< Music Credits: “Pancho's Seis Por Ocho” written and performed by Eddie Palmieri and Cal Tjader,from the album Bamboleate>

Junot Díaz: Oh, man, I think one of the wonderful elements of this book is seeing this spectrum of these Dominican women, I mean, how to describe them? These powerhouses, in many ways. Getting these voices, these multiple voices. I think it's hard to overestimate how formidable an achievement that is.

<Musical Interlude, Music Credits: Eddie Palmieri, Pancho's Seis Por Ocho from the album Bamboleate>

Jo Reed: That’s author Junot Diaz talking Julia Alverez’s novel and current Big Read selection In the Time of the Butterflies. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

Julia Alvarez’s second brilliant novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, is set in the Dominican Republic. It’s a fictionalized account of the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were murdered by henchmen of Dictator Rafael Trujillo for their resistance to his regime. The girls were known in the underground by their codename Las Mariposas or butterflies. Julia Alvarez spent her childhood in the Dominican Republic until the family fled the country because of her father's political activities. Author Junot Diaz’s family also left the Dominican Republic when he was six. Although they didn’t leave because of political persecution, the brutal Trujillo regime was also a touchstone for Diaz, and that history is in many ways the spine of, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. Junot Diaz deeply admires Julia Alvarez and In the Time of the Butterflies and agreed to speak to me about it back in 2010 for The Big Read audio guide. It turned into a wide-ranging discussion about Julia’s book, the Trujillo regime, Diaz’s extraordinary prize-winning novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, and the gift of being a reader. It was a 45-minute discussion of which about 4 minutes was used in the multi-voiced audio guide to Butterflies. I always knew I’d come back to Junot’s interview—the material was too good, so here we are. Junot and I spoke in his Cambridge apartment—so be prepared for some traffic noise. He remembered when he first read Julia Alvarez’s novel, In the Time of the Butterflies…

Junot Díaz: Of course. I read it when it was first published. Any novel by a Dominican writer, by a Caribbean writer, uhm, is gonna be of great interest to me. And this novel more so because, the early reviews were incredibly positive and the topic absolutely fascinated me, so I ran and got it uh, as soon as it was published.

Jo Reed: Do you mind telling me the story? Just give me a thumbnail sketch of In The Time of the Butterflies?

Junot Díaz: Well, In The Time of the Butterflies deals with a terrible traumatic period in Dominican history, in the history of the Dominican Republic. Uh it's about a family of young women, the Mirabal sisters, who play a fundamental role in the liberation struggles against the dictator for life of the Dominican Republic in that period, Rafael Trujillo, and it is a look at the four young Mirabal sisters who, remarkable as they were as individuals, are even more extraordinary when put into the context of the Dominican period at the time and the fact that these were all people coming from one family.

Jo Reed: When did you first hear about the Mirabal sisters?

Junot Díaz: You know, I'm Dominican. I've known about them since I was a kid.

Jo Reed: And were they revered in your family?

Junot Díaz: No, not at all. Uhm, they were more of a historical curiosity. I didn't come from any kind of left-wing, any kind of progressive family. My family was conservative. My family had a military background in the Dominican Republic.

Jo Reed: So when you read Julia's book, was some of it a revelation for you or was it retelling a story that you already knew?

Junot Díaz: The history wasn't. I mean, I'm a big-time history nerd. By then, I mean, I was already, oh, fully along in most of my historical studies, so none of the history was a revelation. Uhm, it's all pretty well documented if you were into Dominican history. The illumination of these young women's interior lives, the, I would say the capillary specificity of their imagined subjectivities was the real revelation. Uh, the book was extraordinarily powerful and human in ways that very few histories can possibly achieve and, in fact, I feel like the novel did more for understanding the Mirabal sisters than any historical documents that I have come across.

Jo Reed: Well, let's talk about why is it, you think, that fiction can get at a deeper truth than the facts can or that a history can?

Junot Díaz: Well, I mean, I think it's- it's less about a deeper truth and more about the fact that both sorts of narratives, historical narratives, and fiction narratives have certain kinds of advantages. One of the advantages that uh, fictional narratives have is their ability to uhm, their ability to sort of mimic or create a wonderful, accurate if not realistic view of a person's interiority. In other words, fiction is brilliant at giving us the human, at giving us hearts. As has been said by greater individuals, hearts that struggle with themselves. Uh, that's not necessarily the interest or the claim of most uh. Historical texts. They're trying to give us different kinds of information. I think that we need both and many other kinds of narratives to begin to address any historical period but I think that people are especially susceptible, especially vulnerable to tales that foreground the human. People connect with people strongly, palpably, emphatically in ways that they don't connect with figures and they don't connect with theories, and they don't connect with abstractions. The advantage of fiction is that it's almost always about people and we love confecting with people. We love it.

