Junot Díaz

by being honest and vulnerable and human and by being humble and putting her happiness over yours and most importantly by being happy yourself. but then again: you SO dont want advice from me.

i love defending art in places where art is not seen as central. america and mit share a lot in common in this respect.

thank you everybody for dropping by! hoping that you all have a great day and are reading something you love with someone you love.

i write so many drafts its not funny. ill work on a story for ten, 15 years. like the last tale in THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER. i started that shit in 1996

if your mindset is about business: humanities doesnt make money, it makes humans and business has never liked humans. if your mindset is human, humaniities makes perfect sense because its about making you a better human. as a writer i majored in history and wrote. one doesnt have to major in writing or english to be a writer. its often better to have other materials rattling around in your head.

masculinity is one of the biggest social forces impacting all of our communities. men, unhealthy, diassociated men, do a lot of damage across the board. this is why raising healthy boys matters.

i more or less won the lottery and got an agent almost as soon as i tried. but i wasnt very professional about it. met and accepted the first agent that crossed my path. she was super young too and had no real authors under her belt. nowadays a lot of young writers want superstars as agents but what i stumbled on was a very useful truth: better an agent with energy and the time to pay attention to you than someone who is too busy to give you the energy you merit.

we all need to interrogate our blindness around our privilege and its an internal process that is often well abetted by books and by thinkers. no way you can read some bell hooks as a man and not have your privilege checked. i think one needs to focus on the process and be honest and read/travel/experience and soon it begins. and if youre lucky it wont stop.

in the DR and other latin american/caribbean countries we talk a lot about delincuencia. what we should be talking about is inequality. economic violence from elites always leads to crazy crime on the street. and the worst the economy gets for poor folks the more desperate some of these poor folks become. im an original AD&D man myself. and i LOVED expedition to the barrier peaks.

i can barely write so i cant imagine doing anything else. thank you!

i actually write as little dialogue as possible because i dont think im that good at it. but i do repeat all my dialogue over at least a 100 times aloud and that helps keep the corny out.