In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Jaquira Díaz about her novel, This is the Only Kingdom.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: What’s your relationship with trust? Like trust of yourself and trust of the creative process?

Jaquira Díaz: Ah, that’s a difficult one. I go through cycles in the very beginning, like, Oh, I’m so excited for this new project. I’m making art. This is so much fun. I trust that this will be what it needs to be. And then somewhere in that writing process, I’m like, This is terrible. This is the worst thing I have ever written. I should give up. I’m failing at this. Noone’s going to want to read this. This is so embarrassing. And then I’m like, Okay, no, I just have to push through and trust that after a couple of years, this will become something beautiful, maybe. But I have to kind of trust that I am an artist and that I have something to say, and that even if I don’t have anything to say right now, that I will have something to say somewhere in the process that I’m going to discover that. I think I have to trust myself before anyone else will trust me and trust my skills as a storyteller. But that’s also for me, really connected to my love of reading.  I have to remember what made me love reading in the first place. Why I turned to reading as a place of comfort, as something that calms me, that feels like it tethers me to the world, and I am my most genuine self while I’m doing it. And so trusting in that, and trusting that what will happen eventually to the work is that my love of reading will propel me, will push me to make something that a reader will also want to read and or enjoy reading or be devastated by.

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Jaquira Díaz was raised between Humacao, Fajardo, Puerto Rico and Miami Beach. She is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, winner of a Whiting Award, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indie Next Pick, a Library Reads pick, and finalist for the B&N Discover Prize. Her stories, poems, and essays have been anthologized in The Best American Essays, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Best American Experimental Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. Her debut novel, This Is the Only Kingdom, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize. She lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.