Karina Echevarría Writer, editor and teacher from Martínez, Argentina
Karina Echevarría is a teacher of Spanish Language and Literature, specialized in children's and young people's literature. She works in a publishing house and as a teacher in a training institute for future school teachers. She has published short stories in anthologies and magazines, and four novels for children: "Rescatando a Don Quijote", Editorial Libresa; "Historias de la laguna", Editorial Amauta; "Las aventuras de Sebastián Holmes", and "Siete veces Julia", Editorial Del Naranjo. For teenagers, she published in 2022 the novel "Impredecible" (Editorial Del Naranjo). At Editorial Homo Sapiens, Rosario, Argentina, she published the book "Literatura y adolescencia, Cómo entusiasmar a los jóvenes lectores", in which she gathers reflections on her teaching experience in the middle school literature classroom. She also published two illustrated stories for younger readers in Cheuque publishing house: "¿Dónde está Ludovico?" and "Mi perro tiene mascota". Karina was a finalist in the "Julio C. Coba" International Children's Literature Contest, Ecuador, in 2005, and in the Sigmar Children's Literature Contest, Buenos Aires, in 2009 and 2014. She continues studying, reading, writing and teaching, because she loves discovering new things and facing challenges. That's why she is writing poetry.
We had this interview with Karina in 2022.
Website
What brought you to your art?
I started writing when I was a child. I used to have a notebook for poems when was six or seven years old. I just liked “playing” with words, making them say something different from their meaning, making them rhyme or sing in a sentence. When I grew up I decided to do something with that, I wanted to teach language and creative writing but also wanted to continue playing with words. I suppose I never left my notebook.
How did you get the opportunity to participate in Cornelia's 'Artists in Residence Program'?
It was serendipity, no doubt about it. It was 2020, we were in the middle of the pandemic and I found the LIJPE seminar. It was free, it was online, there were a lot of famous authors invited, so I decided to get in. In the first zoom meeting I attended, Cornelia and Adolfo made the invitation to write a text or create any piece of art based on Adolfo’s book “El Dragón Blanco y otros personajes olvidados”. I haden’t even read the book! But decided to do it ... So I got the book, I read it and started writing my story. And I started dreaming about it.
How did you like your time at Fraggina? Did you find inspiration there?
Fraggina is magic. The place, the people, the landscape, the nature ... Everything is there to take you to inspiration, to reflect and admire, and create. In the morning you can hear the birds and you really believe they are talking and you feel invited to listen and learn. What are they talking about? What is Nature trying to say? Then you see a small beetle carrying a piece of bark three or four times bigger than him, and you feel he’s making the whole world move, and you can’t stop it. It’s difficult to explain. I found there a perfect time and a perfect space for thinking and writing.
What did you take home from there?
I took home a wonderful experience. I took a book of poems ended and corrected. I took friends that will be forever in my WhatsApp and in my thoughts and in my writing and reading. I took a beautiful talk with Cornelia about writing and vocation. I took landscapes that will surely appear in my stories or poems. I took a coffee at a bar in a medieval square. I took a walk in the night trying to hear or see the boars. I took a dinner made in team, with laughs and some beautiful mistakes. And I surely took home a lot of things that really even know yet, but will appear in my writing any time.