Interview with Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,” and Rey M. Rodríguez and Celia M. Ruiz

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award, and her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California. 

The Storyteller’s Corner invited Celia M. Ruiz, a second-year IAIA MFA student, to join in the interview with Rey M. Rodriguez.

What follows is a wide-ranging conversation about dreams, truth and story, translations, crossing borders, reality and memory, the craft of writing, and many other fascinating topics.
 

RR: Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Welcome to the Storyteller’s Blog of Chapter House, the literary journal for the Institute of American Indian Arts. 

I'm so happy to be here. 

RR: We are thrilled to have you. How did you get into writing? 

 I have always had a deep love for stories. That deep love started with my mother's oral stories, the act of sitting around when visiting family, and just that magical hour of night when the storytelling would begin. Initially, my getting into writing started with my study of journalism but I saw limitations in it. At the time, I was finding that when I wrote fiction I was able to reach some kind of truth that I wasn't reaching with my journalism. My path into writing has always been about trying to give language to something that's inexpressible, or that hasn't been expressed yet. That was always my desire. What I felt gave life meaning had to do with that. It's been a chase to be in communion with that. 

 RR: In the book, you discuss the difference between truth and story. The idea is that in any story there must be truth. How do you make the distinction between truth and story? 

It's interesting. There's a level of truth in everybody's lives that you cannot state directly. And when it comes to those truths that you can't state directly, they find a vehicle through fiction. Fiction can hold the things that you know, and the things that you're trying to understand. Something new comes from your relationship with trying to write them. 

Nonfiction is so different. It's the process of looking back at your life. What is the shape that can come from your life? And then there's a different sort of work that comes with standing behind something and saying this is true.  

Both processes are very difficult. I wouldn't say that one is easier than the other. 

The thing that I really love about nonfiction is the complication of memory. And how... maybe this goes back to the question that you're asking about the difference between truth and story, where memory is an emotional animal, and the memory that we keep has to do with the way that we lived through something. This is why people will have different memories about something even if you lived it together. I appreciate that in nonfiction we can bring that plurality in. So I'm trying to sing all these different voices and all these different memories and put them together. I love and appreciate that part about nonfiction. Nonfiction is difficult because it’s you deciding to tell the truth about something in your life. You also have to say the truth about people who were there with you. And so it becomes an entangled complication where you have to make sure that you want to speak about the things that you're writing. But you also have to make sure that the people that you’re naming are comfortable with that process. 

CR: I have a follow-up on something you were talking about how you got into writing, oral storytelling, your fascination with language, and when lived experiences are expressible or inexpressible.  In your memoir, A Man Who Could Move Clouds, you wrote about the moment after your amnesia when you were in a separate state of perception, and everything was new. You were in between reality and memory. My question is, how do we as writers capture certain life perceptions and experiences that are very difficult to put into language because they're in between languages? We're told as writers that our craft is the written word, and it's our job to capture our experiences in language.  I know you're bilingual, and I'm bilingual, so we can play with two different languages to try to capture what we're trying to say. Can you give us more information about that state of perception that falls in between language and how to capture it in our writing? 

I love this question. One thing that I noticed through amnesia is that I would see things, and they wouldn't come with a label immediately. I couldn’t remember what the word was for something. Sometimes there would be a delayed label, or sometimes no label at all. I was noticing how when things went unnamed, I was in the act of perpetually seeing the thing in question. And saying, Is it this? Or is it this? And you're in the process of naming it. And I think that's what I mean that there's something truer about being perpetually in that process of not being sure about what you're seeing and trying to name it, and things not entirely fitting.  

When we are with memory, when we are going about our days, there's a way in which we stop seeing what's in front of us because they have a label, we have a word for it, and we know that word. We have told ourselves that there is no mystery there anymore.  

Coming out of that experience of losing memory and then gathering memory again and also in my practice of being a writer, I've come away thinking that the creative process should involve that sort of forgetting of language, and doing so intentionally.  

