Of Readings and Diaz

Here's an article I wrote for the upcoming Cornell English Department newsletter about the Cornell Reading Series...

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When Junot Diaz invited me to salsa with him at a noisy bar, I had this sudden image in my head of my MFA professors at the faculty club, surrounded by white cloth and wood panelling. They were persuading a white-haired widow to fund a new reading series so that students like me can have close contact with notable writers outside Cornell. This was probably not the kind of contact they had in mind, but I wasn’t about to stop myself.

By then, Diaz’s residency had alreadygiven me and my fellow MFA writers plenty of insight. The author of the acclaimed story collection Drown and the soon-to-be-released The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao not only conducted a special workshop for us where we submitted stories-in-progress, but also solicited finished manuscripts for consideration at The Boston Review, where he is the fiction editor. We had meals with him where he talked about his days as a grad student in our department. We attended a craft lecture where he drilled us on the importance of structure. For three days and nights, it was all Junot all the time.

Then there was his public reading, thrown into crisis when a scheduling conflict forced its audience into the cramped English lounge. My recurring nightmare of taking a test for a class I had never attended came true when I walked into Cornell Auditorium and a friendly TA suggested that I find my lab partners for the biochem prelim. When the TA saw the shock on my face, he said, “Oh. You must be here for the reading. It’s been moved.” Diaz handled the situation with significantly more grace, reading from the room entrance so that audience members could sit on the floor around the podium, and those stuck in the hall could hear him.

Maybe it was the stress, but at the end of the reception, Diaz asked some of the writers if we wanted to go somewhere. That was when someone suggested salsa dancing at Olivia’s. He not only offered me dance tips that night, but gave us all a great lesson on how to keep it real, just in case we need it someday.

There are other stories, not just from me but from other members of the MFA program. I heard that David Barber, poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly, conducted an amazing workshop, as did Elizabeth Alexander. There were lunches with Alice Friman and Heather McHugh. We learned all about creative writing PhD programs from Emily Rosko, and that George Saunders gives each of his characters distinctive voices when he reads.

Next year’s series promises another batch of luminaries, among them the newly-knighted Salman Rushdie, who is probably my biggest influence. Cornell will also host Sandra Cisneros, William Kennedy, Charles Simic, Mark Doty, and Denis Johnson among others. The last two will be visiting writers for all of spring semester, a situation that kept me awake one night wondering which one I would pick if I were forced to choose a class between the two.

When I eventually fell asleep, I dreamt that Sir Salman was teaching me how to move in a red sari embroidered with gold thread, as we performed a musical number to the Bollywood remix of U2’s “The Ground Beneath Her Feet.”