Episode 44: Ingrid Rojas Contreras

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political turmoil and violence of 1980s and ’90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, not much surprised her as a child. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero–a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”, or the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. As the first woman to inherit those secrets, Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. This legacy had always felt like it belonged to them, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that resulted in amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family told her that this had happened before. Decades ago, her mother had suffered a fall that left her with amnesia too. When she recovered, she had gained access to the secrets. Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, as well as resurrected Colombian history and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the seemingly incomprehensible. The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a testament to the healing power of storytelling and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

Om Podcasten

The BIG TABLE podcast is about books and conversation, an exploration into art and culture, as told through interviews with authors, conducted and curated by writer, editor, historian and publisher J.C. Gabel and a small cast of contributors, all former colleagues and friends. This podcast is a co-production between Hat & Beard, Dublab, and Gold-diggers in Los Angeles, and is dedicated to the interviewing style and enduring memory of Studs Terkel, the Chicago oral historian, actor, activist, TV pioneer, and long-time radio host and author. BIG TABLE is the first digital initiative of Invisible Republic, a nonprofit arts organization, working in coordination with Future Roots, Inc.