One of the things that I love to do once in a while, throughout my day, is suddenly pretend that I don't have a memory, and try to go back to that amnesiac state. I look around and try to recreate what happened in my brain during amnesia: seeing something and suppressing the word for it. And in doing that I'm trying to see it better, or see it again, or be in that state of continually seeing it. It's interesting when you're bilingual because you have two words for something. But that doesn't mean that you're seeing it better. 

CR: No. 

It means that you have the language system of one culture and then another. Sometimes there's a doubling that's interesting that can create something else. But I think it's important to try to return to this: that magic where you don't know what things are called, and maybe that's what everybody's childhood was like. We didn't entirely know what things were. And those times were magical because we were allowing ourselves to be in that continual seeing. 

CR: That's beautiful. 

RR: Even in your writing you have three languages because there are the Indigenous words that come up. You use the term, “eso.” For me, “eso” is a joyful thing, but you describe it as a curse. 

Right. 

RR: But I think curse is not even the right word. 

Yes 

RR: The way you describe it in the book, it felt magical and could be all sorts of things. 

I'm so glad that you brought that up. I felt when I was writing the memoir and trying to translate “eso,” which is such a vague word, which, of course, is like saying “that thing,” I wasn't satisfied with “curse.” It’s not exact. It's not the same. I couldn't come up with a way to describe it in English. Often I'm writing in a world where everything happens in Spanish. And I love these problems of things that you can't translate, and they're just lost. And you have to somehow try to reinvent what was lost. Yes, it's really fascinating. 

RR: What's your process for doing that? Because I'm having the same issue with the word “duende.” I don't even know how you... 

Completely difficult to translate.  

RR: And I felt like “eso” was a similar word. 

Yes, I think even the word like “curandero,” is so different. 

RR: Yes. 

Right? In Spanish, we have these words where I love the fact that we can just add an ending to a noun, and then it becomes like a person who does the noun. We can just do that. Or a noun can become a verb based on what you put at the end. My favorite example of that would be “chancleta” and then the verb “chancletiar.” It's so delicious. And it's so specific to Spanish. And it's completely lost, right? I guess you could say that someone flip-flops. But it’s not even the same. And our cultural understanding of the word “chancleta” is not flip-flop. We're talking about the same object, but culturally, it's not the same at all. 

There's so much loss that happens when you are trying to translate things. And I am often thinking about borders when I'm doing this language process. I'm thinking also about people trying to cross borders and not being able to cross borders. I always think of words that way, where there are some words that can come across very easily. And then there are some words that just are transformed by the border and then they become something else. And I think for me my process is also how I make peace with the untranslatable. 

Just as a person crosses a border, they become changed. They're no longer who they were. They have to leave parts of themselves behind. Sometimes that's the same process: some words come across, but they're never the same. And so when I'm writing, and I'm experiencing the loss of meaning then I ask what new thing is this word becoming? If I ever have to use “flip-flop”—God forbid that I ever have to use the word “flip-flop” in my writing because it's such an ugly word. I don't understand what happened to whoever was in charge of coming up with that word because they failed, miserably. But if I had to use it, if I was constrained to the limitations of that sound, I would ask myself, what new thing can I make from this sound to see what this word can become? So, it's all about transformation, even if you end up using something that's not quite right. 

Does that make sense? 

RR: Oh, yes, I'm glad you're saying that, because I don’t feel like I'm living in this alternative universe where I'm thinking in a way and no one else in the world is thinking. If you're bilingual or bicultural, there are only certain spaces where you feel seen and what you said makes me feel seen. 

Yes. 

RR: Can you explore more of what you lost when you came to the US that you didn’t know you were going to lose? You discuss the idea of loss in your first chapter, but I hope you will tell us more. 

