JOKES: Can you tell us about your background?
BRIAN DUNCAN: I grew up in the central valley of California, in a town near Merced that most people haven’t heard of named Atwater. It’s a small town, but it continues to have a big influence on my life and ideas. It’s a stop along the truckers’ Highway 99; a hot plot of dirt and suburban homes and lakes crisscrossed by asphalt, canals and railroad tracks. A local airbase, Atwater Air Force Base, was shuttered there in the early nineties, and at least half the town, all military people, moved away. Opportunists swooped in to fill the void in the local economy, in one case promoting the vision of an “Atwater Theme Park.” I still remember passing the small storefront they’d set up—it had TVs in the window playing rollercoaster footage nonstop. After the city’s checks had been cashed, they skipped town of course.
This theme of mundane tragedy followed me through a pretty miserable three-year stint in high school in Utah, followed by much better times in Santa Cruz, then traveling around Mexico and Argentina and Chile, then San Francisco. While in SF, I earned a degree in Computer Science from SF State, much to the surprise of myself and my family, who always thought I would go into the arts. The truth is that I always loved computers as a hobby, and found the certainty and clarity of the discrete world very comforting. Also I wanted to know more and I didn’t think I had the discipline to study it on my own. This degree helped me move on from office jobs into programming jobs. I worked at the wild company that did tickets for Burning Man, among others. It paid the bills, but I still longed for a creative career, opportunities and community, so went back a few years later and got an MFA in Creative Writing, so there you go. During my time in that program, I served as the Associate Fiction Editor at Fourteen Hills, the grad student publication.
How was our experience as an editor at Fourteen Hills?
It was tough at times, exhausting, and we didn’t always agree—surprising, right? Still, I really enjoyed working at Fourteen Hills. It was eye-opening to see behind the curtain for the first time. I did novel things like reading the slush pile, sent acceptance and rejection letters, solicited work from emerging writers, talked to local bookstores, and led discussions with staff readers, many of them undergrads. I should also note that since it was part of the MFA program, the whole Fourteen Hills experience had a meta-quality to it; that is, I was working at a lit journal while also learning about how one works at a lit journal. In that framing, I did things that I probably wouldn’t normally do. For example, I read every short submission in its entirety even when I knew right away it wasn’t a good fit, just so I could practice putting into words why I thought so, using evidence from the submission to back up my opinions.
Overall, I got to experience first-hand how much hard work, dedication—and debate—goes into making a publication come together. It is a true cliché that putting together a lit journal is a labor of love.
Are there any common mistakes you’ve seen writers make? Or any advice you’d like to give to writers submitting to Jokes Review?
Advice
When in doubt, submit. In the past, I’ve sat on pieces I’ve written that weren’t “perfect” yet and watched as their relevance and potency slowly dwindled away. Don’t be like me. It would have been worth sharing those pieces with others. Nothing will ever be perfect and you will always change and grow. Phillip K. Dick often wrote very flat characters (gasp), but had amazing ideas that only grow in relevance to this day (see: Predictive Policing). I’m so glad I can read his stories because A. they were submitted in the first place and B. they were published.
Common Mistakes
The number one most common mistake I see are pieces that hinge on dramatic events, but the drama isn’t earned. Or, in other words, they hint that “feels” should be felt but deliver no feels. Examples: Someone is sobbing, or breaking stuff, or punching someone, and the reader feels nothing other than a generic sympathy toward the idea of Loss, for example. I would go so far as to say that this is a Great Blindspot, and that 9 out of 10 writers will need to actively study how to earn dramatic emotion rather than relying on intuition. My advice is to study how other authors do it. Describing an emotional reaction is just the tip of the iceberg and sometimes it’s not even necessary. In most cases, when reading, you will anticipate an emotion before it’s even described, because as an empathetic human being you understand how a specific someone would respond to a specific situation.
You recently moved from San Francisco to Sacramento. How was your experience living in SF? What do you like about living in Sacramento?
I came to SF fifteen or so years ago, for the same reasons as a lot of others have—to find a sanctuary from what I saw as an oppressive culture of puritanical, guilt-inducing patriarchy. SF to me represented the idea of safety, for example, when it came to how you formed your family and friends and represented yourself in the world. I longed for the idea of a place where people could just be who they were, out in public, without the culture hammering them down like the nail that sticks out. In many ways, I found it to be that, because it was and continues to be for so many people, because collective ideas are powerful.
It is of course not so clear-cut as all that in reality—there’s no escape in sight from what bell hooks called the “imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” Who you are allowed to be has large class, gender and racial components. Existing class divisions have only accelerated in recent years in SF.
Sacramento for me represents a fusion of my childhood in a hot, suburban Central Valley and my adulthood in San Francisco. In some ways feels like a return, and in other ways, like something completely new. I’ve regularly visited family and friends in Sac for years, so the shift from the Bay Area did not feel so abrupt. It’s relaxed here; live and let live. There’s great local businesses and cafes. You can camp out on a lawn with friends and watch the sun set and not worry about catching the last BART train home. It represents unexplored possibilities for me, music to find, creatives to meet. I found Jokes Review here, which I am thrilled about.
Do you have a favorite bookstore in SF or Sacramento?
Green Apple on Clement street will always have a place in my heart, of course, and I’ll visit whenever I’m in SF. So far in Sacramento, I’ve visited Capital Books the most. Three floors of books, LGBTQ friendly and local. They also have a roaming bookstore cat and a solid manga collection. I love any bookstore where it’s hard to leave because I want to live there. I value loving curation, endless possibilities, and being left alone to explore.
What are a few of your favorite authors?
Haruki Murakami
Toni Morrison
Ursula K. LeGuin
William Styron (Sophie’s Choice)
Chinua Achebe
George Saunders (whom everyone recommended to me after reading my work)
Ted Chiang
If there’s one book you’d recommend, what would it be?
This is so difficult to answer! I’ll pick the latest book that has taken up residence in my soul: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo. It’s a polyphonic trip into purgatory and an examination of how a single person’s power can shape the world and create a sort of Hell others are trapped in—and so much more. So relevant in the days of Musk and Bezos. Also, it was also a big inspiration to a young Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who, in the forward of a newer edition, related how his author friend threw the book down in front of him one day and said “Lea esa vaina, carajo, para que aprenda!” (rough translation: Read that shit, for fuck’s sake, and learn!).
Follow Brian on Twitter or Instagram @solfugit.
