Top 15 Quotes & Sayings by Achy Obejas

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Achy Obejas.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Achy Obejas

Achy Obejas is a Cuban-American writer and translator focused on personal and national identity issues, living in Oakland, California. She frequently writes on her sexuality and nationality, and has received numerous awards for her creative work. Obejas' stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine and many other publications. Some of her work was originally published in Esto no tiene nombre, a Latina lesbian magazine published and edited by tatiana de la tierra, which gave voice to the Latina lesbian community. Obejas worked as a journalist in Chicago for more than two decades. For several years, she was also a writer in residence at the University of Chicago, University of Hawaii, DePaul University, Wichita State University, and Mills College in Oakland, California. She is currently a writer/editor for Netflix on the bilingual team in the Product Writing department.

Interestingly, in Cuba abortion is treated as lightly as getting a mole removed.
I'm never afraid of research. I relish it!
I tell people to have a relationship with their work every day, even if it means you just move a comma. — © Achy Obejas
I tell people to have a relationship with their work every day, even if it means you just move a comma.
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.
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.
So much depends on our health, and we tend to take it so for granted.
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. 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.
I feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.
Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature's unpredictable creatures.
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. Fiction lies somewhere in between. I usually start intuitively but eventually I need to stop and consider structure, or research, or both.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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