Acclaimed essayist Harrison Candelaria Fletcher speaks with Upper School English students.
Upper School English students engage in a writing exercise.
Mr. Fletcher reads excerpts from his work at the Upper School Assembly.
Mr. Fletcher answers questions from Head Librarian Allen Chamberlain.

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Annual Whitfield Lecture Features Acclaimed Essayist

10/20/2016

Acclaimed essayist Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, known for his powerful and lyrical memoir, Descanso for my Father: Fragments of a Life, spoke at Collegiate’s Upper School Assembly today as this year’s Whitfield Lecturer. For more than 10 years, the Whitfield Lecture series, generously made possible by Cougar parent Bryan Whitfield, has brought poets, journalists and novelists to campus to talk about their craft.

Before he addressed the entire Upper School, Mr. Fletcher, a former journalist, spent the morning with two Upper School English classes, Creative Nonfiction, taught by Allen Chamberlain, and Writing for Publication, led by Vlastik Svab. As he stood in the center of the desks circled around him, Mr. Fletcher talked to students about using details to make someone come alive on the page. He spoke about the power a writer has over his or her subject, so as writers they must be honest and treat their subjects with compassion.

“We aspire to do art and not spin,” he said.

Mr. Fletcher then engaged students in two writing exercises, one on characterization and the other on the anatomy of a scene. He encouraged the students to save what they had written because, “these things often turn into something,” he said.

During the Upper School Assembly (which Mr. Whitfield attended), Head of School Steve Hickman described Mr. Fletcher’s memoir — an attempt to “find” the father he lost when he was not quite 2 years old — as “a story of spaces and gaps.”

Mr. Fletcher, a Latino and a native of New Mexico, explained that while the meaning of descanso is literally a resting place, it really is more of a living monument.

“It is a sacred, special place where those who have lost someone go to talk to them,” he said. “So every essay, fragment and poem [in my book] was a literary shrine to this man I never knew.”

After reading excerpts from Descanso, Mr. Fletcher was joined onstage by Ms. Chamberlain for a brief Q&A. He answered queries about his definition of his genre and about creative nonfiction, how to get comfortable telling personal stories and his next project, which is a look at his mixed ethnicity. Mr. Fletcher said throughout his life, he felt as if he was on a fault line: He was raised by his mother’s Latino family but looked like his father; he was a journalist but wanted to use his imagination. He called it “life in the hyphen.”

“It’s a lifelong process of inhabiting the hyphen and making it my own,” he said. “I’m still discovering.”

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