Professor’s debut book collects awards

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Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, assistant professor in the Department of English, part of the College of Humanities and Sciences, released his first book last year, “Descanso For My Father: Fragments Of A Life,” which won a 2013 Colorado Book Award and 2013 Independent Book Publisher Bronze Medal.

“A descanso in Spanish means ‘resting place,’” Fletcher said. “I’m one of those writers who believes that you don’t always get to choose what you write. I think it’s more a way of – you find your way to what was given to you to write.”

Fletcher’s mother is a visual artist and has made a remarkable impact on his work. She tells stories through elaborate shrines pieced together from objects collected over the years, each one telling a story. “Look closely,” she’d say. She would often drive her children around New Mexico when they were young, looking for a ghost town, listening to local stories and exploring new areas.

“I always liked that,” Fletcher said. “I always liked going out and listening to stories, so journalism sounded like a fun thing, and I did it, and I still like that.”

Fletcher was a journalist for 18 years, covering everything from sports, police work, the prison system, state government, and writing columns in the Albuquerque Tribune, among others.

His earliest interest in writing a personal book about his father surfaced while covering an issue in the news: What should be done about all these roadside memorials, often called ‘descansos.’

“I think I finally got to the place where I was listening to the stories that were inside me that wanted to come out. And that’s kind of when I left journalism, to start letting those things come out.”

The book is written like one of his mother’s shrines – in pieces, or in this case, a series of essays pieced together into a literary descanso.

Fletcher said he sometimes struggles writing a straight narrative, and will instead break into fragments and spaces, “because that’s the language that we speak.”

“That’s how I grew up,” he said. “That’s how my mom communicates. She doesn’t tell us what she means, but she’ll – in a roundabout way – help us fill in the blanks.”

After Fletcher’s father passed away, his mother was in no position to slow down. She had to survive raising five young children without him. In doing so, memories of Fletcher’s father were put away, and literally boxed up.

A child psychologist from what Fletcher referred to as the “Mad Men” days – the early ‘60s – told his mother to help her children understand their father is not coming back by gathering up everything about him, and storing it away in a box, out of sight, and supposedly out of mind.

“She was shell shocked, so she did what the child psychologist told her to do, so she took all his stuff down and put it in a hall closet – in a box with his stuff – and then, that’s it. We never really talked about it again.”

The feeling that he should remain hidden never went away. There was nothing about the man that needed hiding, Fletcher pointed out, but his siblings would still talk in hushed tones. His mother wondered why. Why a book?

“This is how you work things out,” Fletcher later said to her. “You transform pain into beauty … It’s just a resting place.”

Now, Fletcher says, Dad’s picture is on the wall and people are talking about him again. “That’s all I wanted. You just don’t want him to be forgotten.”

 

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