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

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.

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.

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.