To begin, he writes the letters of the alphabet on the top of the page. Since hitting his stride, Duncan has taken to carrying a black pen and legal pad with him wherever he goes. “Whereas before I tried my hand at novels and plays and songs, now this is the thing I do: I write in two directions,” he says. The work began to fulfill in him a lifelong passion for writing. I started to see I could do something a little more sophisticated than just putting together some kind of clumsy sentence.” “I started to write things that got better and better and more like normal writing, more like speech. “I suddenly started to see things more clearly in two directions,” he says. That palindrome ended up in “ The Best American Nonrequired Reading of 2012.” Two years later, friends of his who owned the store Greenward in Cambridge’s Porter Square asked him to write a palindrome in honor of its third birthday. In 2008, he wrote a palindrome about the presidential election. “Or you could read a headline and say, ‘I’ll write something about that.’ I just didn’t realize it could be done.”ĭuncan’s passion for palindromes grew gradually. “I’d see a word and maybe reverse it, but it hadn’t occurred to me that you could tell a story or write about something that actually happened,” Duncan says. He found the writing form interesting, but he didn’t think much else about it. Something similar happened to Duncan when he discovered palindromes. “When I left my first bookstore job in 1981 I thought, ‘I don’t need to do that again,’ and now I’ve done hardly anything but that.” “You work with clever, talented people, you meet wonderful customers,” he says. “It’s always great to work in bookstores,” he says. Even as memorization became less of a necessity, Duncan grew to love the atmosphere. He began his first job at a bookstore in Philadelphia in 1979, and he’s continued to work in bookstores on and off ever since.īefore inventory was computerized, Duncan’s sharp memory for titles and authors served him well. “The thing I really want to do is establish palindrome writing as a literary form, to show people you can write palindromes that are beautiful and funny and factual and have real literary merit,” he says.ĭuncan discovered a love for words while growing up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. “Īs palindromes have come to define him, Duncan hopes to move the ancient field into the mainstream and show people what’s possible. It’s always better if the person or organization for whom you’ve written a palindrome replies in a positive way. “Of course, I also hope that people will appreciate them. “I hope it gives people an idea of what can be accomplished in two directions,” he says. Mostly, though, Duncan just writes palindromes for fun. And he’s written countless palindromes to serve as gifts for birthdays, anniversaries, and other occasions. He’s written reversible poems and tributes that were used as auction prizes. He’s written 800-word epics that don’t lose their meaning when flipped. His creations have been featured in galleries, selected anthologies, and are the subject of an upcoming documentary. Today Duncan, who works as a staff member at the MIT Press Bookstore in Kendall Square, has developed a reputation as a professional palindromist. For fun, and then out of habit, he began reversing words he saw in print, noticing words that took on new meaning when flipped, and writing sentences that could be read backward and forward - palindromes. The discovery, which he made in the early 1980s, set him on a course he would follow for decades. He’s worked in bookstores for more than 40 years, reads often, and has tried his hand at writing novels, children’s books, song lyrics, and plays.īut it wasn’t until he stumbled onto the book “An Almanac of Words at Play” that Duncan realized words could go backwards. Words have always played a central role in Barry Duncan’s life.
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