Unearthing Family Secrets (with Ingrid Rojas Contreras)

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Intro – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes. The podcast where we explore the stories and ideas that shape who we are, and connect us with each other, because it might help life suck a little less. I'm journalist Blair Hodges, and our guide in this episode is acclaimed author Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: My mother brought me up saying, "You don't tell anybody about this. You don't share that I'm a curandera, you don't tell anyone that your grandfather was a curandero," and when I told my mother that I wanted to tell this story, she was just very upset with me and she said if you do this I will never speak to you again.

BLAIR HODGES: Some family stories are proudly passed along. Others are buried beneath layers of fear and shame. After moving to the United States, Ingrid kept quiet about her Colombian family’s history of curanderismo—mystical powers, visions, and healing.

Then one day, she forgot the secrets completely. when a serious head injury triggered amnesia. As her memories slowly resurfaced, she journeyed back to Colombia with her mother to exhume the remains of her grandfather, a man who passed the secrets along. A man who, as legend has it, possessed the power to move clouds.

On that trip Ingrid unearthed more than bones; from the dust she reconnected with a powerful lineage, both haunting and healing.

In spite of her mother's warnings, Ingrid tells the story in her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds. She joins us to talk about it, right now.

 

READING: Amnesia – 02:02

 

BLAIR HODGES: Ingrid Rojas Contreras, welcome to Relationscapes.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: There are so many things I wanted to talk about in this incredible memoir, so many things we can't possibly get to. I thought I would invite you at the top to read from the beginning of the book to set the stage for us. This is on page one and two.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: They say the accident that left me with temporary amnesia is my inheritance. No house or piece of land or chest of letters, just a few weeks of oblivion. Mami had temporary amnesia as well, except when she was 8 years old. I was 23. Where she fell down an empty well, I crashed my bicycle into an opening car door. Where she nearly bled to death in Ocana, Colombia, in darkness thirty feet below the earth, I got to my feet seemingly unharmed and wandered around Chicago on a sunny winter afternoon. When she didn't know who she was for eight months, I couldn't remember who I was for eight weeks.

They say the amnesias were a door to gifts we were supposed to have, which Mami's father, Nono, neglected to pass. Nono was a curandero. His gifts were instructions for talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the ill, and moving the clouds. We were a brown people, mestizo European men had arrived on the continent and violated indigenous women, and that was our origin. Neither native nor Spanish, but a wound. We called the gifts secrets. In the mountains of Santander, the fathers had passed the secrets to the sons, who passed the secrets to the sons who passed the secrets to the sons.

None of his sons, Nono said, had the testiculos required to be a real curandero. Only Mami, strong willed, unafraid, more of a man than most men in his eyes, whom he liked to call mi animal de monte, could have housed the gifts. But Mami was a woman, and such things were forbidden. If a woman came to possess the secrets, it was said that misfortune would soon follow.

Yet as 8-year-old Mami recovered from her injuries after falling down the well, and as her memories returned, it so happened that from wherever her mind had gone, she brought back the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices. The family says Mami was destined for the secrets. And since Nono couldn't teach them to her, the secrets had come directly to her.

Four decades later, when I suffered my accident and lost my memory, the family was thrilled. Tias poured drinks, told one another with an air of festivity, there it goes again, the snake biting its own tail. And then they waited to see how exactly the secrets would manifest in me.

BLAIR HODGES: Thank you. This is a book about these secrets, these abilities in your family. And you introduced us here to your grandfather Nono and your mother, who you call Mami. And we're going to get to them in just a minute. But I wanted to start with your amnesia.

 

Seeing the World Created in Real Time – 05:12

 

BLAIR HODGES: There are several places throughout this book where you add more details about what it was like to experience this amnesia because of this bike accident. And the descriptions of it seem so incredible to me, where you're basically talking about experiencing the world being recreated right before your eyes, like you didn't know anything all of a sudden. And you talk about how it was like you were seeing sunlight for the first time. I can't imagine how that would be. So I wanted to hear more from you about that experience of amnesia, which seems really scary. But you describe it as kind of a type of freedom.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, it was the most surreal, most beautiful experience of my life. There was a real tension between being on the edge of remembering something and then that something just remaining out of reach, you know, forever. And the most curious part to me was the moment I realized that I couldn't figure out what had happened before the accident and realizing that for me, in that moment, the world started with being on the floor and, you know, hearing my head kind of like crack and then not knowing what had happened before that.

And as you say, instead of feeling fear, I just felt this immense sense of wonder. I remember just walking down the street and kind of thinking, wow, this is a street! You know, like there was a second lag where I would remember the word and sometimes I wouldn't remember the word. And that felt very poetic to me. There was this space to invent or there was this space where language hadn't been invented yet, in a sense.

BLAIR HODGES: You're a writer, so that must have been so incredible.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, it was really beautiful. And I think that there was a sense of being present. It's hard to, you know, even though I lived it, it's hard for me to recapture what that was now that I have my memory back. The feeling of not having memories at all meant that I didn't have thoughts to distract me from the present moment. So I was just continually in awe of the way that light was falling into a room and the way that roads kind of continue into the horizon. And just seeing people around and seeing all of these things around, and I had no intrusive memories or intrusive thoughts. I didn't have any regrets. I didn't have anything to kind of weigh me down. And so I think that's why the experience felt so weightless and just so beautiful.

BLAIR HODGES: You talk about that weightlessness. And then you write here a little bit later in the book that as your memory started to come back piece by piece, you say you started to grieve. And you say, “The narrowing of a life is gravity. Memory is burden. I mourned every ounce of memory returned.”

And this is a memoir. This is a book about memory. So, in a sense, I wondered if this is a book of grieving for you, in a way.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: I love that question. I hadn't thought of it in that language before, but I think you're right. I think that there, probably before I lost my memory, I, like everyone else, had all of these misconceptions of what that would be. You know, as a writer, I kind of lived in terror of, for example, getting Alzheimer's and then not being able to write anymore and what would that mean. How would you live your life?

