>Junot Diaz On How New Voices Get Heard

Junot Diaz was interviewed recently by the Wall Street Journal, and it’s an interesting read. Here’s an excerpt (and a link):

I was just raising an element I think in general most of us would rather leave uninterrogated: this idea that every voice silences another voice. It can’t help it. Even if we’re coming out of an enormous silence, the very presence of our narrative displaces another. It’s like if I’m talking right now, it’s very hard for you to get a word in edgewise. I think that’s part of the form, it’s something we have to wrestle with. It’s part of the costs.

What’s really awesome though is that as readers, we don’t just exist in one book. As readers we can read the works of 70 or 80 control-freak writers. While each of them may be control freak and try to be the tyrant in the book, when you put them all together, they all work against each other. It becomes in some ways a democracy of tyrants.

[via Isak]

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