This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Debra Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month, we're going to hear Water Child by Ed Weech Dantica,

which was published in the magazine in September of 2000.

Word circulated quickly that Nadine Marie Osnak was not a friendly woman.

Water Child was chosen by Juno Diaz.

Diaz's most recent book is the novel The Brief Wonder's Life of Oscar Wow,

which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008.

He has published eight short stories in the New Yorker, several of which were included in his collection drown.

He's a professor of creative writing at MIT, and he joins me from the studios of WGBH in Boston.

Hi Juno.

Hey Debra, how's everything?

Good.

So when Ed Weech came on the podcast, she chose one of your stories, and now you've chosen one of hers.

So what's up with you two?

I know.

We have a, we have a hispanola conspiracy going on.

It's like full-scale Caribbean collusion.

Well, since you bring it up, she was born in Ed Weech was born in Haiti,

and you were born in the Dominican Republic, and both of you moved to the US's children.

You've both set fiction back home, and obviously there's this geographical and cultural proximity between you.

...