Jo Reed: Can you give us a sense of the pervasiveness of Trujillo’s repression in the Dominican Republic? You wrote about it in your book Oscar Wao, certainly Julia does in The Time of the Butterflies. But I think it’s stunning for many of us to get a sense of how pervasive his reach and grasp were.

Junot Díaz: Well, I mean, I always think it's good to understand things by, you know, what's said at the margins or outside of the area we're talking about. I mean, I have spoken to older Puerto Ricans who have never been to the Dominican Republic, who spoke about how the great terror of their youth was this idea of the Trujillato, of the Trujillo regime of the Dominican Republic, that that's where incredibly scary and terrible things happened. I spoke only two weeks ago, three weeks ago, to a navy man, retired, talking about coming into port in the Dominican Republic. A U.S. navy man, and uh, American ships uh were allowed to have liberty there and how utterly creeped out they all were because the place was so gripped with fear that it was palpable even to young men who just wanted to party, to get drunk, to chase girls, to gamble, even to these sort of young men, it was very, very apparent that this was a country being utterly terrorized. And he said to me a thing that really struck me, he's, like, "I did not sleep easy 'til we put that damn city behind us." He's, like, "No matter how much we drank, I could never sleep easy 'cause it was the fear was everywhere. It was leaking out of people's pores." And again, you know, one can go on, but I think that, in some ways, that's rather demonstrative of what we're talking about. We're talking about a country where there was a pseudo-totalitarian repressive panopticon that kept everybody under surveillance, everybody under control, that was utterly arbitrary, and that could direct hideous violence towards families, towards individuals, towards communities. And, my god, did it ever and that violence and those echoes of that violence had a traumatizing effect on the population.

Jo Reed: You’ve dealt with this period in fiction as well can you just talk about what some of the challenges of dealing with historical figures in fiction are?

Junot Díaz: I think it's difficult enough to create characters, period, and characters who make sense to people and characters who move people, you know, and characters who challenge people. I think it becomes even all that harder when these are real-life figures when these are historical figures when these are people who sort of have a reputation, who have a myth already developed around them. I think it's hard to get people to see new things about them. Uhm, you know, I think that that's one of the challenges. It’s also, you know, you're writing about another world. The past is as distant to us as middle earth is to us and so you have to not only create these people; you also have to create the world that they inhabited, which is no longer present for us. We no longer have access to it, you know? And that world includes elements that are sometimes outside of our imaginaries, at least for those folks who are residing in quote/unquote "traditional" U.S. communities. I mean, living under a nightmare regime like the Trujillato, for most people, that's not everyday life. For some people, lamentably, that is. But, you know, as a writer, you have to also create that. Uhm, you know, it's- it's nothing easy about it, you know? And I think that that's why it's sort of the- the joy that is found In the Time of the Butterflies, the energy, the spiritual life, the playfulness that exists in this book despite all the horrors it describes. Is really like, I'm telling you, man, this is- this is no mean achievement, to be able to do all this because, you know, she had to get all these things correct to write this historical novel. She had to- Julia had to juggle all of these flaming bowling balls at the same time and yet she had to do so in a way that maintained the life force of these young women and to do so is such a commendable and almost uhm, impossible to repeat performance.

Jo Reed: Julia Alvarez’s performance might be impossible to repeat, and Juno Diaz wasn’t trying when he wrote the novel The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao. Instead, Diaz created a wild, funny, heartbreaking book about a fat Dominican American nerd named Oscar who’s into comic books, science fiction, fantasy novels and role-playing games in a big way but we also get his families story and its one that centered on the women in Oscar’s life. His sister Lola, a punk rocker and particularly their mother, Belicia raised in the Dominican Republic in comfortable circumstances until her parents ran afoul of Trujillo—where the horrifying stories of the dictatorship unfold and whose evil spirit follows the family to the US. In telling the story, Diaz brings in the history of the Dominican Republic, some science fiction, fantasy, a lot of profanity and literary references in equal measure. And boy does it work. It’s a fabulous read which won a raft of prizes including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. It is so unlikely to have a character like Oscar in the center of a book with such scope. So, where did Oscar come from?

