Finding Querencia: Essays from In-Between (Machete) - Softcover

Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814258174 ISBN 13: 9780814258170

Publisher: Mad Creek Books, 2022

Synopsis

Winner, 2022 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award (Autobiography/Memoir category)

With its roots in the Spanish verb querer—“to want, to love”—the term querencia has been called untranslatable but has come to mean a place of safety and belonging, that which we yearn for when we yearn for home. In this striking essay collection, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher shows that querencia is also a state of being: the peace that arises when we reconcile who we are. A New Mexican of mixed Latinx and white ethnicity, Candelaria Fletcher ventures into the fault lines of culture, landscape, and spirit to discover the source of his lifelong hauntings. Writing in the persona of coyote, New Mexican slang for “mixed,” he explores the hyphenated elements within himself, including his whiteness. Blending memory, imagination, form, and language, each essay spirals outward to investigate, accept, and embrace hybridity. Ultimately, Finding Querencia offers a new vocabulary of mixed-ness, a way to reconcile the crosscurrents of self and soul.

About this title

About the Author

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams and Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life. He teaches in the MFA programs at Vermont College of Fine Arts and Colorado State University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

II ORIGIN STORY


1.
A colleague listens to you read about your childhood among
cottonwoods, owls, acequias, arroyos, and the apple-skin New
Mexican sky. Afterward, he places a hand on your shoulder
and squeezes. You are, he says, the most haunted person he
knows.


2.
You sit as a boy on the hardwood floor of your home, beside
rocks from the river, deer antlers from the llano, and a castle of
Cochiti drums. With knights and monsters, you drift through
wood-smoke incense and the watery light from the front window.
You are flying, or swimming, in a story or a dream, trying
hard to never touch down.


3.
Your grandmother watches you across the kitchen table while
your mother makes fried potatoes and tortillas for supper.
You move like your father, she says to you smiling, but since
you don't remember him, you have nothing to say, and return
instead to your toys. She tries again, this time in Spanish, but
you still don't respond, so she frowns at your mother. He's like
Pinocchio, your grandmother says. Boy made of wood: Half
self, half soul.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mad Creek Books
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814258174
• ISBN 13: 9780814258170
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180