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.
ACHY OBEJASSo much depends on our health, and we tend to take it so for granted.
More Achy Obejas Quotes
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I’m never afraid of research. I relish it!
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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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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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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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Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature’s unpredictable creatures.
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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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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.
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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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Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they’re both treated as such.
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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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Interestingly, in Cuba abortion is treated as lightly as getting a mole removed.
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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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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.
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