From what I said, it might seem like I pile up all this mental whatever and then BOOM, out pops a poem! It’s really not like that at all. I was simply speaking of the composition process, not the full process. So, yes, I go through the arc of associations, memories, thoughts, until I get to something that feels summative. That’s draft one. Then, for the rest of the existence of the poem, until it’s published or discarded, I read through it, and when I come to something that doesn’t feel right, I imagine where it could go instead. I think that’s what most people do? I do massive revisions to what I write over time. Two writers I’ve collaborated with, G.C. Waldrep and Kristina Marie Darling, both of them are much more assured with what they make than I am. Or at least, that’s how it feels to me. When we’d revise together, their revisions were much more of a honing, while mine would be dumping three quarters of the poem and putting a whole new thing in there. I hope I didn’t frustrate them too much. I know I did at least a little.

I actually really love editing poetry. It’s my favorite part. I love how you can change just one word and it suddenly elevates the line or even the whole poem. When I’m writing poetry, I’m looking and reading through and I’m really interrogating each word and trying to figure out: Is this the best word? Is this exactly what I’m trying to say at this moment? And I do a lot of reading aloud because cadence and rhythm are really important to me. I try to feel where the lines are sitting or where the stresses are, where the hits and the rhythm are. I also like to use those read-aloud functions on the computer because I feel like if it can still sound somewhat bearable with this monotone voice reading it, then that’s probably going to be alright—it’s the final test.

When I’m ready I’ll transfer what I have to the computer and rewrite.

Not that important. I seem to rewrite in my head a great deal. I write in these English ruled notebooks. So I write on the right, and then I correct on the left. Then, when it’s typed out, I even make another correction, and then maybe in the typed sheets also. But not that much. I seem to have a great facility to go right into what I want to say. I do correct, but not like Balzac, who went crazy over the printing presses. He was correcting at the last minute.

Find the friends who do that. Find the friends who never tell you that you can’t do it, but who point you in the right direction, hold you when you fail, and push you when you need the push. Those are hard friends to value sometimes, but they are the best of friends.

I didn’t start out thinking I would be a children’s book author. I didn’t start out thinking I’d be an author at all. If you know my biography, you’ve heard that I spoke Spanish before I spoke English and struggled until my young adulthood with learning how to speak and write English properly. It was Philomel Books and [publisher] Jill Santopolo who came to me and proposed writing a children’s picture book about my life.

I tell the kids that I speak with on these book tours that my greatest legacy will be the last child who remembers something I’ve said or done that helped them manage something in their life. Once I die, I will be alive through that last child whose life I helped make easier in some way. And that, I hope, could be a very long time.

And I didn’t know at that moment what my impact was. I actually fell asleep that night crying. But the next morning, my mother woke us up, and she said she doesn’t remember this dress, but it was a black with white polka dot dress. And her hair was finally properly combed.  She had for the first time in a year some makeup on, and I knew my mom was back. And that may have been one of the happiest moments of my life.

I think I have been mentored by many extraordinary judges in my career, but there’s one in particular that probably changed the course of my life on the court. And that’s Justice John Paul Stevens and the one year we overlapped.

Never give up. No matter how hard the challenge might be, no matter how hard a moment might be in one’s life, there is still hope. From every failure I’ve had, I’ve learned a lesson that has propelled me to something else that has actually been better than whatever I thought I could never get over.