by Jonathan Odell

In life, you can either live out of your imagination,

or you can live out of your history. ~Stephen Covey

That’s what we adults do with much of our lives. We live out of our history, doing the things that have worked once upon a time. We obey the rules. We avoid the things that didn’t work while stubbornly refusing to imagine a new story for ourselves.

One of my favorite quotes about childhood is from Graham Greene: “There is always one moment in a child’s life when the door opens and lets the future in.”

by Ben Obler

In poker, when I call half the pot with a straight draw and middle pair, against one other player, in late table position, I know where I stand. I know it’s the right decision. However it shakes out, I will regret nothing. But in writing, when I put my protagonist, Gus, in the aisle of a home improvement store for the scene when he gets the call from Priscilla, how can I gauge this choice? As he eyes the mole/vole repellent package midconversation, finding the cruelty unexpectedly tantalizing, can I be assured there’s not a better symbol in the lumber aisle? Or lighting, or plumbing? Maybe Gus should be kinder. Maybe he shouldn’t be talking to Priscilla at all! Uncertainties stack up in a hurry, as numerous as cards in a deck.

Writers’ Journeys to Cuba

by Anya Achtenberg

Es la poesía la única patria real del hombre.

(Poetry is the only real country of human beings.) ~Derbys Dominguez, poet, arts instructor, in Matanzas, Cuba

I first traveled to Cuba from Boston when I was a barely published poet, at a time when those who worked against the US blockade of Cuba faced threats and sometimes murderous retaliation. I made a second trip a year later. After our translator Lilia Berta learned that I loved poetry and was trying to write it, she began to call me “Poeta.”

by Emily Brisse

Early on in my life, I knew what I wanted to be: worldly.

experienced; knowing; sophisticated: as in the benefits of her worldly wisdom

I was the child who read Jane Eyre at ten (or tried to, anyway), convinced it would open up some corner of the universe. I was the teenager who read Jane Eyre again (this time actually) while nested between two branches of a tree, feeling that this was what people in love with the world did. At 21—after many more books, many more secret trysts with vocabulary words and foreign-language dictionaries, many more far-off yearnings, after finally a study-abroad term in Paris—I went east, to Maryland, my desire for worldliness a warmed stone in my hand.