“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.

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.

She had been wrong to think it wouldn’t matter that much to him, yes,He took her for granted, of course he did , but he took her for granted – not like an old coat in the corner of a dark cupboard, as she’d put it to herself , but like the very air that he breathed .

Sunday-evening tea before the fire! I have never missed one moment of beauty, not even taken it for granted.

We forget that our bodies are the most valuable, precious thing we have and take that miracle of life for granted.

We were all kind of thrown into the woods and we didn’t have any of the modern conveniences that we take for granted.

I take a lot less for granted.

I have value, and I have worth. I cannot be replaced like old shoes or taken for granted like tap water.

Sadly, that’s not how it works. You take nothing for granted.

Families, particularly, tend to be the ones that you take the most for granted. They seem to slip under the radar, all those important things – it almost becomes second nature to do so.