With Junot Díaz at Swarthmore
I had the rare pleasure this week of listening to and meeting Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz at Swarthmore College. He read an appropriately brief excerpt from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and then fielded questions about writing, to which he gave answers so good that I am appropriating them for future writing classes. He's a brilliant and genuine fellow, who can call students at MIT "motherfuckers" and make that sound deeply affectionate. The novel is sublime, and it was interesting to hear him talk about himself--about his comic-book and science fiction addictions, which reminded me greatly of interviews I've read with Michael Chabon. Both he and Chabon are using their fascination with comics to explore humanity in a way that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby could not have foreseen. (You'll find Lee and Kirby supplying the introductory quote in "Oscar Wao". The title of the book, as Díaz explained, is a marriage of the Hemingway short story title "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and the name Oscar Wilde. Both Wilde and Macomber play essential roles in the nature and themes of the novel, although Díaz expressed that he was even more influenced by Joseph Conrad, and by a sense of landscape and place--the ubiquitous absence of Poland anywhere in Conrad's oeuvre, which had to have been a cold-blooded eradication--and the locales in Díaz's own life, from the Dominican Republic to Wildwood, New Jersey.
One audience member asked if he had any desire to write fantasy and sf since he was such a voracious reader and admirer of it. He said that while he had an interest, he sucked at it. Sooner or later he found himself facing the sentence "Then the elf said..." with which it was impossible to cope.
Then came a truly unanticipated moment.
The talk ended he took up a position in the hall and signed books. I dutifully took my place in a kind of chaotic book-buying mosh pit that collected around him--far more abstract than an orderly line, yet it seemed to work. When I reached him I introduced myself as one of the fiction workshop directors at the college, and he thanked us--the department of English Literature--for co-hosting him there. I explained that I write fantasy, and that "Then the elf said..." is as big a hurdle for me as it was for him. So he asked me to repeat my name. I did. And the titles of my books. I did. Suddenly his face lit up and he said, "Lord Tophet--I so have that on my shelf to read!" He'd read John Clute's review of Shadowbridge, and we spoke about writing and comics and teaching--all very briefly because others with books were pressing to get time with him. After a minute we shook hands and I walked over to Peter Schmidt, the Chair of the English Department. To him I said, "That was unexpected. I knew I was a fan of his fiction. I never in a million years expected him to be a fan of mine." That was...just grand.
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