MWW

Hernan Diaz gives craft talk (Isabella Diaz-Mira | Student Life)

Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of bestselling novels “Trust” and “In the Distance,” visited Washington University to read the work of MFA students and deliver a craft talk in Hurst Lounge on Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2023. 

Diaz answered questions from Danielle Dutton, an associate professor of creative writing, and the audience about his career and writing process. Diaz began the talk by complementing the work of the ten MFA students and explaining how his career began as a childhood dream. 

“I always wanted to be a writer…I can’t remember wanting to be something else,” Diaz said.

Diaz attended college in Argentina for his undergraduate degree before obtaining his MFA at  New York University. After receiving his MFA, Diaz struggled to get his stories published. 

“I submitted my fiction everywhere, and to quote [Jorge Luis] Borges, it was ‘rejected with universal enthusiasm’ everywhere,” Diaz said. 

When Dutton asked if he had gained anything from the rejections, Diaz explained that the series of dismissals strengthened his belief that he had entered the profession for the right reasons.

“I think one of the nice things was that it reaffirmed me in the fact that I was doing it, because I had to do it, not because of some other external kind of need for validation, of which I got none,” said Diaz.

He emphasized that rejection is part of the process and that persistence is essential to entering the writing field.

“It’s a bad business model to think that you go into this career with any kind of money in mind,” Diaz said. “If you’re going to do it, you should do it for the love of sentences.” 

Diaz’s period of rejection ended when he submitted In the Distance to Coffee House Press, a prolific non-profit independent publisher. He submitted the novel on the company’s day of unsolicited submissions, where authors without agents were given the chance to have their work published. WashU professors Dutton and Martin Riker are currently working with the company to publish new novels. 

When asked what he would change about his career, Diaz emphasized the value of workshopping with other authors and spoke of how he wished he had not isolated himself in his early career. 

“I was a misanthrope because I didn’t go to readings,” Diaz said. “I didn’t go to events. I didn’t reach out to people…. and looking back, that is one of the main things that I would have changed.”

Diaz then answered a series of questions about how his artistic process influences the form that his novels take. 

Part of Diaz’s creative vision is to give the reader a simultaneously alienating and captivating experience, citing the contrasting styles of Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens as literary influences. 

“I love forgetting myself in those [Dickens] novels, and I get that experience from a lot of literature. It’s the thing that takes you out of yourself when language becomes lucid, and it’s like, it’s gone…You’re living in this parallel world,” Diaz said. “But I also like the opposite of that; I love the alienation. I love seeing grammar on the page.”

Sophomore Claire Redick wished to emulate Diaz’s contrasting styles in her own writing. 

“I don’t want there to be an emotional undercurrent, but I think the concept of creating alienation and an objective view that’s surreal or distanced is really interesting. Being able to blend the two is something I’m going to look out for when I read this book,” Redick said. 

Diaz also described his own technique for revealing information to his readers. He avoids deceiving his audience in the way that detective fiction often does — with an omniscient narrator who doesn’t know the butler is the killer but knows what all the characters had for breakfast.

Diaz said that he feels insulted when authors use deceptive moves like these in fiction, calling it an abuse of power and describing how he navigates surprising his reader by surprising himself in writing.

“I love to be joyfully disappointed in my own expectations that I had for a text and to see myself go in a totally new direction…It’s a very narrow crack with a gap through which these revelations can happen in a meaningful way that, again, have to do with the way in which we perhaps relate to truth,” he said. 

Diaz also talked about how part of the truth he wanted to address in writing “Trust” was the exclusion of women from stories about capital, and this led him in part to structure the novel in a four-part polyphonic structure consisting of a novel, a manuscript, a memoir, and a diary written by a character named Mildred, ending the novel from a woman’s perspective.

“I was interested in literature affecting reality rather than literature mimicking; we’re going beyond mimesis, and in making literature, we shape the narrative for form,” he said.

Diaz also said he ended the book with Mildred’s journal entry for political reasons.

“Immediately, it became very clear to me that the novel couldn’t move forward without addressing this deliberate exclusion of half of the population in money matters. Money permeates everything. It’s not just any kind of exclusion, so very quickly, it wasn’t all about capital,” Diaz stated. 

In addition to receiving the Pulitzer and many other accolades, “Trust” is in development to be an HBO series starring Kate Winslet.

MFA student Kate Guadagnino, who gave the introductory speech for Diaz and Dutton’s conversation, said she volunteered to give the speech partly as an excuse to read Diaz’s work. 

In her speech, she quoted an essay by Diaz about fiction and its ability to influence a reader’s reality. 

“‘Fiction is not a collection of falsehoods or irrelevant fabrications…It is rather a certain kind of narrative that shows us the many ways in which we experience life…’ Diaz, in addition to being a deeply competent and especially trustworthy writer, strikes me as the sort always bound to add an experience to a reader’s life,” Guadagnino said.