Change happens so slowly. It is so interesting to witness. The best way for me to think about this would be to say what sort of person would I have been had I stayed in Colombia. I had many migrations. I didn't come directly to the US. I went to Venezuela first and then back to Colombia, and then to Argentina for a little bit, and then to Venezuela, and then to the United States. And I feel I lost parts of myself, like in all those different countries.  

I learned this through writing the memoir: this inherent desire that we have of always staying the same, or always getting to keep everything, is not real. We will lose things along the way. And for me, the loss that I have experienced entails losing parts of myself at all of those different junctures, and reforming, starting again, because for me every time that we moved together as a family I had to start my life again.  

When I first arrived in Venezuela, for example, there were a lot of Colombians who were fleeing violence and coming into Venezuela, so there was a very anti-immigrant sentiment in the air. I remember my parents told us, “Don't tell anyone that something bad happened and that we're fleeing a dangerous situation. If anybody asks, say that your dad got a new job.” And so, there was this shame too about saying we had to flee something dangerous. I felt like it was bad that we were people touched by misfortune. And I felt people were acting like misfortune was contagious, if they touched us then our misfortune might get on them. 

Yes. 

That's what I thought. And so I think that one of the things that I lost at that point was the ability to say, “Something happened to me,” which is maybe why I started to write, and which is, maybe why, turning to fiction initially, was a way for me to access a truth that I couldn't speak. I left Colombia when I was 14, which means, I arrived to the U.S., in the end, when I was about 18, I think. During those four crucial years of being a teenager where all I wanted to do was fit in, there were so many times where I was like, “No, I'm just like you,” when in reality I was nothing like the people I was interacting with. I was a fictitious, sanitized version of who I thought I should be. So, I think that's the loss. I can fantasize about, had I stayed in Colombia, would that loss have happened? Would I have followed in my mother's footsteps? Would I have become a journalist? Would I have still been a writer? Maybe I would have become an academic studying violence? I don't know.  

CR: Yes, in my reading your memoir the theme of loss and trying to recapture what was lost is woven throughout the book. I found that all quite compelling. There is a scene where you're holding an antique book, part of your ancestral research, and the book dissolves into dust. And your mom says to you, “but mija, none of our lives are going to be in those books.” 

Nobody gets to keep anything. Right. 

CR: Your mom was in a prolonged state of amnesia and came out with curandera gifts. And that phenomenon, in my reading of curanderos in West Texas and Northern Mexico, like Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo, had very similar experiences. There was either an illness or a fall, and they had amnesia or a coma, and they came out blessed with these gifts. So that's a fascinating phenomenon. But that's not your experience. You had amnesia. You didn't come out with supernatural gifts but with an interest in understanding your ancestral history and all that has been hidden in secrecy or erasure because of Spanish colonization.  Your amnesia led to a quest to find what was lost, and what was buried. My question to you, and it's an important question, because as a Mexican American we're told we're Mexicans, and I ask myself, “What does that mean?” “What does it mean that we are mestizo?” We know the Spanish history and colonialism, but what about our indigenous side?  Years ago, I read Carlos Fuentes The Buried Mirror, searching for information of our indigenous history, the mirrored buried, but the book disappointed me. You undertook that journey in terms of what has been lost, what is kept secret.  From your perspective, in terms of getting a more grounded holistic perception and understanding, what search of secrets and the buried will enrich our writing? Is there a benefit in searching for those things that have been lost? And what role do they play in who we are now, and who we will become in the future?  

I love that question. One of the negative things about Latinidad is the way it sometimes plays out where we say we're just a mix of everything. Sometimes the inexactness of the term then erases Indigenous people or erases Black people. It erases specific cultural lineages and culture-carriers who are not just “a mix of everything.”  

The way that I think about Latino people is that we are detribalized people. We have gone through a period of, as you were saying, colonial erasure that was systemic. It happened at the level of communities, the family, marriages, in the law courts. It was so wide ranging.  

I was really interested in investigating the traditions that my grandfather kept. What does that sound like? What does that look like? What are the things being used? 