And when I lost my memory, what I found was that it was just—It was a state of knowing that was completely apart and aside from our state of knowing that we know. And, yeah, in some ways, you can't even compare it, but I did experience, you know, when my memory went away it was the most happy that I've ever been. And when memory returns, like experiencing, remembering certain things or, you know, sometimes I would go to sleep over the period of those eight weeks and I would remember something.

One time I woke up remembering the plot of Moby Dick. And I experienced that as a tragedy. I was very sad about, you know, suddenly being made flesh and blood, because before I felt that I was just so weightless and I was so a part of the world and so rooted in the present. And as the past came back, then it also meant that I became uprooted from the present in the way that we all are, I began to be rooted in the past and just began to kind of feel all that weight of every decision that I've taken, everything that I've ever said, everything that I've lived, like all of it felt like it was just, you know, taking residence in my body.

 

Unearthing the Family's Spiritual Secrets – 10:21

 

BLAIR HODGES: And you also talk about how, as memories about your family came back to you, you recalled your family's abilities. You talk about remembering that your mami would hold your hand over a bowl of water and taught you how to bless it, and how there was a sense of secrecy and shame about it because as you mentioned in the opening reading, there was this idea that women and girls weren't supposed to be engaging in these type of activities, like curandero activities—so healers, sort of mystical, prophetic type of abilities that your grandfather possessed. And so there was a shame connected with those things for you. And you say this experience of amnesia kind of took that shame away and made you start thinking about wanting to be more open.

And you say that made your mom furious when she heard about that. Talk about that fury.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, well, first, I should say that from what I know, this is just my family. There are women curanderas all over South America. But in my family, for some reason, just, you know, my grandfather, his grandfather before that, everyone, all the men said women are not supposed to practice. And I couldn't get to the bottom of where that came from in my research. But yes, as I remembered the stories of my family, I think that's the first time also that I started to fall in love with the world again. You know, it was the first time, you know, Moby Dick, the plot of Moby Dick.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: But then, remembering the stories of my aunts and uncles saying, like, we saw your grandfather move clouds, and then telling me about it. And meeting different people that my grandfather had healed in one way or another when I was a young girl. I remembered all those things, and I just started to really treasure those memories and really saw just how special that world was. And it was almost like the most magical thing that happened to me was that the memory of shame didn't arrive immediately.

At the moment when I was retrieving all that memory about my family, I didn't remember that. My mother kind of had brought me up saying, you don't tell anybody about this. You don't share that I'm a curandera. You don't tell anyone that your grandfather was a curandero. And so those memories didn't come back. And all I felt was just a sense of pride. And when I told my mother that I wanted to tell this story. She was just very upset with me.

And she said, “if you do this, I will never speak to you again.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah!

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: And she hung up on me. I called her back repeatedly. No answer. At some point, my dad answered, and he just said into the receiver, “what have you done?”

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, wow. So how did she end up changing her mind about it? Because here the book is.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. You know, in the end, what happened was my mother had a dream where my grandfather kind of gave his blessing in her dream. And my grandfather said that he wanted the story to be told. And so after that happened—and I had a dream concurrently about my grandfather kind of taking me by the hand and showing me through the house that they used to live in Bukhara Manga. And I just remember that dream so well. We were just kind of rushing through the house, and he took me to the back of the house, and he pointed to the river in the back, and he just said, like, this is the scene. And, you know, and it's just like one of those dreams that was so beautiful, and I felt so held by it.

And so once my mother kind of learned about the two dreams, those two dreams, she kind of went along with it. But she never apologized for what she said to me.

BLAIR HODGES: I didn't get the sense that your mom would do that very often! She's such a strong character.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, she's a very strong character. But she did call me and she said, “Well, something has happened around this book that you want to write, and so we should go back to Columbia.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, right. And that's what this book is really about, because dreams play a huge role. You've kind of introduced that idea here, family dreams. So your grandfather is dead at this point. Nono is dead, but he's coming to you and other members of your family with a really strange request. He's asking them to come get him and exhume his body, take him out of this grave.

Let's talk about this man who could move clouds who now wants to be exhumed.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: So he had been, I think, dead at that point by 27 years or so, or maybe 23 years. And so it's very strange that the dreams just kind of happened out of nowhere. But that was also part of it. I guess we had been dreaming about him. But, you know, all of that happened at the same time.

And because two aunts and my mother all had that dream at the same time of my grandfather arriving to them and saying, I want my remains to be disinterred, that we just, you know, gathered money. You know, my mom and I bought tickets to go to Colombia and. And we took the errand seriously.

We were just like, it's happened three times. It's like a peer review of a dream. So, yeah, we should go back and do that.

BLAIR HODGES: So this is the man who could move clouds. How did he get that name?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: I think that's the way that most of my aunts and uncles spoke of him, or when they told me stories about him. That was always just one of the stories that, for me, was at the forefront. They always said, "Did you know that your grandfather could do this?" Even if they had told me the story countless times—my family is one that just loves to retell stories.

And I just remember being asked that question: "Did you know that your father could do this? Did I tell you about, you know, when I saw this happen?" And, you know, he... he was a healer, and he had a healing room in their house, where they all grew up. So different people from the community would arrive there with a number of things they wanted help with.

Sometimes it would be, you know, mental health problems. Other times, it would be women who wanted to be pregnant—and women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies. It could be broken bones, it could be epilepsy, it could be asthma. He had a lot of plant knowledge, and some of the healing would happen through that.

And he also sometimes would heal through dreams. So sometimes, if somebody would say, "I have this physical instability," my grandfather would say, "Yes, I will heal you in dreams." They would stay in his house, and he would feed them and give them different tinctures.

Then, at night, he would go to sleep and concentrate on finding them in the dream world—doing something there to kind of heal them. Sometimes there would be a clue in the dream that would direct him to an herb or to something else.

So it's always been in a loop in my family—the dreams-to-reality loop is one that, you know, happened over and over again.

 

Archive of the Ghostly – 17:50

 

BLAIR HODGES: And there are so many incredible stories of spirits, apparitions, foretelling the future, and healings—these miraculous things that seem almost commonplace in your story. But you also seem like a person who's very attracted to proof and documentation. I mean, there are photos that you took throughout the book. You cite different documents that you looked at in preparing it.