Junot Díaz: Hard to say. I wanted to write a book about a big old nerd. I wanted to write a book about the kind of nerd that people still refuse to talk about. It doesn't matter how many Oscar Wao's are written you know, the idea of a nerd of color, the idea of an immigrant nerd is so impossible. Even regular quote/unquote "white nerds" don't want to imagine or don't wanna allow the space for this nerd to exist. So, you know, I picked what I would consider one of the most conventional, invisible figures. Conventional because he's not in a war, because he's not in a concentration camp, because, you know, sort of no extreme experiences. The Jersey sort of Jersey boy, you know, going to a okay school and uh, but yet as probably as far in the margins as one can imagine, you know? The- he's the prosaic fantastic, in some ways.

Jo Reed: Each narrator has such a different voice. What made you decide to go using multiple perspectives with this?

Junot Díaz: Well, you know, I always tell my students, it's just a nickel dime solution to a million dollar problem. You wanna give the sense that this a larger community, you wanna give the sense that this book somehow has the complexity, the diversity, the cacophony of life. And so having multiple voices gives you that, you know, gives you that sense without you having to write millions of characters or without you having to go to Cecil B. DeMille's mode.

Jo Reed: Oscar’s sister, Lola and their mother Belicia are both vivid characters with distinctive voices; I wondered how difficult it was for Junot to wrap his mind around these female characters in particular.

Junot Díaz: I mean to write any character uh, it always is, like, a huge pain in the ass. Uh, the women characters were, well, equally challenging. I think they were probably way more challenging than anything I'd ever tackled. You know, it's- it's tough because half the planet has got some authority on whether your woman voices sound any good or not, you know, and they're more than happy to share their opinions of your failures and your shortcomings. So, you know, and uh, on top of that, I had made sort of what little tiny career I'd had to that moment from writing very particular masculine voices. And uh, for me, it was going to be this really big reversal, this really big change. So, yeah, it was a big old struggle but one that I kind of uh, was happy I undertook, man, because uh, it was a joy to live with Belicia and Lola for a little while. It was a joy. They were tremendous gifts of the imagination. I mean, in some ways, you know, ferocious, ferocious Belicia and her willful and positive daughter. I just-- I was glad to have spent the- all the years that I spent with them. I really was very glad.

Jo Reed: How old were you when you came from the Dominican Republic?

Junot Díaz: I was six years old. Six years old.

Jo Reed: Were your parents already here?

Junot Díaz: My father was already here. Me, my mother, and my other three siblings, we came uh, to live and settle in New Jersey, right outside of Perth Amboy. Yeah, not far from the Amboy Cinemas for those who know.

Jo Reed: <laughs> And how was it for you, do you remember very much about it?

Junot Díaz: Oh, yeah, yeah. The same way I always say the same way you'll remember that arm if I cut it off. Yeah, uh, I both remember the Dominican Republic and I remember what I arrived to with a level of detail that only loss and shock can provide. Oh, I remember them very, very, very powerfully.

Jo Reed: When did you discover books?

Junot Díaz: I think I discovered books as soon as I landed. I think within- within months, I mean, within weeks, I was at school, enrolled, ready to go and within days of being enrolled, we were all taken to the library and given a little tour of the library. And, when I saw that tiny room, probably- probably only double the size of this room, when I saw that room, I think, you know, sometimes there's a click in the universe and, at that moment, there was a click. My life changed. I met my future, in a way, and a part of me knew it. A part of me knew it. I fell in love with books so profoundly when I was six years old uh, yeah, just really did, really did and that- that love has carried me through to today.

Jo Reed: Did kids in your neighborhood understand that or were you kinda the nerdy kid?

Junot Díaz: I mean, I don't know. What kid understands another kid's passion? I grew up very protected in some ways. I had a big family; I had a family who didn't mind fighting a lot. So that, you know, me, the third oldest sibling, was protected. I mean, I think, in the end, you know, this was the '70s. I think that the- the gears about masculinity, about urban masculinity hadn't really caught up yet, so I think that, had I come up, let's say, in the '80s and '90s, being a book lover would have been even crazier than it was when I was a kid. When I was a kid, it was, you know, it was a certain accepted level of freakery, you know? In other words, it was a freakish thing to do but, again, I had a- a family that sort of protected me, you know? And I think that that was- that was a life saver in some ways. I wonder what it would have been like without them. My vision of what it meant, uh, you know, comes from that. I certainly did not feel ostracized for being a smart kid the way that Oscar was ostracized for being a nerd. I mean, not even close.

Jo Reed: Mm hm. Well, how does the work, work?