Sometimes through this type of investigation and asking, Where do those things each come from? it can give you a more accurate map of mestizaje. A more accurate map of where your family comes from. If you go through that process, you can come to understand the people that you come from, what they have been through. You come to know the histories that you carry in your body. You come to know the tragedies that you carry in your body. I think it's the most valuable thing and the most enriching thing that you can give to yourself and also give to others. 

That's so beautiful because I believe art heals. Since we're talking about dreams? 

What are the roles of dreams in your writing and in your life? How do you use them? And how do you work with them? As you describe in the book, three of you had the identical dream and then you acted upon it. It appears there is a form of communication through dreams. 

Yes. Dreams happen in a language that is very hard to understand. Sometimes they're understood years later after being dreamt. Whenever I have a dream, I love telling it to my mother because she always is able to decode it really quickly. I feel dreams are trying to give you something that you need, that you don't know you need, and you can't easily decode. 

For the period when my sister was very sick, and we didn’t know it yet, I had a dream that she was inside a building, and I was trying to go in and find her. In the dream, somebody told me that the building was a stomach, which didn't make sense to me at the time. This was before she was in the hospital for the first time with an eating disorder. In the dream I finally found her and I told my mom that I had a candle, and I was trying to get her out of this building that was a stomach. The building didn't look like a stomach, but somebody had told me that it was a stomach. I woke up without knowing if we got out or not. And I was telling my mom this dream, and she said, "That sounds like you were trying to retrieve her life from something.” 

It was the sort of dream where we didn't know if this was something that had happened or was going to happen, or was happening currently. So, like, dreams are always inexact information. Now that I'm in the future, looking back, I understand exactly what that dream was trying to say. Now that I know the end of the story, it makes complete sense. I couldn't have decoded it at the time at all. I think that's my relationship to dreams is trying to understand the language or architecture of it. What is it? What is the language? And what is being spoken back to us? 

It's not a language that I'm fluent in. 

CR: I wanted to follow up on that, because I love the way you said during your craft talk that your family don't say hello. You say, “What did you dream last night?” That is so beautiful. I do think dreams are important, right? And they're in that same unstable space of perception that you were in when you had amnesia. In psychology, a dream is like a window to your subconscious, awareness, soul, and who you really are. I have dreams that are vivid and very instructive in terms of my life and my life experiences, and events. 

In your book, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,’ you did a beautiful job of incorporating intuition, mystery, dreams, and an alternative worldview and perception. You're able to take this mysterious, intuitive part of perception and life and write about it in a concrete, refreshing way. What advice can you give writers on how to write about mystery, intuition, serendipity, etc, so that our readers understand our writing?  

Yes, there are many dimensions to perception, including dreams. I believe Freud’s work on dream symbolism and interpretation has ruined dreams for many of us as a rich and valid source in our writing. For example, this idea that if you dream that you're in a train that's going through a tunnel, it means that you're just coming out of a vagina, or that you're like the penis coming into your mother's vagina. Freud’s dream interpretation is inane symbolic shorthand for the phallus and the vagina. It is flattening.  

And so I think that the way that we write about dreams in a concrete refreshing way, as they happen in our families or as they happen in our culture, we need first to do worldbuilding around our definition and understanding of what our family's symbology is so that those Feudiam interpretations are not assumed and interjected into what we are writing. It is important to do the worldbuilding.  

We all know the word “dream,” but it doesn’t always have the same meaning in different cultures. So, I approach my writing as if I’m writing sci-fi, creating a world that is the same as you know, but completely different, and it’s exactly as I know it. I'm still discussing the real world, but I make it clear that I’m talking about a different culture. 

In The Man Who Could Move Clouds, I built the world slowly: providing examples of what dreams meant to my grandfather, to my mother, to me. Then I layered what dreams meant to the Indigenous people of the area. Then we come to the three dreams that occurred simultaneously. By then, we know that we are in a different world that understands dreams differently than the dominant culture. I am bringing people along and introducing them to the culture. Otherwise, they will not understand what I mean.  