And one of them is your grandfather's business card—Nono’s business card. I’ll just read it here:

Rafael Contreras Alfonso, Homeopath. Cures you of all kinds of illnesses: diabetes, obesity, sinusitis, cancer, and witchcraft.

And then the last line, which you say always gets a laugh from you: Licensed by the Scientific Center.

Which you said wasn’t actually a thing, right?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: It's not a thing. I mean, the document itself tells the story. And I think that was one of the early documents I saw that made me think I wanted more documents in the story.

BLAIR HODGES: Ah.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: I was also playing with the idea of memoir and, you know, the rules we have around memoir—what it's supposed to be. And I did want to play a little bit into that.

When we went to disinter my grandfather, I took a Polaroid camera with me. I wanted to document things that are hard to document.

So anytime someone told me—like I have an aunt who told me, "I’ve been haunted by the same ghost since I was a little girl." She was, like, 70 at the time. And she was pointing to this place in the jungle where the ghost always appeared. She said, "This is what he looks like. He always appears. He beckons me with a finger."

And at that moment, there was a ray of light that just fell on the jungle at that exact spot. And I just lifted my Polaroid and took a photo of it.

I think I was just trying to document things that felt surreal or ghostly. I was trying to make an archive of the ghostly through those images.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. And I love that you never spell that out. You don’t ever tell the reader that’s what you’re trying to do. So it lets us live in the process of documenting as you’re experiencing it. You’re not laying it all out—which, again, is part of the craft of memoir. It speaks to your skill as a writer.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. I think I also wanted the reader to be lulled by the story in some ways—and then be shocked by an image that kind of reminds you, no, this is actually happening. People are telling me these things. I’m there. I’m living it.

This is what the grave looked like after we disinterred him. This is that spot of sunlight. This is another kind of ghost-related image.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So we get to participate a little bit. Because I think a lot of readers are going to be skeptical of some of the more miraculous stories that appear here.

And—at least when it comes to your grandfather—his business card, with that line about the Scientific Center, kind of shows me that he understood showmanship as well.

And you talk about a skull that he ended up putting into his healing room that I think, like, a dentist or somebody had given him, saying, like, hey man, you need to, like, dress this place up, make it look a little bit more spooky, and you’re gonna—you need to brand yourself more. So he had some, like, showmanship and stagecraft, but he also seemed to be a true believer in his abilities as well. Right? So people want to know, like, was he a fraud? Is this stuff being a charlatan? And we do see him playing up some stuff, but it also comes across that he was a believer in this and truly believed that he was practicing in good faith.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, no, he was practicing in faith. I think the line about the “scientific center” is—he’s just trying to kind of get people who wouldn’t believe in him to give them something to believe in. And with the dentist story—it’s just so funny to me, and I’m so happy that I put that down into the book. But I think it also speaks to the way that, you know, in Colombia, in this area, in this part of the country and in many villages, there isn’t quite as stark a line between a dentist and a curandero, say, like how we might have a very stark line in the United States. And that’s just different culturally.

So this dentist had gone through, like, a very bad heartbreak, and my grandfather had given him all of these plant tinctures and had kind of helped him get through that pain. And then after that, the dentist just became very involved with my grandfather’s curandero business, and he wanted to help. And he was like, no—me, for example, I have diagrams of teeth on the wall. So, like, what is your equivalent? Like, what could you put on the wall? And it just all led to this—the dentist getting a skull from, like, the dentist—

BLAIR HODGES: I couldn’t believe this.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: —brought him a skull back. And he was like, this is what other—don’t you think that if you put a skull, people will be like, this guy really knows his stuff?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you remember seeing this skull, right? Like, you saw—did you see it as a child or your mother did?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: I guess my mother did, yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, your mother saw it as a child.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: So she was like, I think by the time I was a child, the skull had disappeared mysteriously. And then in the book, I found out, like, how it reappeared mysteriously.

BLAIR HODGES: That story is so funny. I’m going to leave that one for, like, people that pick up the book. But you gotta find out, folks, what happens to the skull. So that’s a reason to pick up this book. It’s called The Man Who Could Move Clouds.

 

The Open Tomb – 23:28

 

BLAIR HODGES: When we think about calling him “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,” it seems really peaceful or helpful and kind of beautiful. But of course, clouds can also bring storms and a sense of the violence of weather. And your book doesn’t shy away from talking about some of your grandfather’s abuses and some of the violence that he participated in.

For example, when it comes to your own mother—you say that she was his favorite child, but it wasn’t always like that. In fact, you say when your mother was born, he actually tried to kill her. And you tell this story of violence, and it’s a startling story.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. So at the time—I mean, it kind of goes back to his relationship with my grandmother. He would just be constantly leaving on all of these long trips, and he would go on these trips to visit with other curanderos and other tribes, and then he would return. He was also visiting other women when he was going away. So every time that he came back, my grandmother, as a way to try to keep him, would try to get pregnant by him. She was just kind of thinking, like, if I have another baby, this will make him stay.

And instead, he would just constantly be leaving. That was the dance they were in—for, you know, ten children. So he hadn’t known about my mother. But at some point, he was away, and he says that he kind of heard a spirit tell him that there was a baby coming, and that this baby was evil. So when he returned, he was convinced that he had to kill this baby. He drank a lot of alcohol, found my grandmother, and was chasing her with a machete.

My grandmother, thankfully, got to hide with her own mother, who lived across the street. And the next day—or, no, later that day—he said he had lost his memory. He said, “I don’t know what happened.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it was like a fugue state.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: He said it was a fugue state. And so even though I’ve questioned my mother about this story constantly, saying, “But how do you feel about this? Do you think it was a fugue state?” she’s always said, “No, I think he was possessed.” She’s never veered away from that.

But yeah, I think writing this story was really a practice of trying to allow people to have their truth. I, as a storyteller, can tell it all and say what happened. I can give you what the person believes—what my mother believes happened in that state. And I think it would be maybe a kind of violence on the story for me to then superimpose my own opinion of what I think happened.

