Díaz with students: “Indeterminacy . . . is the state where great art happens.” Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

Anyone from New Jersey out there? Any Dominicans?” novelist Junot Díaz asked a crowded Murray Room audience at the start of his Lowell Lecture on the evening of February 15. A noisy handful in the crowd of almost 300 answered the shout-outs. Díaz, 43, was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in a blue-collar immigrant community in New Jersey, “half a mile away from a huge landfill.” His debut short story collection, Drown (1996), put him on the New Yorker list of 20 writers to watch in the 21st century, and his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), won four major awards, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The public lecture marked the midpoint of a three-day residency at Boston College for Díaz, during which he led a book club discussion of his work, taught several creative writing classes, critiqued student writing individually, and met with faculty, students, and administrators over lunch, tea, and dinner. Funding for the residency, which last year brought novelist Gish Jen to campus, came from the Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA), the Lowell Humanities Series, Fiction Days, the English department, and African and African Diaspora Studies. English professor and novelist Elizabeth Graver organized the program.

Writing short stories, Díaz told the Lowell audience in his opening remarks, is like eating chicken wings—”a lot of work, very little chicken.” He then read a couple of unpublished pieces about infidelity, “dude cheating stories,” with sonorous deliberation. As English major Katrin Tschirgi ’12 noted later, he is a masterly performer, his emphasis “falling hard on each word, like a slam poet.”

Following the readings, in answer to questions from the audience, Díaz talked about his passion for research—spending time in urban U.S. probate courts (“where you will hear the wildest [stuff]”) and in the chaotic national archives in Santo Domingo. The aftermath of the brutal Trujillo dictatorship (1930–61) provides the dark background to much of Díaz’s fiction, and a great deal of his research for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao involved hanging out with local Dominicans, never asking direct questions about “torture, assassination, trauma.” “I was literally just catching atoms of information from people,” he said of the slow sifting process that informed his multigenerational narrative of an accursed Dominican family.

On day one of the residency, Díaz led an hour-long book club–style discussion of Drown and Oscar Wao with some 80 undergraduates in Devlin 101. As the students settled into their seats, he paced restlessly at the front of the room—movement eases his chronic back pain—a slight figure in a black hooded sweatshirt and black jeans. “All right, gang, let’s do this,” he said, inviting questions.

One student asked about the man with no face, a sinister figure glimpsed by several characters in Oscar Wao. On one level, Díaz replied, the whole book is about masks and what they conceal. Yunior, the principal narrator and cheating boyfriend of Oscar’s sister, Lola, “is the character who can never take off his mask” or, if he takes one off, it’s only to assume another, Díaz said. Oscar, the central character, has the opposite problem. He’s a romantic, overweight, science fiction–obsessed nerd, with no clue about how to wear a mask. “Dudes have at least three masks for passing for being boys,” Díaz said. “We’ve got to pretend we’re boys, so we snap these . . . masks on.” Díaz himself is a university professor—he teaches creative writing at MIT—but he speaks in a streetwise slang spiked with four-letter words that harks back to his younger self, “a straight-up ghetto-assed moron,” in his words. “I went to college acting like I was a thug—I was a boxer, a weightlifter.” Take away a person’s tough mask, he said, “and you get the vulnerable, the human, and the real.”

In answer to one young woman who wondered how he knows when a piece of work is done, Díaz said: “We’re a goal-oriented . . . culture, and we find it very difficult to live in the state of indeterminacy, which is the state where great art happens.” What that means, he added, is that “if you can get yourself to bear the quantum state of possibly sucking and possibly being good simultaneously, for years at a time, you’re good to go.”

After the Q&A session, nearly all the students lined up to get their books signed and have cell-phone pictures taken of themselves with Díaz. “Most of the books I read, the author is dead,” said freshman Trang Mai, whose family came to the United States from Vietnam three years ago. She opened her well-read copy of Drown to show a passage she liked so much that she put it on her Facebook page: “I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.”

Day two of Díaz’s visit began in the conference room of the ILA’s Stone Avenue headquarters, where he met with a group of about 20 Latino students—most of them participants in the annual Dominican Republic immersion trip—and talked about his move to the United States and his grappling with a new culture in which “our stories, our realities, our complexities, are absolutely erased.” Asked what his parents thought of his decision to become a writer, he said that “nothing earns respect like you working really, really hard.”

A meeting with 17 English majors concentrating in creative writing followed. “Take as few creative writing classes as you can possibly take,” Díaz told them. “Go out and take classes where you get a bunch of reading, because your writing is strengthened by your reading.” Asked what he’s been reading lately, he mentioned four novels by Gish Jen, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black—”like a master class in the ecology of atmosphere”—and Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat’s recent book of essays on art and exile, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.

Apart from omnivorous reading, said Díaz, it’s important for a writer to confront himself or herself. In order to write with integrity he said, “you need to get an accurate beam on the one subjectivity you have access to,” then combine that with a deep knowledge of literary forms. Writing, he said, “transforms, opens horizons, gives comfort—it’s this one place where we encounter the human in ourselves and in other people.”

Asked about his novel in progress, Díaz said that he’s been working on the idea of an apocalypse that starts in the Dominican Republic. An earthquake in neighboring Haiti cuts off power to the whole island, and a group of “crazy kids” from Santo Domingo decide to drive to Haiti to see what’s happened. “And that’s when they start to get eaten,” he said, to laughter. “I write so slowly, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he admitted. Then, after a long pause, “We’ll see.”

Jane Whitehead is a Boston-based writer.

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