“It’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard in your life, to advertise a writing workshop and only get writers and poets. What’s the point in having a writing workshop? You want people to come who are not poets, who are not writers, but have kept their dream alive to be one. You know and I know you can’t honestly shape and forge a writer once that writer has already been shaped and forged. What you’re really looking for is the raw experience at the table. That’s where the great works come from. It’s where raw experience meets language . . . . That’s the kind of writing you want. There’s no critique; there’s no momentum, no character, no plot. There’s just the story, man. ‘I gotta get this thing down.’ That’s where the human journey expands and opens its wings.” – Jimmy Santiago Baca (interviewed by Alan C. Fox in Rattle 62)