Episode #282: How Stories Get Carried Through the Generations and in Our Bones
Featuring Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Hello family historians, genealogists, geneticists, mystics, magicians, and memoirists!
This week’s Write-minded floats into the magical and surreal world of Ingrid Rojas Contreras, who talks about her new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, about her curandera-storytelling mother and their shared history of amnesia, and about why to her magical realism is just realism. Grant and Brooke consider what gets passed down to us from our families and how our stories and histories are in our bones and lived experience, and how reading stories from writers whose lives are vastly different from our own can invigorate our writing.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras asks us to think about magical realism in a new way, to think about the Western mindset of needing to have things be evidenced-based and science-based as opposed to a more integrated way of being in the world. We loved this part of the interview and invite you to consider who are some of the writers you know and love who write or who’ve written magical realism, and how might you reframe this idea Ingrid poses that magical realism is realism? We’re listing some of our favorite Latin writers here and invite you to add more in the comments.
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: Today we have a really interesting show that applies to everyone: family stories—how they get passed down, how we can listen to them as writers, and how they shape our lives. I’m here with my co-host, Brooke Warner, and we’re going to talk with Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, is a unique and sometimes surreal journey that spans generations. I know you were especially swept away by it, Brooke.
Brooke: I was, yes. It’s an interesting experience for me to read books by authors whose native language is Spanish because I speak Spanish and studied in Spain when I was young, and sometimes I can hear the Spanish underneath the English. There’s a part in the book where Ingrid is talking about cuentos, and cuentos means tales, stories, but it also means lies, or exaggerations. And I think what Ingrid effectively does in this memoir is weave together the fact that in some ways our lies or our exaggerations are also our stories, are also our truths. As you said, I was swept away. It’s a very magical and beautiful story.
Grant: The drama and the uniqueness of The Man Who Could Move Clouds made me think of how undramatic my family’s life story is because in some ways my family might be the opposite in the scales of drama. There were no real-life ghost stories on the Iowa prairies, in short, and most of my family stories are very rooted in cold hard facts. But every family has stories. Maybe not the kind of stories that will fill a best-selling memoir, but stories that tell who we are. I was recently given the assignment to write about a day that occurred 10 years ago by the journal Past Ten. Past Ten is an interesting journal because all of its essays are about someone writing about a day that occurred ten years ago—so it’s an exploration of memory and how memory works because you have to construct your story out of fragments of memory—and you have to think about how to tell a larger story about a random day. My assigned day happened to be my birthday. I dug up a photo of brother, sister, parents—we were back in my parents house, but I couldn’t figure out: why were we there without our partners or families? My brother remembered that it was the last time our parents were able to travel to see us and we were all together as a family of five. On this particular day there wasn’t really anything to do to celebrate my birthday. We had to drive to another small town nearby and we saw the movie American Hustle. So I wrote about that day and going to the move and driving in the car. In the process of writing this, an image really coalesced for me—the image of us driving home. I realized that this was a powerful metaphor for my family: we were together, yet traveling elsewhere, not quite there together, but all of us seeking something beyond the small town we’d grown up in. I realized how all of the vacations we took, the Sundays we went to Des Moines to shop for clothes, the movies we went to together, so much of what we did were acts of imagination for us— we were trying to gain worldliness, sophistication. We aspired to something different and more, which meant that we’d make our homes elsewhere, which meant that we’d never entirely be of a place, we’d always be a bit restless and searching. This is the way I often think of the Midwest. There are a lot of restless, seeking people there. And that actually leads to interesting endeavors and achievements. So what I’m trying to say is that people shouldn’t be intimidated from writing their life story just because there aren’t any big, dramatic events to explore, but that we all have dramatic stories, and sometimes we have to sit down and write to find that drama. Even if the drama occurs in a car going to a movie.
Brooke: What an interesting meditation, Grant, and that’s so right on. Ingrid’s book is full of drama, full of passion. One of the main throughlines of the book is her family’s efforts to exhume her grandfather’s body. They raise money to basically unearth him from his own grave because they’re convinced that he’s burdened by all of these notes that the townspeople stuffed into his pockets in his open casket at his funeral—asking him to do this or that, to heal this or that, because he was a curandero, a healer. So there’s this scene where they gravediggers are digging up the body and Ingrid writes:
The gravedigger says that if there’s gas trapped in the grave, the face masks won’t do much to protect us from fainting or even spontaneous death. I remain unfazed. Dying at the sight of my grandfather's bones somehow doesn’t seem to me like the worst fate. Like any good Colombian, I know I must die, and so I yearn for a good death, an exit that is both meaningful and dramatic.
This is just one of many many moments in her book that I thought to myself—her life is a thousand times wilder than mine. She has a rambunctious, big, loud, opinionated family that believes in ghosts and superstitions and healing rituals and so much more. And it’s delightful in a thousand ways, but absolutely that her story is more dramatic than yours should not turn anyone off of memoir.
Grant: It’s interesting, because when my father died, I wished he’d written just 10,000 words about his life. Memories, anecdotes, images, remembered conversations, anything. It would have been precious. And, again, I think a lot of people don’t do this because they don’t think they have high drama to write, but I like this suggestion from Ingrid. She suggested that others working on memoirs not only collect family stories, but also pay close attention to how they are formed and told. She says, “When you’re listening to a story at a family or chosen-family gathering, become a student of structure and tone. What silences are kept? What silences are broken? Surveying all that land can teach you so much about what to write about, and how to do it.” Brooke, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but since you’re writing a memoir, how are you trying to capture family stories? How does a quote like this play into your process?
