Meng Jin, Dionne Irving & Ingrid Rojas Contreras: A Conversation

Dionne Irving is the author of the novel Quint. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, Missouri Review, New Delta Review, and on Literary Hub, among other print and online journals and magazines. She teaches in the creative writing program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame. In The Islands: Stories (Catapult), Irving looks at the history and condition of Jamaican women in locations and times ranging from 1950s London and 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey. She follows the lives of these women – immigrants or the descendants of immigrants – who chose to move to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call “the Island.” It’s an unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention, only to reveal the cracks in their marriage. In another, the sole Jamaican mother at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer for its International Day event. In a third, a travel writer connects with the mother who once abandoned her. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves and grow roots wherever they find themselves.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s the author of the novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. Rojas Contreras was raised amid the political violence of the 1980s and ‘90s in Colombia. The house bustled with her fortune-telling mother’s clients. 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. Mami, the first woman to inherit the secrets, was just as powerful. But for Rojas Contreras, all this was someone else’s legacy, not hers. Until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, she suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family told her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to her power. Interweaving family stories, Colombian history, and Rojas Contreras’ deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir (Doubleday) is a testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

Meng Jin was born in Shanghai and is the author of the novel Little Gods. Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories (Mariner Books) features 10 thematically linked stories. Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming of age, and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships, and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly unlimited access to knowledge, and little actual power.