Spanish Teacher Debuts Dual Books on Emotion
Spanish teacher Elena Martín Gordo will debut in 2025 with two books, a children's story and a poetry collection, both exploring human emotions from childhood to adulthood.
Next year, the Spanish literary world will see the debut of Elena Martín Gordo, a Spanish Language and Literature teacher from Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In 2025, she will release two books from very different genres: a children's story called The Little Seed That Was Afraid to Grow and a poetry collection titled With an Open Heart. Despite their differences, both books explore human emotions, a theme Martín Gordo examines from childhood through to adulthood.
The Little Seed That Was Afraid to Grow, published by Apuleyo Ediciones with illustrations by Sara González Hernández, helps children overcome the fear of change, build self-confidence, and understand that everyone grows at their own pace. Martín Gordo said the idea for the story came from a conversation she overheard between children, where one girl doubted her own beauty. This moment, along with her experience as a teacher and her own pregnancy, inspired her to write a story encouraging self-acceptance and celebrating individual differences in young people. The book highlights that all emotions, even fear, are valid and important. It aims to be a resource for families and teachers to discuss these subjects with children, aligning with modern teaching methods that focus on emotional intelligence.
Around the same time, Talón de Aquiles will release With an Open Heart, a poetry collection that follows Martín Gordo's emotional journey over time. While the children's story was a more recent idea, this poetry collection is the result of a long creative process that started when she was a teenager. The poems cover a wide range of feelings, including love, heartbreak, daily worries, and loss. She also included reflections on motherhood, written during the end of her pregnancy. Martín Gordo sees these poems as honest expressions of feelings, not striving for perfection, much like emotions themselves are often imperfect.
So, while the children's story came from a specific idea and needed careful writing to be understood by young readers, the poetry collection developed over many years, capturing emotions as they arose. Both books, however, provide insight into our complex inner lives and encourage us to think about how we manage our feelings at different ages.