Ingrid Rojas Contreras on Writing the Real and the Surreal

Previously in my craft conversation series: Megha Majumdar, Ada Limón, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Crystal Hana Kim and R. O. Kwon, Lydia Kiesling, and Bryan Washington.

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Every now and then, you read a story that almost seems to exist outside of time—you feel that it must have always existed in some form, and know that it will still be read and discussed a hundred years from now. That’s how I felt reading Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s gorgeous new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds.

Rojas Contreras told me that before she “surrendered to the call of writing,” she thought that she might be a journalist, or perhaps an oral historian. “I didn’t always know that I wanted to be a writer, but I always knew that I wanted my life to be in service of taking care of and preserving stories,” she said. “I still write from that desire to make the stories last, to preserve them for the community that they’re about.” In her memoir, she directs that same curiosity, attention, and care to her own story as well as her family’s, exploring the legacy of her grandfather, who was a curandero—a