The Listen & Be Heard Hour for Readers & Writers
s1e22, s2e23
Ingrid Rojas Contrera
The Man Who Could Move Clouds
For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amidst the political violence of 1980s and ’90s Colombia, in a house where “what did you dream?” was the preferred greeting in place of “how are you?,” very little was out of the ordinary. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets: ” the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds.
Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.