And actually, my opinion is: I don’t know what happened. But I think that also allows for the reader to—it allows enough room for the reader to make up their own mind about my grandfather and about what happened. I did want to give a full portrait of him.

In so much of our culture, and in so many of our stories—especially in memoir—there’s always a practice of trying to protect men in the family. But sometimes when we do that, we don’t realize that we’re protecting abuse. So it was important for me in this book to not have silences around abuse, but to say them and speak them. And I think there’s a power to that.

BLAIR HODGES: And I think the power is also in not creating a supervillain either. I think some memoirs that really delve into the difficult parts kind of veer into making people out to be evil. And some people do horrible, terrible things—but they become kind of two-dimensional that way. With you, there’s clear affection for your grandfather. We get to see what I presume to be one of the worst moments of his life, but we also get to see other things that he did and the beauty he participated in. So we get a fuller picture of him.

And in talking about these tough stories—you say most families try to keep this stuff under wraps. Your family refers to them as ultratumba. And so, like, the super grave—like, bury them super deep. But you say that your mom is a tumba abierta—an open tomb. And you are as well. So bringing the difficult parts of the story out into the light—you certainly felt comfortable doing that.

 

Bring Mami Back a Baby Lion – 28:15

 

BLAIR HODGES: What about the extended family? Your mom and others who see a story and think, oh wow, you're depicting this moment of great violence—was there a sense of embarrassment? Did you worry about how your family would feel about that, being a tumba abierta?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, I think we had conversations around that. In the end, there were a lot of conversations around silence—what silences are we supposed to keep, and what is silence protecting? And if silence is protecting abuse, then is that a silence we want to keep? So yeah, those conversations were difficult.

I think, in the end, it is the decision of the person who's at the center of the story. I don't think any of these stories—especially those that involve my mother and my grandfather—are my stories. But I will always side with the person who's at the center of something happening to them. And if it's important for them to tell the story, then I think it's important for me to tell that story with them, or from their point of view.

Their relationship was very complicated. But as my mother grew—and after her accident, after she lost her memory and recovered it—my mother and grandfather were inseparable. And there was a humor about this incident, when she was a baby and he tried to kill her. She told me she would bring it up every time she wanted something. She used it against him.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Remember this?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: So I was saying earlier he would go on these trips, and every time he returned, he brought an animal. My mother loved this part of his return. One time he brought back a monkey and a parrot that could curse. Another time, he brought back an anaconda.

BLAIR HODGES: He sounds like a special man in that way.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, just very alive. He brought a lot of interesting things with him. And my mother would say, “First you try to kill me, and now this?” What she really wanted was for him to bring her back a baby lion. She would say, “Bring me back a baby lion. You tried to kill me—you owe this to me.”

I think the fact that she would bring it up constantly in a humorous way, as a way to get what she wanted—when what she wanted was so over the top—says something. She just wanted a baby lion.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it’s like, give me the world, Dad.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Exactly. That, to me, communicates that there was an understanding between them. We weren't there for that moment—I don't know what that was—but I can see the outcome of it. They were very close, and they understood each other.

I write a lot about the complications of patriarchal men in Colombia, and the violence they can carry and how it shows up in different ways. It was a loving relationship, but one constantly complicated by patriarchal values that he didn’t always realize he held.

BLAIR HODGES: And your book does a wonderful job of giving us context for that—depicting it with care and concern. But also, you don’t pull punches in terms of how you feel about it. It’s clear you're uncomfortable with a lot of that patriarchal control and how it played out within your family. So readers get a strong sense of the cultural context—but also a strong voice helping walk us through it. It’s helpful.

 

Mami Fell Down the Well – 32:15

 

BLAIR HODGES: I want to talk a little more about your mom. To me, she was the most striking person in all your stories. I know the book is named after Nono—it’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds—but I did wonder if you ever thought about naming it after her. I noticed in your acknowledgments you thank her directly. You say, “Thank you most of all to my mother, who told me stories, and in telling me stories, taught me how to live.” Nono isn’t mentioned directly in the acknowledgments. I assume he’s included in your general thanks to family far and near. But that made me wonder.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, I think she is the main protagonist in the book. With the title, I was thinking of Nono as kind of the origin point. He’s the way we understand what it meant for my mother to become a curandera, and what that means for migration. So I was thinking of origin in that way. But yes, my mother is the central part of the story.

BLAIR HODGES: She is so fascinating. As the child of a curandero, she saw him practicing, and learned from that. But she was also told this wasn't for girls. Still, she ended up developing powers, which were connected to her accident—she fell in a well. She was probably pushed by some other kids. You know how kids sometimes do impulsive things, not realizing the consequences. But it knocked her out, and she could have died down there. She lost her memory for eight months.

There’s a beautiful moment of connection between her and her dad. He was out in the field or somewhere—I can’t remember exactly—but he believed he heard her calling for help. He ran to the well and found her.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, nobody else heard her. I don’t even know that she could have been saying his name. But he somehow heard her—he described it as something internal. He heard her calling for him inside himself. He ran out and started trying to find her. Eventually, he got a sense that she might have been playing around the well. He just knew she had fallen.

He found her. He also knew how to set bones. When he found her, she had a dislocated shoulder, and he set the bone and carried her back home. I think this is astounding. He built a drip machine out of sugar cane tubing.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: He fed her homemade serums. He prepared plant medicine for her skin so it wouldn’t scar. He basically cared for her and nursed her out of a coma, back to health. My mother doesn’t have scars on her face, which I find amazing. I don’t know what he put on her skin, but her face was all broken—it was a very bad fall.

My grandmother kept trying to get him to take her to the doctor. But my grandfather said no—they’re going to cut into her face, she’ll have surgeries, she’ll be scarred. And he insisted he could heal her in a different way.

