“Beauty in childhood”: a journey, between memory and essay, towards these first years of existence

The Spanish writer, teacher and poet Elisa Martin Ortega (Valladolid) has just published “Beauty in Childhood”, a book in which he takes a tour of the first years of life, those in which his own memories and those told by others mingle with elements of fiction. The author is a mother of two children, Gabrielle, 11 years and Adrian, On 8; in 2011 he started a blog called Gabriel’s storywith the aim of reflecting on childhood, as he does in the written pages of his new publication.

The 42-year-old writer developed mainly in the professional field as a teacher at the fDepartment of Education of the Autonomous University of Madrid and researcher in language and literature analysis. Regarding his literary career, Ortega He has published several books devoted to poetry, including the collection of poems “Dream”winner of Jaime Gil de Biedma Awardliterary prize awarded by the Provincial Council of Segovia.

The book “Beauty in Childhood” is part of the collection beautya series of short essays that explore the concept of beauty in different areas of life, including “The Beauty of Wandering” of April Gonzalo; “Beauty Outside” of george prague; “The Beauty of Gardens” of dario alvarez; “The beauty of the little ones” of Tomas Sanchez Santiago; there “The Beauty of the Dead” of Ildefonso Rodriguez.

This literary collection was presented at the end of 2022, under the title of Elisa Martin Ortega one of the newest to join the collection. In “Beauty in Childhood” the author refers to those years when the world was perceived without words, but also when language and thought were born.

“My interest in writing about childhood started after my children were born, so I couldn’t separate thinking about childhood from my own subjective experience. Whether you show it or not, the subjective experience is there and I decided to show it. So I chose to make a mix between the essay and a more personal part in which my own childhood and that of my children is filtered”. Elisa Martin Ortega.

In the title, Ortega is responsible for saving all those moments that hide inside, an unfathomable secret, what we have forgotten and will never find again. In its pages, the author confronts these first experiences between the frontier of experience and knowledge. It exposes the permanence of childhood until adult life and how it is made of sensations and images, but also of sudden reunions.

The test “Beauty in Childhood”it is not an endless title, but in its little more than 100 pages Elisa Martin Ortega is responsible for deepening its different expressions through a prose where the essay and the story intertwine, a text where the author transits between reflection, observation and memory.

“The first years of life are what they told us. The first stage of a baby, in which there is no access to language, is a very bodily stage by necessity, since it is not possible to put words to what happens to us. Then there is a time when the child can already speak and the adults become aware of their thinking ” Elisa Martin Ortega in interview with The country.

This collection of Eolas Editions Its objective is to publish twelve titles a year, including those of The beauty of delirium, of the incomplete, of dreams, of the outside, of the word, of animals, of what does not exist, of silence, of cinema, writing, gardens, madness, the occult, stories.

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