Duff Allen’s work is driven by an underlying and indomitable happy despair that regards storytelling as the light seen through a keyhole, even if the door is quite heavy and bolted shut. Working in an era of corporate flattening and the now prevailing global ethos of individual consumption as representative and symbolic of the summum bonum, he feels it’s particularly important as a working writer to illuminate what is grim about today’s fatuous notion of achieving a successful life, hopefully with humor and a light enough touch. His slightly disingenuous irony stretches back to at least the mid-1800s. Working in solitude, he is also certain, as Robert Walser writes, that most art gets done when little value is placed “on the tokens of respect and the distinctions conferred by the world.”
Teaching English at a local public high school, where Duff was given a prize for his iconoclastic work by Williams College, he always managed to scooch away plenty of time as a writer. After leaving this richly rewarding job, he became part of a devoted team of professors at Bard where he’s been teaching writing to economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals in the Clemente Course in the Humanities ever since. Examples of his work appear in Columbia Journal, Burningword Literary Review, Pure Slush, among many other publications. When he isn’t working on a new story before the sun comes up, he can usually be found splitting wood for the winter; pulling up beets, carrots, or garlic from the garden in the summer; or dreaming about skiing a bit too fast down a local mountain.