Junot Díaz: Very, very slowly and a product of tremendous amounts of reading, you know? I think that I need to read at least 100 books before I can write a story, in a way, you know? I think I- I might extract a word from each book I read and so, you know, or maybe a sentence from each book I read and uh, that’s- that's been a- sort of a- an interesting journey. Because, for me, the writing is connected so intrinsically to this immense amount of reading that I do. Uhm, I read voraciously, omnivorously, compulsively and in some ways, all that reading and that experience of being a reader uh, shapes my writing more than anything. And then there's, of course, the daily work, the getting up. These days, I get up earlier and earlier. I get up at six a.m., work three hours, you know, four hours and then go do my regular job of teaching and then try to get a couple hours of reading in. You know, it's just really mundane. I mean, for something that can have such miraculous effects as art, the actual, you know, daily practice of it is really, really kind of boring, you know?

Jo Reed: Well, this is a work question because you teach creative writing. Does that kind of take some of the juice away from your own writing or do you think it adds to it?

Junot Díaz: I really, I love teaching, but for me anything that keeps me away from reading is it going to somehow disrupt my writing? I mean, I think that’s what teaching does, keeps me from reading more than anything. Because, you know, the writing, you’ll always figure out a way to get a couple hours in, but the reading is something that you just end up jettisoning, which stinks. Again, I really-I love teaching, I love my students, but, let me tell you, if I win a $30 million lottery tomorrow, I will probably never teach again, you know? The dream- the dream of the person of leisure, for me, would be the dream of just endless reading, you know?

Jo Reed: What do you get from reading?

Junot Díaz: Uhm, I guess I never know what I don't get from reading. The only thing that reading can't give you is the world and, for that, there's travel, and there's, like, really throwing yourself out there. Uhm, but, you know, reading is a wonderful way to come in contact with other human subjectivities. Nothing communicates the interiority of another human quite like a novel can, or the interiorities of other humans quite like a novel can. I mean, for me, books have always given me that fundamental human experience, which is communion. I feel very strongly, a very strong love and need for communion and novels and fiction give that to me across a space and time. There's no way the internet can compete with a novel for connecting me, you know? I mean, the internet can connect me maybe to someone in Kazakhstan, but a novel can connect me to someone in Kazakhstan 200 years ago. Really remarkable stuff, you know? And not just the level of words but to connect at the level of spirit, at the level of dreams, at the level of hope, it's really great, man. It's, like, it's worth the price of admission. Yeah.

Jo Reed: And there's also something about that connection with other people that often connects, at least me, to a deeper part of myself that I had no idea was even there.

Junot Díaz: Yeah. No, I think that that's- that's exactly accurate.

Jo Reed: You know how people talk about books as writerly books? Oscar Wao struck me as a readerly book.

Junot Díaz: Yeah. I- I wouldn't disagree. I would not disagree. Yeah, I kept telling myself, when I was reading this- res- reading, when I was writing this book, uh, I kept telling myself what I always wanted to be, you know, there's this sort of, this uh, title that is given, uh, or this category of a writer's writer. I'd always wanted to be a reader's writer. I just- I just think that reading, as a praxis, you know, reading is a way to understand the world, you know? Reading is a way to shape the worlds uhm, really drove this novel and I think it's no accident you-you felt that.

Jo Reed: I felt like I was in very safe hands.

Junot Díaz: Oh, man, I wish I had felt that when I was writing it.

Jo Reed: Yeah, I bet. <laughs>

Junot Díaz: I'm glad, I'm glad it worked that way for someone. Yeah, glad it worked out for somebody.

Jo Reed: There is something that happens when you're in the grip of a novel where you just don't want to do anything else. You come home, and you think, "Wow, I get to read this book now."

Junot Díaz: Yeah. No, that's- I'm telling you when that happens to you, that's when- that's when every book that you've ever had to, like, drive yourself through or that you ever had to force yourself through, that you ever fell asleep through. That's when, like, all those experiences are suddenly worth it when you have that one moment where you are captivated and transported, yeah, you realize that all those other books were preparation for this one.

Jo Reed: That was Junot Diaz—he’s the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and more recently, This Is How You Lose Her. Julia Alverez is the author of the Big Read selection, In the Time of the Butterflies. You can find out more about The Big Read at arts.gov.

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. And now you can get the Art Works podcast at Itunes. If you like us, please subscribe and rate us—it helps people to find the podcasts.

To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog or follow us @NEAArts on Twitter.

For the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

<Musical Postlude, Music Credits: Eddie Palmieri, Pancho's Seis Por Ocho from the album Bamboleate>