I love factoids. It's hard for me to keep those out. It just takes realizing that it's stopping the character. Part of it is the decision to keep things where you want to train the spotlight. For me, it's the personal side. I always ask, How does the person inside the character relate to this?

I love factoids. It's hard for me to keep those out. It just takes realizing that it's stopping the character. Part of it is the decision to keep things where you want to train the spotlight. For me, it's the personal side. I always ask, How does the person inside the character relate to this?

My sense, and I'm sort of guessing, is that the journalists were being classified by the government as common criminals, and the political prisoners were so resistant to being that. Always keeping [the other prisoners] as murderers, thieves, that sort of thing, which has a certain irony to it, I guess. It's a curious thing.

If one is writing in a way that is questioning, or even raising questions about how we are supposed to negotiate the world - even if it is about the self, or love, or how human beings relate - I do think that has a certain subversiveness to it. Even if it's not on a geopolitical level.

The fact that my students could be in a little college in a little college town on the coast of Rhode Island, and be connecting in other countries with other people, did open them up and empower them and their sense of being. Whether it affected their writing, it's hard to tell.

What really resonated with my students, I think, is that most of the writers we worked with were journalists, and when they saw journalists simply raising questions and being put in jail for that, it did freak them out a little bit.

Often people who already had an interest in human rights work. What I did notice with all of them, even the people who professed to be interested in human rights, was that activism was somewhat a concept in their mind - a symbolic flag on the quad or something to show how many people were starving in the world. But once they saw their efforts connected to a person, I did see a change.