Bruce Ducker

 

Bruce Ducker was born in New York City and now lives in Colorado. He has practiced corporate law for most of his career and is the founding partner of a Denver law firm. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in such journals as The Yale Review, Poetry, Commonwealth, and the Literary Review.

Mooney in Flight is his seventh novel. Critics have called earlier books “an evocative counterpart of loaded terms,” Boston Globe, “understated, elegant prose,” Denver Post, “written so allusively, so lyrically, so in tune with the quotidian,” L. A. Times, and from Dave Barry, “a vivid, compelling and beautifully crafted book. Bruce Ducker is a hell of a writer.” He received the Colorado Book Award for Lead Us Not Into Penn Station and was nominated for The Pulitzer Prize for Marital Assets. Visit Bruce online at www.bruceducker.com

 

"Rich and meaningful.... Bruce Ducker has managed to create a character that inspires hope rather than pity." Colorado Advocate

"Mooney in Flight is a special and rare book, one about adult life as it is lived. While Leonard Mooney's wrecked life might seem a dark and depressing subject, in the author's hand it is anything but. You'll be engrossed, entertained, and humored as Mooney slouches toward the outcome. Witty and knowing, this book is one you won't want to end." Dungeons and Dragons Magazine

 

 

Pageonelit.com: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?

Bruce Ducker: I grew up in Neponsit, a tiny suburb of New York City, at the western end of the Rockaway peninsula. My father was an omnivorous reader, my mother and brother musicians. My earliest influences were Owen Johnson ("The Tennessee Shad"), John R. Tunis ("Highpockets," "Go Team Go," "Keystone Kids" and a long line of fourth-quarter, sudden-death, nineteenth hole sagas), and Howard Fast ("Spartacus", "Freedom Road", whom the House Un-American Activities Committee was derogating just as I was reading him, making him that much more interesting.

 

Pageonelit.com: Why do you write?

Bruce Ducker: Goodness gracious, what a question. I suppose I must believe I have something to say, or I so admire my words that I can't keep them to myself. You know the Stephen Crane poem about the beast in the desert who is discovered eating his heart. He is asked whether it is sweet, and he replies, No, it is bitter. But it is mine.

Pageonelit.com: 'Mooney In Flight' is your seventh book - The Colorado Advocate says, "Rich and meaningful.... Bruce Ducker has managed to create a character that inspires hope rather than pity." Who is Leonard Mooney? And where did this story come from?

Bruce Ducker: Leonard Mooney is simply what he appears to be: another hapless, clueless middle-aged man hoping to be loved despite himself. The story comes, I suppose, from the under the rug of the psyche of each of us, where we sweep our insecurities, fears, where we store old string and stones that glisten along with our touchstone conviction that, despite appearances or achievements, we are indeed unlovable.

 

Pageonelit.com: Leonard Mooney is a romantic. In 'Mooney In Flight' he says, " I am a sucker for fireplaces, for all sites romantic." Is Bruce Ducker a romantic like Leonard Mooney? Please explain.

Bruce Ducker: Ducker is indeed a romantic, almost unfit to drive in traffic. A dose of lay schizophrenia allows him to pass in the business world, in the supermarket, as a responsible citizen. His branch of romanticism is not that of Wordsworth or Keats, but the antic strain of Laurence Sterne, Don Delillo, Richard Ford.

 

Pageonelit.com:  Is Leonard Mooney flying away from life or toward it? How do you define a mid-life crisis?

Bruce Ducker:  I don't define mid-life crisis-I leave that to the professionals. But I think Mooney is flying in both directions. The advantage of the inner life is that one can have, chart a course for, and indeed arrive at and occupy, more than one destination simultaneously. As a pilot, I can tell you that's not something one generally does in a small airplane.

 

Pageonelit.com: Please explain -- "Don't get mad, don't get even, just get out."

Bruce Ducker: The friendship between Mooney and Hofstadter, it seems to me, is helpful to both in that they amuse each other but do not inform each other. Even Hofstadter's ghost exercises restraint, declines to lecture Mooney. No one can show us the way: we learn, if at all, by overhearing our soliloquies. Hofstadter can be thought of as suffering from Mooneyitis in an advanced state, a man who has detached himself from the battles of the heart.

Pageonelit.com: In real life you practice corporate law - How is practicing law like writing novels?

Bruce Ducker: What makes you think that's real life? Practicing law is as related to writing novels as, say, skydiving; though I confess that both involve taking language seriously, realizing its power and potential. The discipline involved in the one also translates to the other: I've never said, nor heard my partners say, I'm sorry, we can't negotiate that merger, we are suffering from lawyer's block.

 

Pageonelit.com: What do you hope to achieve with your books? What do you hope readers will take away after reading your books?

Bruce Ducker: I suspect I'm like everyone else who works in this sullen art. I hope that readers will be moved as I am moved, that they will care, rage, laugh, generally engage themselves in the people who walk about my books. That's what I'm looking for when I pick up a book, and I assume they are looking for the same when they pick up mine.

 

Pageonelit.com: What's next?

Bruce Ducker: I'm just finishing up a light satire, called Dizzying Heights, set amongst the flora, fauna, and exotica of Aspen. My agent is also about to circulate a collection of short stories and poems, some of which have been published, that have in common some touch with fly flishing. Those projects are completed. The ones I'm working on, I tend to keep to myself.

 

Pageonelit.com: What was the last book you read?

Bruce Ducker: I just finished Doctorow's wonderful new collection Sweet Land Stories. After that, I have in mind taking on Henry James' The Golden Bowl-I'm off for a week's salmon fishing in Iceland, and I thought James would be good company for the long flights and strikeless days.

 

Pageonelit.com: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they enhance your writing?

Bruce Ducker: I always think of hobbies as stamp collecting, or traveling to countries with pellagra. I spend a good deal of time on other passions of mine besides writing. Fishing, obviously--I play piano every day and have lately been composing, and I fly a light twin. We live in a beautiful part of the country and this time of year Jaren and I spend time at a little house we have on the Roaring Fork River. I'll also be teaching in August at the Aspen Writers' Festival-who was it who said, I've done a lot of things in my life I'm ashamed of but I've never taught creative writing?