Wildwood

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968 and immigrated with his family to the US in 1974, settling in New Jersey. He earned a Bachelor’s in English from Rutgers University, an MFA at Cornell, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He continues to write while teaching creative writing at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Culture and immigrant life are at the center of Diaz’s writing. As in “Wildwood,” his short story collections, essays, and a novel have a cultural thread running through them. Diaz won numerous awards for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (from which “Wildwood” is taken and published as a short story), including a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Diaz joins such authors as James Joyce (Ulysses) and Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men) in taking liberties with punctuation and syntax, leaving the text somewhat unstructured and omitting quotation marks to convey dialogue. Diaz has said that he wants to blur the line between thought and speech, the way human memory works, and so doesn’t use quotation marks. Diaz also infuses a measure of Spanglish—a blend of Spanish and English—in his writing. “Wildwood” contains Spanish words and phrases that either have a commonality with English or can be translated through context. Diaz shared his difficulty with learning English when he first came to the US, causing him to be enrolled in special education programs to learn the language.

Another constant theme Diaz writes about is absentee fathers. He and his family reunited with his father when they came to the US but soon became estranged. In “Wildwood,” Lola and Oscar do not speak of their father, who abandoned the family after being married to Belicia for three years. Family is still a prominent feature in Diaz’s stories, which often include an array of uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins.

In 2018, Diaz was accused of forcibly kissing writer Zinzi Clemmons and of behaving inappropriately toward two other women. After investigation, the university where Diaz teaches, MIT, chose to keep him on staff. He was also reinstated on the Pulitzer Prize committee after an independent review of the allegations “did not find evidence warranting removal” (Flood, Allison. “Junot Diaz Welcomed Back by Pulitzer Prize After Review Into Sexual Misconduct Claims.” The Guardian, 2018).