Exploring Creative Spaces: A Chat with Junior Bases
Today we’re catching up with Junior Bases, whose short story Santa Barbara explores themes of love and jealousy with a creative twist.
Santa Barbara Literary Journal: You’re currently a student here in Santa Barbara?
Junior Bases: That’s right. I’m a third year undergrad student at UCSB, originally from the Los Angeles area.
SBLJ: What can you tell us about this story?
JB: It is my first published piece! It’s inspired by a few different relationships I’ve had, but mainly an experience I had my freshman year of college.
SBLJ: Congratulations! I’m glad the Santa Barbara Literary Journal was able to help you achieve that milestone as a writer. Let’s talk about your style. Who are your influences as a writer?
JB: My main inspirations are probably Ted Chiang and JD Salinger. I’m gonna sound pretentious here talking about my writing style, but that’s ok. My main goal as a writer is usually to hold the reader’s attention for long enough to tell my story and have it hit in an impactful way. Especially in the digital age we live in, attention is not so easy to hold in a literary form. Ted Chiang is a supremely technical writer and seems to never waste words. I’d love to attain that level in my own writing someday. As for Salinger, I’m in love with the tone he writes in. I’m jealous of the introspection and mystery his main characters can hold. But his best trick is to describe something so simply and make it so obviously important to the reader. He might say something like “she moved the telephone an inch farther from her face,” at which point I’d pause and say, “woah,” because he did so much with so little. I’ll stop there for now, but those two authors are really both fantastic.
SBLJ: Do you have other creative pursuits in addition to writing?
JB: I’d say most of my generation is on a platform in the way of social media and so, most of us create to an extent, at least my friends here at Santa Barbara as well as from home. For me, it’s all writing of some form. I like songwriting, though I’m nowhere as gifted in that regard. Poetry is the in-between with writing and lyric writing, and I do write some poetry as well. I love creative spaces, and recently started working at the radio station on campus, but that’s still in its infancy.
SBLJ: What are you working on now?
JB: Stories I’m working on now tend to be more tethered to real-life events. I just finished a more journalistic piece on a musician named Rokus Traore who was in jail for kidnapping her daughter (crazy story). Today, I was working on a story about loss that’s told through a phone call between my mom and me. That should be finished soon.
You can find Junior’s story Santa Barbara in print in the Santa Barbara Literary Journal, Volume 11, This Must be the Place.
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