 

READING: Mami's Doubling – 36:03

 

BLAIR HODGES: And after this accident, she begins to manifest these powers you talk about. There's a section I thought would be great to hear you read from on page 77, where you're talking about your own experience. After your accident, you would wake up in the night and be back in an amnesia state. You'd wake up having forgotten everything and have this nightmare that you were in bed with your brother—inappropriately—and you don't even have a brother, so you were having this horrible nightmare. You connect this with some of your mom's new powers that she experienced and how her life changed after her accident. So if you could read that. One of her powers was she could double. It was as if she had clones—she could appear in two places at once, and people would witness this. So you're going to talk about this doubling that would happen.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Mami's doubling was a worrying event we all lived with, but Mami herself never expressed concern about having a splintered self. While I was growing up in Bogotá, it happened that every time Mami grew intensely angry, feverish, or tired, Nona would call us from 251 miles away in Cúcuta to report that she had seen Mami appear in the house that Nono and Nona built with their own hands. Mami would materialize—caressing the furniture, turning a corner, shuffling down a hall. For a long time, I thought Mami's apparitions were just stories the family told.

Then, when I was thirteen, I saw one of Mami's clones. I was heading down the stairs to the first floor of our house in Bogotá when I saw her sitting at the dining room table, even though I knew full well she was upstairs in bed with a fever.

Mommy, I called from what I hoped was a safe distance. I lowered myself onto the stairs and spied through the white wooden balustrades. The apparition did not look up when I called to it but continued to stare at the round glass table, where Mami's tarot cards—or the clone's tarot cards, I should say—were spread out in the shape of a star. Everything about the apparition was a faithful copy, down to the charms that hung from her hoop earrings. The right one: a pyramid. The left: a sphinx.

The clone plucked a card from the tarot stack, turned it, and placed it by the others she had uncovered, then jotted something down on a piece of paper.

I ran away.

In her bedroom, Mami's brow was sweating. I shook her awake.

I just saw you, Mommy. Desdoblada. You were sitting at the dining table.

Mami, pale and slick, turned over and groaned, Oh, let me sleep, please. Sometimes that happens to me. Can't you see that I'm sick?

BLAIR HODGES: So now you're the one witnessing this supernatural thing. And I have to say, it was really pleasantly difficult to pin down exactly what you thought about these powers. At one point, you're asking your own dad if he believes in her powers. He's kind of a skeptical guy, and he says he thinks it's actually possible. And your mouth drops open with shock because up until then, he'd encouraged you to think scientifically and was kind of dismissive. So I'm watching you tell these stories, and I think a lot of readers are going to want to know—what does Ingrid really think? Is it possible for people to appear in two places at once? But you really kept us at a distance when it came to your exact beliefs about these things.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Well, I think that probably is my exact belief, is the thing. This is a book that is trying to write into the most unstable parts of perception—those moments where you think you saw something and you're not sure. To me, as a writer, that's very fascinating. I've always been brought up to live with mystery as opposed to trying to dissect the mystery. I think something is always lost when we try to dissect it and pin it down—especially in cases where there is no answer, right? There is no way to say or to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt: did she actually appear? Or did I just see something because of suggestion?

I like to live in the unstable reality, actually. I like to be in that space where I am not sure and I don't know. And I do love to hear other people's relationships to instability and what that means for them. I have family members who are very sure—one way or another. And other family members for whom it's not either/or, but more that the story is what's important. It's what it means that she can appear that matters, or what that creates that matters.

 

Local Truths – 41:13

 

BLAIR HODGES: And you point out that there are different ways of understanding truth that we get from our surrounding culture. In the author's note at the beginning, you say this is a memoir of the ghostly, amnesia, hallucination, the historical specter of the past. You say it celebrates cultural understandings of truth that are, at heart, Colombian, and that the stories here are the true lived experience of the people who lived it—and as you lived it.

So you also spend time throughout the book talking about these different ways of understanding truth and how colonization has tried to erase some of those traditional Colombian ways of knowing. The fact that your family might say whether she materially appears or not doesn’t matter—what matters is that she appears, and what that means for us. That would bug some people who’ve been so enculturated to want “the facts.”

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, yeah, right.

BLAIR HODGES: So it's also some cultural differences, right?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. And I think that’s important to point out. If we just said, for example, that Indigenous people in Colombia—when they were healing—shamans would go into the dream world, and that’s how they’d find plant medicine. If we name that as an Indigenous tradition, I think outsiders stop trying to colonize. They go, oh, this is a separate cultural understanding. I get it. I don’t have to disrespect whatever’s happening.

So I think with curanderismo—and some people in Colombia have that Indigenous lineage—it’s been intermixed with everything that’s historically happened to us. Who we’ve married into, what we’ve been allowed to believe outwardly or not, what’s been able to survive or not. But it is indigenously rooted. And when we talk about that connection to dreams and to a reality that can't be pinned down, I think it’s important to say we’re not talking about Western culture. We’re not talking about the scientific method.

And yes, that’s something I love, something I support—and I am in both cultures at this point. But for me, the way to live in this world is to respect wherever I see differences in culture. I think both can exist at the same time. I don’t necessarily find a need to make one lord over the other. I don’t know if people realize that when they want others to make a decision or to impose their culture, that that’s what they’re doing.

BLAIR HODGES: Because they’re taking their own perspective for granted—that it's the baseline.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Exactly. Often with Western ideas, it’s like, Oh, but that’s the reality, that’s the truth. But we’re not even seeing that Western ideas are also a culture—that it’s not everybody’s truth. Other people come from other stories and other origins and other ways of being and relating.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Ingrid Rojas Contreras. She was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. She wrote a novel called Fruit of the Drunken Tree that won all kinds of awards—it was a New York Times Editor’s Choice book. She’s also written essays and short stories in The New York Times Magazine and The Believer. She lives in California, and today we’re talking about her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds. It’s a fascinating, incredible book that was a National Book Award finalist and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

 

READING: The Burial Site – 45:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right, Ingrid, let's go to the scene of your grandfather's grave, where your family does make it there to fulfill his wish that he's. That he's been delivering in dreams. And you describe this scene in detail and include, as you said, Polaroid photos of some of his remains, too.

So I thought it would be powerful to hear you read from this. This is on page 94. And I'd like to have people experience this moment with you. So to set the scene, here you are at the site of the burial with your mom, your aunt, and a cousin.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: It is so black, I can't tell what anything is. The one gravedigger steps up to my right, clears his throat by my ear, says, you could have died. Then he says for everyone to hear.

