Junot Diaz on the Joys of the Young and the Stories of the Dead

In this episode of A Phone Call From Paul, Junot Diaz talks to Paul Holdengraber about death, pain, the joys of teaching, and the magic of the library.

Junot Diaz on the joy of teaching young people…
Young people have an enormous reservoir of creative energy and of possibility. One of the things that happens as we get older is that we cool down. No matter who we are, we cool down. It’s just the law of the universe. I’m not talking about how you feel. I’m just talking about the reality. I think there is something really remarkable to be around young people and to be reminded every day of that energy and of that possibility, and it’s easy to take it for granted.

Junot Diaz on writing slowly…
Part of it is bad habit. But part of it is an attempt at a different kind of methodology. I have noticed that what matters to me is to reflect very, very long on what I might call my materials or very, very long on what I might call the sources of inspiration. Lately I’ve been thinking of my writing as—what interests me more than anything—is grinding these slow lenses. What I mean is giving events, giving history, giving people the time to unfold, the time to mean—to give forth their meaning.

Junot Diaz on pain…
Often our pain encourages us to isolate ourselves. The truth of it is our pain is a badge for how we are members of this larger community. Recognizing this and recognizing our shared humanity is not a small insight. The ego pushes us towards individual, pushes us towards fantasies of achievement of power… and all of those things pull us away from our common link, our common clay… We are made of a common clay, and among the most prevalent minerals in that clay is our fragility.

Junot Diaz on libraries…
When we talk about banquets, when we talk about this sort of utopian promise of food for all for all time—this is what libraries for me prefigure. They are a banquet for all and a banquet clearly of the mind, and for someone like me, and perhaps for someone like Ray Bradbury, perhaps a banquet for the soul…

Junot Diaz on stories from the dead…
There’s also the stories that death tells us. What are the stories that the dead tell us? That’s not a language that’s easy to crack. It’s a language that I’m trying to master—that I’m trying to become sensitive to the nuances, sensitive to the phonemes, but it has been resisting me.