Join me in this live, two-hour conversation with Matthew Zapruder and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about writing and creativity – and about the artistic necessity to write from the emotional landscape of crisis.
Hi, my name is Ingrid Rojas Contreras. I’m the author of the novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree, and the memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Migration has defined my life. I left Colombia with my family when I was fourteen, fleeing danger, and we moved to different countries in South America, remaking our lives, attempting at safety, before I finally migrated on my own to the United States, where I would study first journalism, and then creative writing.
As I started to write, I realized I had obstacles to writing that none of my professors mentioned, and that none of my peers seemed to be having. My creative obstacles had to do with having lived in crisis for so long. I realized then that even after a period of crisis ends, we can still carry that crisis in our bodies.
For me, at that time, it became an artistic necessity to work out how to write from that emotional landscape of crisis. Perhaps this is a question we are all facing today, to varying degrees.
When we discuss writing and creativity, we always seem to be leaving behind the body, which maybe many people can—leave behind the body—and many of us cannot.I hope you can join me for my upcoming session with my friend and colleague, Matthew Zapruder. Five Things I’ve Learned about Creativity – by Writing Through Crisis will focus on the strategies I’ve found have worked for me, and on the ways creativity during crisis is not only possible but necessary. It is life saying yes.
– Ingrid Rojas Contreras
About Ingrid Rojas Contreras
INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of the author's lineage of curanderos, healers who know plant medicine and talk to ghosts, and her mother, who was the first woman in her family to become a curandera. The book won a Medal in Nonfiction from the California Book Awards, was a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and was long-listed for a Carnegie Medal in Excellence in Nonfiction. It was named a “Best Book of the Year” by TIME, People, NPR, Vanity Fair, Boston Globe, among others. 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, The Cut, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.
You and a guest could win two tickets to the class of your choice.