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.
ACHY OBEJAS
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.
More Achy Obejas Quotes
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Journalism is very much public writing, writing with an audience in mind, writing for publication, and frequently writing quickly.
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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.
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Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature’s unpredictable creatures.
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I’m never afraid of research. I relish it!
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I feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.
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I tell people to have a relationship with their work every day, even if it means you just move a comma.
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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.
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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.
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Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they’re both treated as such.
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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.
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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.
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Fiction lies somewhere in between. I usually start intuitively but eventually I need to stop and consider structure, or research, or both.
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The legacy of the embargo will be Cuba’s poverty and desperation. When the island comes out of it, they’ll be even more desperate than they are now about the things they think they’ve missed.
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