“Keeping track of my thoughts in a journal is a habit I acquired as a teenager experiencing the conflicts and loneliness of Puerto Rican immigrant life in the sixties. Now in my middle forties, I find writing my daily paragraph as indispensable as a daily prayer and weekly candles are for my mother. Most nights before bed, I take out my plain school notebook and write a few lines. Every morning at dawn, I write the poems and begin the stories that recollections have filtered through my dreams. I do not, however, merely record the mundane activities of each day in my journal or in my writings, but rather I try to capture with clarity and succinctness what, if anything, the past twenty-four hours have taught me. Sometimes as I write, my fingers cease to be connected to my conscious mind and instead become instruments of revelations of my most painful memories and thoughts.”

– from “A Prayer, A Candle and A Notebook” in Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer by Judith Ortiz Cofer