RR: In your book, you talk about how good divination is the art of a good story. Can you share your thoughts on what makes for a good story? I understand that there are different ways of telling a story, but in your experience, what are some of the elements that make for a great story?  

Storytelling is about reaching a depth that we cannot access. A good story captures a moment when everything becomes unstable, and we fall through the ground, touching something that feels vast and eerie. 

I always compare normal storytelling to the feeling of being at the surface of the ocean, where things are beautiful and clear, and you know there are dolphins, but really good storytelling is being in the ocean's twilight zone, where it’s stranger than you can imagine and there are bizarre creatures that emit their own light. It’s the same world but stretched into an eternal eeriness. 

A good story touches and allows access to that other world. Whether it's about heartbreak, love of family, or a trip, it reveals some of that other world. Even humor has small ways of revealing something. 

RR: I got an insight into what makes for good storytelling in your book, where you talk about how your mother curing people, and she would tell them the truth right away and many would not return. So instead, to be a good storyteller, your mother left them with some truth, not all, so that her clients would return wanting more.  

Yes, it’s like this idea of being in the twilight zone or the midnight zone of the ocean, where you can't see very well. You only see flashes of some feature or detail of something that you have no idea of—a tiny fragment—but we’re able to grasp the mystery of something more. This is kin to that being in that state of perpetual wonder and suspended mystery. 

RR: Yes, that goes back to what we discussed previously, perception in the in-between, seeing something for the first time and wanting to explore and discover more about it. 

CR: This discussion about perception and seeing things for the first time reminds me of the discussion in your book about mirrors and how colonization affects self-perception. Royalty viewed themselves in clear mirrors, unlike the poor, who used tin mirrors. In a way, the tin mirrors distorted our self-image, but they also retained more mystery as we tried to make sense of what we saw that was unlabeled and undefined. 

That's true, that's true. 

RR: Can you discuss the mirror that you would place under the bed and the concept of breaking all but one mirror, which you would keep under your pillow? 

Mirrors reflect how your body has a history. When you have amnesia, you feel outside of history. It is a very distressing experience to encounter a mirror then.  

My mother's mirror was interesting.  Its surface is mottled, so when you look, there is this incomplete image where you can’t quite see yourself very well.  

I still have my mother’s mirror, but I almost never take it out. Sometimes, I will take it out and look at it and handle it. I have not put it under my pillow again, but I would be interested to see what happens. 

RR: I have to ask you about the courage it took to write your memoir, especially considering the potential strain it might place on your relationship with your mother. And this notion of shame—that it is essential to navigate amnesia to uncover the courage within our voice. 

What a beautiful question!  I felt that I didn't have a choice and could not go on not telling. I had experienced what telling was like, and then I could not physically go back. I also knew that at some point, my mother would come to understand that, so I think that there was trust in my doing as I did, that she would eventually understand and come around, and I didn't know how long that was going to take. 

She eventually did, and she's very proud of the book. She has it on her coffee table, just like in the middle. She loves that she's on the cover. When I go see her—she lives in Mexico City—she is always taking me to meet someone so that I can sign a book for that person. So yeah, she's not distancing herself or hiding that she's the person in the book. 

And then, yes, you asked, do we have to go through a period of amnesia? 

RR: Yes, I believe we need our voice more than ever right now. We have to express that we're not vermin or poison. We are beautiful people who have a lot to offer and deserve to be treated as human beings, no matter the borders. I don't hear our leaders really expressing that. That's why I think your book is so crucial right now, more than ever, because we need its courage. 

Thank you so much. Yes, there's a difference between focusing on the negative things people say about you and falling in love with your own life, family, or culture. That's something I learned distinctly while going through a period of amnesia. I realized I had spent so much of my life worrying about what I could or couldn't say, fearing that people would make assumptions about me or treat me differently. I worried I might lose opportunities. I lived in a way that I was just anticipating harm. After amnesia, I stopped living that way. 

