I have borrowed the title of the book written by the educator Philippe Meirieu to write these reflections on the complexity of introducing children to the world of writing. It is a short book, included in the new Minerva collection published by the Rosa Sensat Teachers' Association, reviving the name of the collection offered at the beginning of the 20th century by the Barcelona Provincial Council and later by the Commonwealth of Catalonia.

Carme Riera (Palma de Mallorca, 1948) is a writer and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Winner of the National Narrative Prize, the Josep Pla Prize, the Crexells Prize, and the Lletra d'Or Prize, among others, she publishes Thank you, a literary memoir of fifty years of writing.

She spent her early childhood in a large house in the center of Palma. "It was very damp. I remember the tiles covered in water, the bed soaked as if you'd stepped into the sea. On the other hand, it had a garden that I loved because you could run around and feel a bit free." The house had three floors. "Each of us had a floor: my parents lived on the ground floor, my grandmother and aunt lived on the first floor, and upstairs, on the third floor, lived my grandfather." My grandfather was quite a character: "He was very funny, he had a gym, a library, he rode his bicycle from 7 in the morning until 2, he swam in the sea whether it was summer or winter, he was quite eccentric."

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Karl Kraus was dying when he learned that the Japanese had invaded Manchuria. "None of that would have happened," he exclaimed, "if we had been more strict in the use of commas." I won't go as far as to say, but I do believe there's no way to develop critical thinking by ignoring the use of conjunctions. I completely agree with Antoni Capmany: "Anyone who can't read and write never speaks about what they're thinking."

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Xavier Grasset's first French kiss was with a hamburger. "With a girl from Hamburg," the journalist explained, recalling that elusive yet unforgettable first summer love. He confessed this to the audience at Ver-MOT, held during vermouth time on the terrace of the Taberna de El Foment in Girona as part of the MOT literary festival, this year dedicated to love in all its forms and meanings. Grasset shared a conversation with two authors of a debut book: journalist Agnès Marquès, who has published the novel Nobody knows I'm here, and Glòria Gasch, editor who has jumped to the other side of the profession, that of authors, with the publication ofNow, and every morningThey had to be the authors of a first book because it was about discussing "the first time" in literature and in life. Agnès Marquès explained the reason for her debut as a novelist: "I dedicate myself to journalism because I like to tell stories, and in literature, stories are also told, in this case through the artifice of fiction. They are connecting vessels." But the natural transition from journalism to literature did not prevent her from experiencing the vertigo of a blank page, the obsession with rewriting the text, and the doubts about what she had written, which editor Gloria Gasch (in her role as editor of Columna) dispelled with encouraging advice: Marquès also discovered the fear of the last moment, when the book is at the printers and there is no possibility of amendment: "Can't we stop the machines?"

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