About Dan Reed Miller

I am an artist, writer, musician, permaculturalist, and pilgrim who lives in Portland, Oregon, USA.

I was born in Seattle, Washington, USA, on the 14th of October, 1967 at about 4 PM. Until I was 6 ½ years old we lived in the Madrona neighborhood of central Seattle. Then in April 1974 my Dad got a job working for the Department of Defense in West Germany. We lived there on a small Army base in southern Bavaria until I was almost 12. These years were more or less of an idyll. Then we moved to Colorado, where I spent my Junior High and High School years in the shadow of Pikes Peak near Colorado Springs. The area was conservative in those years but had not yet been overrun by frothing Fundamentalists.

In 1985 I started attending The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. I went there my first and second years, then switched to Seattle Pacific University (at which my Dad was then working, thus offering cheap tuition) then went back to Evergreen for my senior year and graduation. Once a Greener always a Greener.

I had no idea what to do with my life in those days. I vaguely knew I was an artist. I had various forgettable jobs for most of the 1990’s, but painted a lot of oil paintings. I also started writing songs around 1990. I didn’t muster the courage to sing in front of anyone other than a couple of good friends until 1994. Since then I have performed semi-regularly, using various stage names (currently Enrique Bronkowski.)

In 1997 I started working for a small but growing online bookseller. In 1999 that employment led me to Reno and Fernley, Nevada, where the company was opening a state-of-the-art, semi-automated distribution center, and needed people who could pretend they were smart to help get it going and solve the inevitable avalanche of problems and glitches that comes from trying to build a complex system from the ground up. Thus I served to rectify and strengthen the Beast.

The cognitive dissonance of it all was too much, so in March of 2001 I quit and thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. It was the hardest and best 6 months of my life. Post-trail I landed in Portland, Oregon, USA and have been here more or less ever since. In 2003 I rode my bike down the West Coast and across the Mojave Desert to Arizona and up into Utah. To read more about my travels here and in Central America in 2007 and 2008, see my travel blog - Traveling Dan.

In Portland I have painted dozens more paintings, written ever more songs, been part of a wonderful community of bicyclists and other creative people, worked various jobs including almost 2 years at the regional public transit agency, and lived in a small but vibrant co-housing community.

In 2006 I built a 200 square foot cob (earthen) house in a friend’s back yard in the Kenton neighborhood, where I have been living ever since. (See more photos of the cob house project.) I have also been the musical accompanist of the Mudeye Puppet Company, and a member of the Cheez-its dance troupe.