I love the amazing stories, the culture, the dancing, and the jokes, but also the darkness of Colombia. I think it is beautiful, and there's so much that anyone can get from being in contact with and knowing that culture.  

Colombians have been in communion with death and war for so long that our writing can teach the world about war and death. Our war goes back so many decades, to the point where it's hard even for academics to pinpoint when the violence began. So, it becomes creatively important to ask: What jokes do we make about death? What is our understanding of life? How do we celebrate within all the death that is happening? In this place where violence has always existed, where does violence come from?  

In regard to the hurtful things people say today, I think it’s useful to put them in a historical context. People have been saying the same thing for 500 years, and they think that it’s their own original idea. Giving things context also makes it not a personal attack but the expressions of a system. 

Once we sort the code, the hatred, and see it as systemic inheritance, we can write against it, and write about something that celebrates us, and create space for us.  

I think it's the difference between reacting to something versus asking yourself what world you want to live in. And what do I need to do now in order to create that world? 

RR: Yes, that's why I was so touched by the idea that amnesia gave you this concept of abundance in terms of our future and who we are and a mindset of hope. Yes, too many of our young don't see the hope. I'm grateful for your writing and what you do. 

CR: I feel the same way. Thank you very much. It takes courage, as Rey mentioned, especially considering that your mother didn't want you to write the book. You honored your mother by keeping the secrets of curanderismo while being open about your family’s reality. Curanderismo is so integral to Indigenous culture that keeping it a secret meant concealing part of your origins. Therefore, the courage to write about beautiful things in our culture is a positive way of responding to Rey's concerns. One of the most powerful messages was to not live in the shadows or duality and to talk and write about our truth, which brings joy and positive healing in many ways. Thank you so much for your courage in writing your memoir. 

Oh, thank you so much for that. It's so important to write about the things that we're proud of and the things that we think are beautiful in our families, even if we're writing about spots of darkness. 

It gives someone language, right? When I was going on tour with the memoir, many Latine people I met would say, “I've never told anybody, but my grandmother was a curandera.” 

And I thought, why wouldn't you tell? Curandero stories are the coolest genre that is nonfiction, that is real. We should tell all the stories. Many of our realities have not been written about and have not made it to the page. Writing about them gives someone the opportunity to say, “Me too.” 

RR: Yes, it's a process of decolonization. Because you had 500 years of an oppressor writing the history. And now you can deconstruct it and say, No, there's this. We need each other. We're all interconnected, and we can't really move forward without each other and our stories. What are you working on next? 

I am working on my next novel about the experiences of people struck by lightning. When I described the book, I forgot to mention that a group of women will be struck by lightning and become curanderas, and they will be at the center of the story. 

RR: Wonderful. We can’t wait to read it. To close, do you have any advice for students starting out as writers?   

The most transformative advice is to read widely. And then to find your people. Build your communities. Artistic community is where important things happen. You can be out late at a bar discussing something with a friend and the next day you see your work in a new light. It’s a practice of like passing creative energy around among a group of people and sharing ideas. A lot of creative dialogue happens, and that teaches you to be a better writer in ways that are just beyond the classroom.  

CR and RR: Okay, Ingrid. Well, thank you so much. This time with you has been fabulous. 

Thank you both. 

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall, his poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.

Celia M. Ruiz is a second-year Creative Nonfiction MFA student at IAIA. She is working on an ancestral memoir about her family. A retired attorney from California, she practiced civil rights, employment, and education law. She has published several essays, including “The Day” in the 2023 New Limestone Review, “Artesia” in the 2020 Willamette Writers Timberline Review, and “My Name is Not Sally,” which will appear in the Spring edition of Glassworks magazine. Her essay also won a Personal Essay award in the 2024 Writers Digest Competition, ranking 23 out of 800 submissions. Ms. Ruiz lives in the San Francisco Bay area.