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 OBEJASI tell people to have a relationship with their work every day, even if it means you just move a comma.
More Achy Obejas Quotes
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Interestingly, in Cuba abortion is treated as lightly as getting a mole removed.
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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 feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.
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So much depends on our health, and we tend to take it so for granted.
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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!
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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’m never afraid of research. I relish it!
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