Finding Querencia: Essays from In-Between by Candelaria Fletcher, Harrison

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.

Author: Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Publisher: Mad Creek Books
Published: 04/15/2022
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780814258170

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2022

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.