“It’s a neat skill to have but it’s deadly for literature. In literature, you need to stare at that hole, not ignore it. You need to figure it out.”

Fiction lies somewhere in between. I usually start intuitively but eventually I need to stop and consider structure, or research, or both.

I’ve gotten to try on voices very different than my own, and I’ve become much more aware of structure than ever before. Also, you really weigh every word. There’s no closer reading then when you read to translate.

In journalism, if there’s a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you’ve got a 4 p.m. deadline.

We’re a long way from the embargo ending. Look at what just happened with the rollback of Obama’s Cuba policies. Two idiot congressmen convinced our idiot president to make it harder on Cubans on the island.

Each genre has its own process. I’m very intuitive about poetry. I usually write first and second drafts out by hand. The other end of the spectrum is journalism, which is much more cerebral, more thought-out and planned.

I think one of the unintended results of the embargo is that Cuba is quite consumerist – and I’m talking about the people, not the government or the official propaganda.

So much depends on our health, and we tend to take it so for granted.

Interestingly, in Cuba abortion is treated as lightly as getting a mole removed.

And then when we moved, I reconfigured my writing desk. The previous one had had very little space to write by hand. And suddenly, the poetry was gushing!

I feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.

Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature’s unpredictable creatures.

I’m never afraid of research. I relish it!

I tell people to have a relationship with their work every day, even if it means you just move a comma.

And I know that when I worked daily journalism it really affected my patience with literature, which I think requires reflection, and a different kind of engagement.

Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they’re both treated as such.

Our real world has evolved. It’s become something much different, and inadvertently about healthcare, and about what it means to have good health, and to be able to have good health.

Arrogance can be deadly.

I need to get back to work, patch said. He gave me a once-over that lingered a bit below the hips. Killer skirt. Deadly legs.

I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.

…all the most acute, most powerful, and most deadly diseases, and those which are most difficult to be understood by the inexperienced, fall upon the brain.

The deadly weapon against totalitarian society is openness – doing everything very openly on the Internet, letting people know every detail, any little development. Once it is out there, everybody can make their own judgement.

Mental activity is like a deadly poisonous cobra. If we don’t interfere with a cobra, how poisonous it may be, it simply goes its own away.

I know that the vitriol and hyperbole that exists online, and the anonymity, can be deadly because it’s cloaked in negativity and it’s brutal sometimes.