Ingrid Rojas Contreras on What’s Gained by Losing Language
From Micro, a Podcast for Short But Powerful Writing
This episode is part of an interview series for Miami Book Fair, where members of Team Micro interview authors appearing at the fair about their work. For more information about MBF’s programming and to check out the incredible roster of authors appearing this year, visit miamibookfair.com. And be sure to follow them at @miamibookfair and #MBF2022 for more updates.
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In this episode of Micro, Dylan Evers talks to Ingrid Rojas Contreras about her latest book, The Man Who Could Move Clouds.
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From the episode:
“During amnesia, what I discovered is that I was feeling so many things that I didn’t have words for—or another thing that was happening was that I couldn’t remember a lot of the words for things. And so I was often in this space of not having the words for something. But that didn’t feel like a loss because it allowed me to dwell in the experience of what I was feeling in a way that’s very different when it’s mediated through language.”
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Micro is edited and curated by Dylan Evers and produced and hosted by Drew Hawkins. Theme song is by Matt Ordes. Follow the show on Twitter at @podcastmicro.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. 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. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College.
Dylan Evers is a third culture kid interested in amplifying stories from the margins. She graduated with her MFA from the University of New Orleans and won a few awards for her thesis. When she’s not tending to her small children and large dogs, you can find her reading copious amounts of flash and working on her first novel. You can find her on Twitter at @dyl_evers.
