Sitting With The Ghost: A Conversation with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

When my family says hello, we say: what did you dream last night? It’s the way that we communicate with each other.

Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s writing is astoundingly, breathtakingly beautiful. I read her novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, in a matter of days (whizbang fast for my post-head injury brain), and then promptly read it again. Set in Colombia during the height of Pablo Escobar’s violent reign, it tells the story of seven-year-old Chula living in a gated community with her family and Petrona their live-in maid from a guerrilla-occupied neighborhood. In their own way, each is carrying too much (responsibility, sorrow, guilt, fear, hope, curiosity, desire), and the weight of their lives and the secrets they share threaten to bring down both their families. The book was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, the story is based loosely on Ingrid’s own life.

In her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, Ingrid’s mother and aunties share a dream that Ingrid’s grandfather’s bones (a curandero—traditional healer who could speak with the dead, heal the sick, and move clouds) need to be exhumed. And so Ingrid and her mother travel to Colombia to do just this. Five years before, in her twenties, Ingrid has a bike accident that leaves her with temporary amnesia, an experience she enjoys. As a child, Ingrid’s mother also had amnesia. For her, it awakened the ability to communicate with ghosts and appear in two places at once—making her the first curandera in the lineage. Using her travels home as the throughline, Ingrid exquisitely intertwines her personal narrative with her mother’s childhood, colonialism, the magical, healing, and the impact of violence and trauma on the human soul. The book was a Pulitzer and National Book Award Finalist and won a Medal in Nonfiction from the California Book Awards. It was named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, People, NPR, Vanity Fair, Boston Globe, among others.

Ingrid’s Advice on Craft

Don’t miss Ingrid advice for authentic storytelling. “…If you try to center people who don't understand what you're writing about, the writing is going to come out stilted.” For more, stick with us until the end of the interview.

After a blow to your head, you struggled with amnesia during which you experienced a constant state of confusion and turned to your dreams for grounding. Can you tell us about your relationship to your dreams and why they grounded you?

I love this question. It’s difficult to navigate the world when you have amnesia. I was lagging behind the reality, but in this very beautiful way that was also a state of confusion. Dreams are a landscape where everything is known to the dreamer. So whatever you're dreaming, there's a way in which you’re already clued into the meaning of your life. In the beginning, I wasn't a character in the dreams so much, but was more observing the changing world.  

The reason that was grounding is because the self for me was such a question mark. In my waking life, I couldn't remember my past. I had heard and read what my name was, but it didn't sound familiar at all. Nothing seemed familiar. Things that I was supposed to know, I just did not know. But in the dream reality, I was the observing force.

One of the first dreams was watching lava erupt out of the ocean. If you were watching the phenomenon and you didn't know what it was, it would still be so mesmerizing that you’d sit in that feeling of awe.  

So it wasn't that the dreams were giving you information about yourself, it was that they were calming your nervous system in a way? 

Yes, incidentally that was happening. But I felt I belonged to that reality more than I belonged to the waking reality. 

Are you still connected with your dreams?