The Dreaming Machine is honored to be part of The Creative Process, an exhibition and international educational initiative traveling to leading universities. As part of the exhibition, portraits and interviews with writers and creative thinkers are being published across a network of university and international literary magazines. The Creative Process is including work by contributors to The Dreaming Machine in the projection elements of the traveling exhibition.
JUNOT DÍAZ
Interviewed by Mia Funk
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.
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Portrait of Junot Díaz (this piece can accompany the interview)
by Mia Funk
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JUNOT DÍAZ
I think part of what I was thinking about with this project was to build the fact that [my character] Yunior is a writer and that with Yunior being a writer we get to check in with his maturing and changing perspective, so that in fact part of the game of writing Yunior is the notion that he’s going to be quite different from book to book and also that occasionally I’m going to in This is How You Lose Her write Yunior from a perspective that’s a period that’s a bit far off from the period he’s writing. Therefore built into the story there’s a perspective that might not otherwise be available if I was writing far more closely to the events he was narrating. These are the weird nerdy decisions one makes as one writes where one has to decide the events that are occurring in your text. You have to decide what’s the distance between the event and the point of telling where the narrator stands, looking upon and reflecting and retelling those events.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You have spoken about how you like to keep the company of non-writers. Is that one of the reasons why you teach at MIT?
JUNOT DÍAZ
I don’t know if I understand it as well as I should, I just know that it has only been my privilege and prejudice to be interested in writing for readers who are not writers. I think that it’s always been my bag. I’ve never felt any interest in writing for people who themselves want to be writers. And I do think that there is a difference. There’s really a great difference and, god knows, I’m sure we could spend a lot of time talking about those differences, but I’ve always felt it very strongly.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
But you also have a lot of fans who are themselves writers, though I see what you’re saying. I think there’s a sense in your books–aside from the structural devices, the writerly puzzles that you’ve put into your writing which are very literary–there is a sense with everything which I’ve read of yours that it can be performed. It has a very strong oral element.
DÍAZ
Yeah, I mean I’m not necessarily sure of that, either. It has a great mask of orality, but really I have to tell you, as someone who’s lived in these stories a long time, in fact, often that mask of orality is nothing more than that of math. It’s amazing how these…
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Of course it’s not literally oral, but it has a music, an internal music that’s very strong.
DÍAZ
Well, if it’s true, I’m grateful for it. But in some sense we’re not always so sure of what the hell is going on [as we write], you know?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
So tell me, what are some of the things you teach in your classes? I know it’s pretty varied compared to other literary programs. What are you recommending from both sci-fi and literary fiction to readers? And I’m asking this as a serious question because I need to interview sci-fi writers and that’s not my background.
DÍAZ
Gosh, who am I teaching? Who am I reading? And who am I writing? So I think folks as varied as Hilton Als and Paul Beatty are some of the science fiction people that I’m really enjoying, who I think are just wonderful. Edwidge Danticat, of course. N.K. Jemisin, she’s fantastic. When it comes to listing things my memory does not serve.
[…]I try to keep strong sympathy with my female characters. I think in the end I always feel that a character like Yunior [a recurrent character in much of Díaz’s work] grapples with very, very strong women. One, because he’s in some way not… I mean to be blunt, he’s just not afraid of strong women. And I think Yunior, why he’s such a confounding sort of person is because, you know, he’s clearly comfortable with strong feminists. He’s got no problem. But what he’s incapable of doing is moving away from his own masculine insanity, abandoning entirely this kind of patriarchal prerogative. So [regarding which of my female characters I feel closest to] it all depends on what age of my life I’m thinking about. You know, when I think of myself in my twenties I always think that Lola [the sister in The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao], the person, is the character I feel most strongly for because in my twenties she was the kind of person who I think most taught me about the world. She was the kind of woman that, you know, I learnt really enormous amounts of what it meant to be a person and what it meant to live in a real authentic way. When I think of myself younger, of course, when I think of myself as a teenager, I think of a character like Nilda. [Meeting] a person like that as an adolescent I think taught me quite a bit about the world and about myself and about women’s lives. So it all depends. One is never the same person, one has a different sense of oneself depending on one’s memory.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Yeah, I also like Beli a lot. [Beli Cabral, the mother in The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao.]
DÍAZ
Sure, yeah.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I think she’s really…
DÍAZ
She definitely, ah, she’s a really fascinating character.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I know Beli is from an earlier book, but in your latest book This is How You Lose Her, “Otravida, Otravez” is a great story. And it’s also from a female point of view. So I wondered if you were considering doing more stories or novels from a female point of view?
DÍAZ
Hard to say, I mean it’s always hard to say for me. I always figured it’s sort of like, the proof will be in the pudding, you know? I could say anything, but in the end it depends on what actually comes out, which to be honest right now, it’s hard for me to even conceptualize what the future will bring. I don’t have any ideas [right now], so it’s not really hard. I think most writers I know always have a long list of projects that they are working on and I’m sort of, currently I’m blank. So it makes it harder to think about what the future might bring.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
What are your views on the future of literature and us on this planet?
DÍAZ
We are a hardy, exploitative, weed species. We’ve managed to undo the planet and still thrive endlessly. You’ve got to take odds against our human species. We’re kind of a bipedal cockroach. I have a feeling we will defnitely survive. Now, whether that will be in a way that will seem reasonable to us that will be another question. As far as literature is concerned, I’m an optimist. And it’s not just simply because I love literature. I’m just an optimist. I figure the book as an artifact and reading as an artifact has survived for hundreds of years. I get a feeling it could survive for a couple more hundred years, even if it becomes a boutique practice. A minority practice like vinyl is today. I just believe that there are always going to be people that will require and will long for and will seek out that intimate private exchange that one has, that communion that books provide. I think in the end the book will always summon forth readers the way that a virtue will summon forth paragons. Not going to happen in a great quantity, but it will happen.
I have a faith in reading the way I have faith in very little else.
This is an excerpt of a 10,000 word interview which is being published across a network of literary magazines.
How Can I Participate in The Creative Process?
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To participate in an interview or submit your academic essays or creative works:
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