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.

Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they're both treated as such.

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. 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.

Interestingly, in Cuba abortion is treated as lightly as getting a mole removed.

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.

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.

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. 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!