The casket has disintegrated. The corrosion is high. We'll have to pull the body out part by part. He steps back to fit one arm at a time into a yellow butcher's apron. I continue gazing down into the black. After a while, as my eyes adjust, I see pieces of a lilac ribbon. It amazes me how Such color has survived, but it shouldn't.

The ribbon is plastic. I blink. Suddenly I spot the skull. Then, among the clumps of earth, I see white finger bones. Everything snaps into place. The finger bones are peeking out of a graying coat sleeve, and they are wrapping delicately around the base of a turquoise cross. Here and there I can see the cloth of Nono's pants emerging from the dirt.

The white finger bones holding the last movement of my grandfather's body feels like something I am not supposed to see. So I turn away and close my eyes. Tia Pearla is standing next to me. She tells Fabian the cross they buried Nonna with was bronze, and Fabian explains that it is blue now because it has oxidized.

Notice all the things the cross has stained blue. Nono's chest, the coat sleeve, the earth. Mami is quiet too. Then I hear the sound of her camera shutter. The gravedigger wearing the yellow apron climbs back down into the hole, and the other two stay up top, receiving parts. There's a long steel tray for the remains lying on the grass.

They transfer my grandfather to it in handfuls. The first things to be placed on the tray are small bones and more colored ribbons. But then it's small pieces of paper which get carried to the tray, along with lumps of earth or cloth and unidentifiable matter. Mami and Tia Pearla begin to count the papers.

I know the papers are the requests people sneaked into Nono's casket the day of his burial, like the ones Tia Perla found half planted in the grass atop Nono's grave. After the shared dream, when a curandero dies, it is customary to leave him with Encargos. The curandero will then carry his people's errands to the afterworld, where his powers are said to multiply.

But in his last days, Nono said his powers were waning. His load was too heavy, and he took to drink. He had asked Wenmi to keep any and all requests and prayers away from his casket. But family members and strangers alike disguised their request behind flower arrangements and roses. The day of the burial, Mami and Tia Pearla intercepted at least 40 requests.

They repeatedly announced Nono's wishes to be left in peace. They grew furious, then dejected, and finally resigned themselves to people's disrespect. They supervised the long procession of mourners. At the time, Mami unfurled and read some of the prayers she had intercepted. She wanted to know what was being asked of her father. Of these, there are three that she remembers.

Don Rafael, Curandero of Ocana. By this paper I hold you from your rest until you give me a house. Rafael Contreras, look over my children. They are in so much need. Rafael, by my will you will dwell among the souls in purgatory until you grant me revenge. At the cemetery I hover over the steel tray and look at the papers, wondering how many wishes were fulfilled.

I have no way to find out. I had imagined I would be able to read them, but as I bend over them, I see that they have turned crinkly and black. There are at least 30 of them. The gravedigger in the yellow apron is crouching at the bottom of the tomb. He is looking at nothing, it seems, but then he sweeps aside dirt and pinches at two points.

He pulls and a light linen coat emerges. He places his hand beneath it, at the middle of its back, and as he does so a matching pair of pants begins to surface. He pulls at this until he can slip his other hand beneath. I imagine he is trying to keep all the bones together.

It is a logical, simple gesture, but I am shocked at how compressed Nono can be, leveled inside a coat and pants draped over this man's arms. The man in the grave swings his arms up to the man above ground, and they transfer Nono from one pair of arms to the other, because the suit is not a suit filled with bones, but to us and to them, for this brief moment, a person. The man above ground drapes the coat along the length of the tray, but the pants are loose and furled underneath. Nono is headless, just the linen suit he wore on his wedding day, dusted and decayed. Then the skull is added, and as a finishing touch, the shoes, all the ingredients of humanity, on a tray.

After a while Tia Pearla says, how black the skull is. It's normal, Fabian answers. It's the humidity. For the next 20 minutes I don't know where the gravediggers go. I don't know what anyone is doing. All I am conscious of is that I am kneeling on the grass in front of my grandfather's bones, inhaling the scent of deep dark earth that wafts of his remains.

I am hearing all of the stories told to me. I can almost hear his voice. His voice, his bones, are a conjuring.

BLAIR HODGES: And then, right then, we get to see the actual photographs, and that really snaps us into the reality of the scene. You've described it so beautifully, but it still seems at such a distance. I was completely spellbound by your description, but then seeing these photos—clearly taken in, like, 2012—it’s suddenly so real. These are people. This is a real thing that just happened. And you've got a photo there of Nono, and I wondered about the decision to include a photo of his remains. It seems so intimate.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. I think one of the things that felt important for the book was this idea of unearthing. And I know we tend to be very queasy about many things, especially death. South Americans are very different—we're not as queasy around death. We have a relationship that's very organic and tactile. Like Día de los Muertos—you've seen people just be in touch with death in this other way that’s participatory.

So I really wanted Nono to be present in as many ways as he could be present. And maybe I'm just not as queasy about it as other people might be.

BLAIR HODGES: For me, I didn’t feel queasy, but it did feel private in some ways. But that makes sense—that there's more of a communal connection and a sense of openness to interacting with the dead in ways that, in my culture, I just haven’t been exposed to. That helps make sense of it. And it certainly brings the reality of the situation to the reader in a strong way. They're beautiful pictures, even though they were taken with a Polaroid camera.

 

One Family, Many Stories – 53:25

 

BLAIR HODGES: One of the things your book makes clear is that different families can have some of the exact same experiences but interpret and understand them very differently. And we see this in your family. Some divisions crop up—religious divisions. Some of your family saw what your grandfather was doing and rejected it. They saw it as evil. They saw what your mother did as evil. They put crosses on the walls of an apartment in one part of the book to maybe heal the place or send a message of repentance to people participating in what they saw as evil rituals.

