The journalist has published her latest book, Desde mi ventana, a compilation of thought-provoking articles from an emotional prism

Antonia Cortés: "'Desde mi ventana' is a way of reaching out to more people".

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The journalist and writer Antonia Cortés has been devoting her life to journalism and writing for a long time. A columnist for La Tribuna de Ciudad Real, a medium in which she provides her vision of the world through emotional writing, Cortés has decided to bring together her most significant articles in a book: Desde mi ventana, a publication that has just been published by Huerga y Fierro Editores, and which moves away from her literary career dedicated to poetry.

In the book's prologue, the journalist and playwright Ignacio Amestoy refers to Antonia Cortés as a "thoroughbred journalist" who has devoted her life to literature. For his part, the cover design is the work of Suso33, one of the pioneers of urban art in Spain who decided to make a qualitative leap from graffiti to visual art. 

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This latest publication adds to the four collections of poems that the journalist has published over the last two decades. Now, with Desde mi ventana, Cortés hopes that readers will dare to look from other perspectives at an unbridled world in which it is difficult to observe and attend introspectively to our emotions.

What are you looking for with your latest literary publication Desde mi ventana?

In this book we have compiled the articles I have written every Thursday since 2005 in La Tribuna de Ciudad Real, the place where I was born. I have selected 55 columns out of hundreds and hundreds, some of them also published in Diario16. It has been a fairly exhaustive selection, in the end, from the last eight years, from 2013 - the year my father died, which is why I wanted to give him a nod - to the first months of this year 2021.  What I have tried to do with this selection is to offer different views from that window. Generally, current affairs, but told in a more literary way. Almost all the stories or chronicles are real events written in my own way, from my perspective, which would be that window. 

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What do you hope people will find once they look through that window?

I hope that people will open their own windows as well. I hope they will stop time and look beyond what they see at first glance, beyond the obvious. They will find topics such as illnesses: Alzheimer's or cancer, the memory of an attack, loneliness, indifference, the illusion of a first salary, poetry... They will find current affairs and everyday life, but from feelings, from emotions.

I would like people to stop and think when they read these articles, to look inwards and outwards. 

Can we say that in this book, although it has been separated from your previous collections of poems, we also find poetry? What encouraged you to publish it?

I think, in this case, that poetry cannot be completely separated; that some poetic resources can be found. I decided to publish because there is a group of friends to whom I send the column every week and, for years, they have been telling me: "what a pity you don't compile the articles, bring them out, because they are stories that make you think". For example, Alzheimer's or cancer, unfortunately, are diseases that are affecting more and more of us. Desde mi ventana is a way of reaching out to more people.

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Do you think journalism and poetry share common links? 

The pure journalism of an event has little poetic aspect, but that's what chronicles, reports and columns are for. There you can mix journalism and literature, but, in principle, I would put journalism on the one hand and poetry on the other. Poetry, let's say, is more intimate. 

What is poetry for you then?

For me poetry is a vital necessity. There are times when I find it hard to get the most emotional things out and one way of channelling these emotions, these feelings, is through writing, in this case, through poetry. When I write poetry, I never think that it will be published, I do it for myself. One day, you realise that you already have a lot of poems, and you decide to put a book together. I've never sat at the table with the pretext of writing poetry, it's something that comes out of necessity.

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What about journalism?

Journalism is purely vocational. It shares with poetry, which is something vital for me. Within journalism there are many facets, there are many stages. Journalism I do with a different force, it's more professional. Poetry would be more intimate. 

Can you tell us about your next project?

I don't know when it will come out... I have written a novel that was going to be published in Mexico just when the confinement arrived, but it was stopped, I don't know if I'm going to take it up again. On the other hand, I could bring out another collection of poems, but Desde mi ventana has just come out, I prefer to go slowly. I'll let at least a year go by, which isn't much considering that nine years passed between En un instante and El día en que callamos las palabras.
 

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