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

Journalism is very much public writing, writing with an audience in mind, writing for publication, and frequently writing quickly.

This is going to sound nuts but it took me forever to figure out why I’d stopped writing poetry – I mean, I went about a decade where I wrote very little poetry and I thought it was because I was doing a weekly blog.

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 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.

You can never win as a sight-seer. Somebody else, more often than not the first person you meet when you get back home, has been there before you.

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.

People who never drove a car in these conditions, they just don’t know.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

Never give up your day job. I do all sorts of things, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to The Today Show,

When I test I never go right to the limit. Only because when you are below the limit you can go at the same speed all day, and that’s the only way you can be absolutely sure about what you are testing.

I want to devour you with my eyes, and tell you over and over that you’ve never been so beautiful.

Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.