Recently, the Philadelphia writing world and the larger world lost a luminary in Dan McQuade. I won’t pretend to be his closest friend – I’m sure they are hurting even more than I am currently at his sudden and unfair loss. I’m certainly not trying to speak for them, his lovely wife who I’ve known even longer than he, or his kid. That kind of eulogy isn’t really what I’m gonna be good for here, and I’m sure they will speak with remembrance that befits the man.
No, Dan and I were certainly friends, but we were writing friends. This is a corollary of internet friend, the sort of friend that you have to qualify so people don’t think you actually believe the friend they can’t see is invisible. The sort of friend who people often think is a consolation for the socially inept among us, distant but nominally true. When I had a buddy stay over on his way to Cape Cod a while back, my mom got wind and was stunned I had a friend she hadn’t met. She almost seemed scandalized. That kind of friend, the one who isn’t real to the collected people in your life until they’re in front of you in the flesh or dead.
And Dan is real to them now in that unfortunate, latter sense.
I don’t really know what to do with that. I appreciate the well-wishes, but in the same way that many people don’t quite believe online or writerly friends are real, I look back at myself and wonder how real I am in the cosmology of the McQuade solar system. Certainly not as real as his family, but more real than the postal delivery person? Who can say. What I can say is that, in working through the sudden loss, I’ve been struck by how much I feel a sort of connectedness with writers-qua-writers like Dan McQuade, and this has me thinking about what makes a “writer friend.”
It isn’t the same as a podcast friend, if such a thing exists. All the people I podcast with, I would call them friends before I’d call them podcast friends. The term seems a little dismissive. Even friends who I haven’t recorded with in a bit don’t get the diminutive of “podcast friend” – Jonathan Bernhardt of the long-dead Patch Notes is, as Dan was, a writer friend. You can see how this works.
On one hand this speaks to my dismissal of my more successful work as epiphenomenal, not a craft so much as a dodge, and that’s neatly in line with my usual self depredation. But moreso, I think I’m drawn to the fact that writing in itself feels like a sort of modern sorcery, both in terms of how it is a honed craft and in terms of how it’s largely derided by all normal people. Not a Harry Potter you found your people Harry, hooray! kind of thing but a far less transphobic experience of “sir will you please stop intoning, people are trying to sleep because some of us have work in the morning.”
Writing, despite being a formerly respectable job, is now seen as the bastion of the wastrel – before AI everyone could write and writing wasn’t really a hard to find skill. After AI, AI can write so why bother. The poorly kept secret in the world of writing is that AI can probably do the stuff that most people value as “professional” writing – emails, white papers, whatever, you can probably squint and not care enough about prose to get a machine to pump that out for you. And, in the meantime, every magazine, journal, and newspaper is dead or feels the wolf at its heels.
Which I guess goes back to why I feel Dan’s death so keenly. He worked for Defector, which is one of those bastions still afloat in its own inimitable way; I don’t like everything they publish, but I love a good bit of what they publish, which is how you know they’re a real organization and not some vanity bullshit. I shouldn’t love everything anyone publishes, outside of myself and frankly even he’s pretty hit or miss. But for the most part, and I can’t really think of an outlier, I always liked reading Dan’s work for two reasons: one, he clearly enjoyed himself writing it and you could feel that joy through the prose; and two, he didn’t care about his status in his field, he just cared about the field.
The first one is maybe self explanatory: Dan’s prose, on twitter or in paragraph form or whatever, always felt a little like it was being delivered with a smile or a choked laugh. Always serious and earnest about his subjects – often the people of the Pennsylvania-New Jersey diaspora – he also got that they were often pretty funny and entertaining. This is the verve of someone like WC Fields or Tom Waits, who can say “boy these people are ridiculous, just like me.”
And that leads into the second bit, which is that Dan was writing in the suddenly well-trod industry of Philadelphian folklore. I once pitched a Philadelphia piece to Defector and was told there was nothing more to be said about the city or its fans; not that they were entirely wrong! But Dan’s work spoke to his field in a sort of geologic sense, he found the pieces of the Anthropocene (anphropocene?) that weren’t made obvious and showed them to people in the way you’d see Kerouac dig up an old road story or Kathy Acker recall a dirty limerick. It didn’t matter if anyone cared (they did care, of course), it only mattered that the story should be told. Dan didn’t make content – he wrote stories.
A phrase that’s helped a bit in thinking about all this is that a Linnean taxonomy of people is incomplete, to me anyway, without the word denoting what we call the people in a group. Or, well, usually animals – murder of crows, parliament of owls, miracle of unicorns, you’ve heard this before. My mind keeps coming back to the impossibly saccharine and teeth-achingly earnest concept of a “camaraderie of writers.” I can feel sweat bead on my forehead and my spine tingle with warning as I write that down because oh brother, look at this guy. But I’ll keep it anyway because it describes a certain kind of truth as well.
Writing isn’t valuable anymore, and if it ever was respected it isn’t anymore. Writing is the bastion of freaks, losers, liberal arts majors, and the unproductive. Writing can bring joy, but it’s joy that can also be summarized by grok or whatever into a slurry so you can get to your next meeting. Writing is frivolity. But in that frivolity, it’s also its most pure self. We can’t really make our fortunes anymore, but we can cling together and recognize each other. And that kind of recognition can mean a lot, and does mean a lot. To be clear, it doesn’t put food on the table, but it feeds other important things.
So I guess my conclusion here is that I mourn the passing of Dan McQuade as someone in whom I recognized a fellow humanity and craft. I hope he is at peace and I know his work will live on. May we all have such fond legacies.