I feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.

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!

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

Journalism is very much public writing, writing with an audience in mind, writing for publication, and frequently writing quickly. 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.

So much depends on our health, and we tend to take it so for granted.

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.

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.