Maria Echaveste, growing up in Fresno and Ventura counties, pored through Tom Swift adventure stories and Nancy Drew mysteries. Developing her love of reading, and discovering new worlds within books, is her fondest childhood memory. Below, the former Clinton White House staffer reflects further.
Q. What do you wake up to?
A. My daughter, who is seven, is the first to wake up. So then it’s time to get breakfast and get NPR on.
Q. What is your favorite word?
A. Tomorrow.
Q. What comforts you?
A. Working with my hands. I like to garden, I like to knit.
Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Can’t sit still for a minute.
Q. If you could live in any other time, past, present, or future, when would it be and why?
A. The moment at which we are establishing human colonies on other planets.
Q. When are you most creative?
A. When the children are asleep, my husband’s watching television, I have a quiet moment to myself and I can just focus. It tends to be in the middle of the night.
Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. My insatiable desire for yarn, fabric, and books relating to those topics.
Q. What worries you?
A. How the differences among people become barriers that prevent people from seeing common humanity.
Q. Whose talent would you like to have?
A. I would like to be able to sing.
Q. Who is your favorite Beatle, and why?
A. All the little girls were in love with Paul, but I’d have to say George Harrison.
Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. A picture of my mom and dad getting married.
Q. What teacher or professor if any changed your life?
A. Mrs. Miller, who was my sophomore English honors teacher in high school, and just instilled such a love of literature, reading, and just the whole exercise of learning.
Q. What promise would you say you make to yourself that you break the most often?
A. I promise to read more history books, more non-fiction, and I invariably choose to read science fiction and fantasy.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you’d love to have a beer with?
A. I did get a chance to meet him, but I didn’t have a beer with him – Nelson Mandela.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.