the Oxfordshire countryside, and all kinds of colorful characters. This truly turned out to be a life-changing experience that resonates in my personal and professional endeavors to this day.
I returned to the US in 1990, to a rural area of Western New York State where I reside in a cozy log cabin, with my eighty-something mother and a multitude of cats.
Writing on a TYPEWRITER!
1970/71
Now finished and set for publication in late 2017
... a novel about the poet and novelist Anne Brontë, youngest sister to Charlotte and Emily Brontë: an intensely researched and sensitively imagined depiction of the youngest and often neglected member of this remarkably talented and complex family.
The Irish novelist George Moore praised Anne's first novel, Agnes Grey, as "the most perfect prose narrative in English letters."
Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in many ways the most shocking of the Brontë novels, suffered dismissal by early critics and, after Anne's death, Charlotte refused it a second publication, her reason reflected in her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.
Charlotte claimed that Anne had made a poor choice of subject in her second novel:
She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate near at hand, and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was a naturally sensitive, reserved and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind: it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course, with fictitious characters, incidents and situations), as a warning to others.
Not long before her death, Anne explained why she wrote it:
I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.
The Irish novelist George Moore praised Anne's first novel, Agnes Grey, as "the most perfect prose narrative in English letters."
Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in many ways the most shocking of the Brontë novels, suffered dismissal by early critics and, after Anne's death, Charlotte refused it a second publication, her reason reflected in her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.
Charlotte claimed that Anne had made a poor choice of subject in her second novel:
She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate near at hand, and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was a naturally sensitive, reserved and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind: it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course, with fictitious characters, incidents and situations), as a warning to others.
Not long before her death, Anne explained why she wrote it:
I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.
Drawing by Anne Brontë
Find out more about Without the Veil Between ...
There is such a thing as looking through a person's eyes into the heart, and learning more of the height, and breadth, and depth of another's soul in one hour than it might take you a lifetime to discover, if he or she were not disposed to reveal it, or if you had not the sense to understand it.
~ Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
~ Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Original Artwork by DM Denton is copyrighted. A license for its use may be obtained. Please SUBMIT CONTACT FORM and indicate in the comments box that you are interested in discussing terms for the use of one or more of my original illustrations/images.
Original Artwork by DM Denton is copyrighted. A license for its use may be obtained. Please SUBMIT CONTACT FORM and indicate in the comments box that you are interested in discussing terms for the use of one or more of my original illustrations/images.
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