So I wondered about those family divisions. On a podcast like mine, where we explore family, I think talking about these divides is really important, and your book spends a lot of time attending to those divisions in your family.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. I think those divisions allowed me to look at why they would have happened or how they could have happened. They allowed me to look at the history. I just always kind of grew up knowing there were missionaries around. And for the part of the family that came to believe what Nono and Mami were doing was evil, they basically took that message from evangelizers.

BLAIR HODGES: This is a charismatic Christian church they ended up joining, right?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. So the people in the family who joined the church started to echo the same messages. They would say, “The Bible says this is evil.” That gave me an opportunity to look at how that has happened on a large scale in Colombia. It’s really the history of colonization. When the Spaniards came, they converted as many people as they could to Catholicism using torture, coercion, and messages like, “What you're doing is evil, and you're going to hell.”

There are people in Colombia who live syncretically. They hold both Indigenous and Catholic beliefs. It doesn't mean one is evil and the other is not. It means two cultures can coexist. But for some in my family, the division came from people who just couldn’t get over that. They couldn’t say it was okay. Even if they are Indigenous traditions, they still believed they were evil. So it's a narrative of colonization—it has a long history. And you see it playing out in my family. People are saying the same things that have been said for centuries. In the book, I could look at how it was happening on the micro scale and analyze how it’s happened on the macro scale.

BLAIR HODGES: It also gets to your definition of family. I'm going to leave it open to the listener as to what happens to Nono—if people want to find out, they’ll need to check out the book. But once the mission is complete, before you leave Colombia, you and your mother travel around and meet a lot of different family members. There’s this kin network you start to connect to. So many of them see you and say in shock that you look exactly like your mother, and they feel this instant connection. You were just being introduced to these people, but there seemed to be love and connection there—a different kind of family.

So you have these family divisions caused by religious beliefs, where some people don’t talk to each other or have hard feelings. But then you’re also introduced to these broader networks of family on this trip with your mom. It led me to believe that you just have this expansive definition of what family even is.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. Especially going back to the village of Ocaña, where my mother's family is from, there's a sense that I can just walk around and see my face all over town. You recognize your eyebrows. You recognize your nose.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: The shape of your nose.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, sure.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: You just belong there. I remember people where figuring out how we were connected was too complicated. We'd start to do it, and they'd say, “Well, your uncle's cousin is my…”—and then it would go on and on. Eventually we’d just say, “We're family.” Sure.

BLAIR HODGES: And then there's also the mystery of Nono having perhaps had other kids…

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. We didn’t know. But that’s very different—especially in a village where people know each other, and there are people who keep track of these very complicated lineages. They do understand. I was not able to understand most of the time, but it gives you a sense that your family is very large. That you’re not alone. Someone is always looking out for you.

Talking with my mother, there was always someone coming up to us in the street. She’d try to explain who they were, and I’d be like, “Okay, so your second cousin of the uncle of the…” and then they’d just bring us into their home, feed us, and tell us stories—stories of shared family members. It was a very lovely way history is kept. You can’t find that history written down, but people are keeping it in memory. And when they meet you, they can tell you stories: “These are the people we have in common, and this is who they were.” It’s like a living history book.

BLAIR HODGES: I love this part of the book. We talked about memory as grief, but this seemed to be the emergence of memories that gave you a closer connection to a place you had to leave.

 

Curanderismo Meets Western Medicine -  01:00:22

 

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, your book talks a lot about the violence and the civil wars that were happening in Colombia when you lived there, including kidnappings and attempted kidnappings of people in your family—and you. Trauma and violence that you witnessed. Things ultimately got so bad that your family moved to Venezuela, and then you and your sister Ximena eventually moved to the United States.

So when you're back there—back at your roots—you’re able to reconnect in a setting that’s not violent. There doesn't seem to be a lot of fear there for you. It seemed like a good moment of healing, considering all the trauma your family experienced—to the point of your sister Ximena being hospitalized because of an eating disorder, which you talk about toward the end of the book.

She's treated at an inpatient program, and your mother actually comes to her side. So there's that healing happening—reconnecting with your roots, but also living through the result of coming out of violence. And that’s largely what brought you to the United States.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. I was trying to write a book about how we carry stories—and how different people carry histories. I was looking at, on a national level, what experiences are being erased, or what the powers that be have tried to erase.

And we can think of curanderismo in that way. When we say Indigenous traditions are evil, that’s an effort to erase something. It's a triumph of resistance to assimilation when those traditions survive and still have a place in the world.

And then there’s the other way—in which, when you live through something hard, you immediately try to forget it. You try to erase it from your life in order to be lighter, to be able to keep going.

So I was looking at these two sites of erasure. And of course, it’s impossible to really erase something that happened to you. The more you try, the more present it becomes—sometimes even stronger. In our family, we really lived that through my sister and through that time. There was a time we weren’t sure if she was going to make it.

That part of writing the book was really interesting. I could look at how my sister was in this inpatient program, being helped by Western medicine—and also what my mother was doing. How she tried to communicate with that Western system to help my sister was fascinating to write into.

BLAIR HODGES: I loved seeing you work as a translator in that moment. It showed such care and love for your mom, and respect for your culture. You were really bridging the Western medical model with the curanderismo.

For example, there's an excerpt where you say you spent many hours translating Western medicine for your mom. You’d had an eating disorder, so you knew the experience. Your mom asked what was going on, and you said, “It’s a ghost she picked up. I picked it up too, when we flew over the border. Maybe it’s a ghost that thrives in places of transition, and it can cast an impressive mirage.”

You were talking about body dysmorphia—how you and your sister could look in the mirror and see something that isn’t really there. So you're translating that into a framework your mom could understand. And both of these ways of seeing the illness seem true.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. And I think words like trauma—we're talking about something that’s deeply felt but can’t be seen.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: So I just brought a poet’s mind to that. When I think about my mom’s knowledge of how to heal people, I know that her word for that would be ghost.

There’s something to those illnesses that live very deep inside of us and are hard to root out. When my mom wanted to help someone suffering from trauma, depression, something deeply buried, she would have a glass of water and breathe prayers into it. Then she’d give it to the person. There’s this idea that you can ingest a prayer. That something hard to reach—something others can’t touch—can be reached that way.