Brooke: I’m happy to be put on the spot, and I’ll offer a bit of an interpretation, I guess, of how we reach to our families of origin to inform our stories. I am the child of two therapists, so this looms large. I am naturally good at extrapolating what people mean, and understanding people’s motivations. I read people well. Ingrid is the daughter of a curandero mother who learned the secrets of healing from her father. she, too, is naturally good at extrapolating what people mean, and understanding people’s motivations. I have always felt that I have the soul of a therapist in a way, because I see the world through that lens, as a result of growing up with both parents who held that way of seeing people, that way of seeing the world. Ingrid is the same, but her lens is this lens of healing, but she talks about people’s trauma and fears and concerns through the lens of a spiritual crisis. Therapy might categorize it the same way, but in different terms. In the Westernized world, there’s a more intellectualized way of understanding things, but so much of Ingrid’s story resonated with me. There is magic and divination and itution and more, but there is also the ways in which different peoples interpret what is happening to them, what we all suffer through. So rather than be intimidated that Ingrid had a more interesting story—and it is interesting, my goodness—I felt encouraged by her powers of interpretation. She was sort of like the reader’s guide to her family of origin, our walking stick into the world of Columbia and curanderos and so much more. And I finished reading her memoir feeling that my parents had in some ways passed down to me a similar lineage to hers—just less magical and more grounded in concept, theory, and practice.
Grant: Since my mom is still alive, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I said about my Dad—how precious it would be to just have 10,000 words. So I’m actually going home next week, and I have a book of questions I bought at Target, appropriately titled, “Questions to Ask Your Mom,” and I’m going to try to sit down with my mom each day and ask her some questions and record her responses. I know there’s a company, Storyworth, that does the same: they email you a question each week, and you answer it, and then they compile a book after a year, which is pretty cool. Brooke, are you actively interviewing people for your memoir, and if so, how is that informing the story?
Brooke: I’m not doing that, no. In my own process I need not to interview people, mostly because I need not to have my mom’s voice in my ears more than it already is. I am trying to follow the muse of memory. I’m writing about 2004-2015. So it’s a ten-year period in which so many things happened to me, and I’m making sense of it all as I wade through it. For me I think there will be a point when I have to share the work with some of the primary players—especially my ex. But I’ve been pretty guarded, protective rather, of my work at this early stage because I need it to be for me, for now.
Grant: Maybe we can give people some exercises in capturing family stories before talking with Ingrid. I know I’ve heard many stories from my parents and other family members that I’ve forgotten, so if we’re not actively writing them down, we’ll forget a lot of them. So I have a file on my computer of family stories, and I try to write down whatever I hear, no matter if it’s a big story or just a small anecdote. In fact, the small anecdotes can be telling. My mom told me that in the winter, my grandmother would order frozen fish, and then they’d bury it in the ground and dig it up each week and have fish every Friday—because in the depression, they didn’t have a refrigerator or a freezer. In terms of prompts, though, I’m enamored by a memoir my friend and former teacher Molly Giles wrote that is coming out this summer. She wrote her memoir by recounting one story per year, so some of them are connected, and some are drifting in space alone and separate, but they all add up to a life. They’re all pretty short. I thought that was a really interesting way to capture a life.
Brooke: That’s great, Grant. I think capturing family stories is an important exercise. I would encourage writers to think about the stories that they know, that they can’t let go of. For those of us who have lost parents, or someone central to our book, trying to capture their mannerisms by recalling a story and just writing a scene in which you capture their voice, their way of articulating something. This is an important exercise because good memoir brings characters alive on the page, makes you feel like you know them and understand them. If you’re lucky enough to have an audio recording or a video, you could transcribe that person’s words. A lot of us have a central person or people in our lives that we’re writing about, or who loom large in our books, so to do some exercises around defining their characters, their speech, their mannerisms, their quirks. This might be more than an exercise but something to store in a journal or a word document, an exercise in character development, which is another thing Ingrid does so well in this book.
Grant: What a great exercise, whether you’re writing a memoir or not. I think I want to take some time simply to describe my father’s mannerisms and voice. I can’t wait to hear more from Ingrid after this short break.
This Week’s Book Trend:
This week’s book trend shows how book marketing is evolving, and getting weirder in some senses, but also more creative and fun. So of course I'm talking about TikTok—and the 9-month cruise that's been getting so so much attention online lately, that it's making the cut as this week's trend. This Royal Caribbean cruise has been referred to as “Social Media’s Newest Reality Show." The short story is this: Atria Books covered Marc Sebastian costs for his 18-day leg of the cruise to promote a few of their titles. Yes, he has 1.5 million followers, but he also admits he's not a reader. Have you been following this story? What do you think?
ABOUT INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist—and a winner of a California Book Award. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College and lives in California.
I loved Ingrid's first book and have CLOUDS in my TBR. I loved hearing her process of word fishing with multiple dictionaries. I can also envision her family celebrating her amnesia! Great episode.