In some way, I think it does help. Even if you don’t believe in it, to see it as a gesture of care—it changes something. To be cared for in that manner does something.

 

Surviving the Surviving – 1:06:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: You also talk about how complicated the idea of healing can even be. Your mother was resistant to the idea of curses—for example, the idea that something was cursed and that’s just how it is.

And I really loved the part where you say to Mami and Nono, “Purity never came into healing because purity didn’t exist. A person would always be visited by pain and grief. A person was an accretion, constantly growing in strangeness, becoming an accumulation. Healing was found in stretching toward abundance. It wasn’t about leaving the past behind or dividing the self into good and bad, but about opening a path through ruins.”

So this is healing that recognizes not everything can be repaired. I remember your mom’s advice to you when you dabbled in tarot—that a good curandera knows how to make space for people’s burdens but never picks them up. Doesn’t take them on. There's a lot in here about healing.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. I always loved what she said about opening a path through.

Maybe it’s the ableism in society that says, if you have anxiety, you’re supposed to get better and never have anxiety again. Then you’re “normal.” But this idea says: If you have anxiety, maybe it’s because you lived through something hard. That’s the consequence of living through difficulty. And healing might not be about getting rid of it—but about learning how to carry it. How to develop a place where you can walk through it.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah—to live with it as part of your life.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: You want people to be able to heal from trauma in certain ways, but you also recognize—here’s the line—you say, “There’s surviving, and then there’s surviving the surviving.” And those are two different things. You might’ve gotten through the hardest part, quote-unquote, but life is still challenging. Now comes the task of surviving the fact that you survived.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. And I think there’s also a recognition that your life is beautiful in that.

BLAIR HODGES: In that brokenness.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah. You don’t have to return to what you were. It’s beautiful that you survived something, and that you're making space—clearing a path through the ruins of that. There’s something really beautiful about that. And it’s unjust to always say, “We have to get back to better. We have to return to what we were.” Especially if that’s impossible—if it’s out of reach.

I love this idea that Mami and Nono had: Sometimes you are touched by life. And that’s what life is—to be touched by it. We don’t get to choose whether that touch feels balanced or not. But that’s what becoming a person is. And there's beauty in the accretion—the strange, complicated combination of everything that happens.

BLAIR HODGES: And it’s a real recognition that who we are is connected and made up of so many other people. We like to think of ourselves—at least I do—as individuals. “I am this individual thing.” But really, so much of who I am is made up of other people. The people who love me, who raised me, who support me. Even people I don’t see—the people who make my food, who build the roads I drive on.

It’s a very interconnected view of human identity. And your family extends it into the afterlife, too—where someone like Nono can still participate in the family, still have requests, still have needs, still be served. It’s reciprocal. Everybody’s connected. Everybody can give and receive. It’s really beautiful.

We're talking about the book The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 1:10:42

 

BLAIR HODGES: Now is the segment of the show when we talk about regrets, challenges, and surprises. So—anything that you regret about the book now that it's out? What was most challenging about writing it? And then maybe, if anything, what surprised you in the course of creating this book?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: I don't know that I have regrets.

I think the challenges I faced always had to do with how large the story felt. Definitely. Because I'm telling a story of a disinterment. It's also a story about two people having amnesia. It's also a story about my grandfather being a curandero, my mother being a curandera. It's a story about migration and trauma and violence.

It just felt very large as I was writing it. And throughout the whole writing of the book, I was constantly trying to rein it all in—because I just knew in my heart that it was a single story.

I imagine other writers might have tried to break it up into different stories—or maybe make them into different books, or however they would have approached it. But I just really saw it as this kind of epic. I just wanted to write this family epic—three generations, very complicated.

BLAIR HODGES: It is so epic.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: It is.

BLAIR HODGES: I felt so connected to your family and the stories you were telling that the scope of it never, to me, felt overwhelming.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, it was something I was constantly worried about, constantly trying to correct and edit. And I’m just really glad that it—

BLAIR HODGES: Came together so good. Okay. Well, thank you for that.

 

Mini Spoiler Section – 01:12:27

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, this is going to be a mini spoiler section before we go. So anybody who hasn't read the book yet and doesn't like spoilers—I suggest you skip to the end of this episode or turn it off now.

I want to ask kind of a “where are they now?” moment, because I did want to find out how your mother is doing and how your sister is doing. You end the book with you all helping each other out. So how’s your mom doing? How’s your sister doing?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: My mom is doing well. She lives in Mexico City with my dad, and she's really happy.

My sister has two daughters now. She’s been the strongest and most healthy that I’ve ever seen her. So everyone is doing really well.

BLAIR HODGES: That's so good. And I assume both of them have read the book by now?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: My mom doesn’t like reading, so she hasn’t read it yet.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, I kind of love that about her.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: You know, she has that personality—but she knows what’s in it. And she’s...

When I call her, the book is always on the center table in their living room. So I know she’s very proud of it. She’s always showing it to people and giving it to people to read. But she—she just doesn’t like reading.

BLAIR HODGES: She lived it, you know. How about your sister? Did she read it?

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Yeah, my sister has read it. She even read parts of it before it came out. So, yes, she’s read it.

BLAIR HODGES: Cool. Okay, good. I wanted to ask that at the end because there’s some tension in the plot—you don’t exactly know where folks are going to end up. So asking that question answers a few of the things I was wondering about while I was reading.

Okay, well, Ingrid, again—I just want to say, this book that you’ve written is... it’s really a special book. The Man Who Could Move Clouds—being a finalist for the National Book Award, being a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It certainly deserves that recognition. I’m so glad you published it, and that I had the privilege of reading it and talking with you about it. It’s been a real treat.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much for that. That means so much to me. I loved having this conversation. This was such a pleasure.

 

Outro – 01:14:48

 

Thanks for listening to Relationscapes. There's more to come soon. I’m inviting you, as always, to review the show in Apple Podcasts or rate it on Spotify. That’s what radbookworm did! They say they love the thought-provoking and interesting conversations.

Thanks, radbookworm—I love your rad screen name!

Mates of State provided our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I’m journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and I’ll see you again very soon.