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DeepDive Sneak Preview #3: Ingrid Rojas Contreras

DeepDive instructor and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ingrid Rojas Contreras on the relationship between ritual and creativity.

Author

Brad Listi
March 26, 2025

Hi there,

In this week’s newsletter, a short meditation on ritual, concentration, and creativity.

DeepDive’s debut audio course, How to Write a Novel—available later this year—features dialogues with dozens of today’s leading writers, all of whom have found a way to prioritize their work and sustain the kind of deep focus that literature requires.

In How to Write a Novel, you’ll hear from Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of the novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree and a memoir called The Man Who Could Move Clouds, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Ingrid’s essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. 

Over the course of her career, she has developed a personal system that helps her enter into a state of deep concentration on a consistent basis.

Here’s a preview of one of Ingrid’s episodes in How to Write a Novel, in which we discuss her use of self-mesmerism in her writing practice, and how it has helped her to overcome struggles with PTSD and loss of focus:

DeepDive: So there's a line in an essay that you wrote for the New York Times that I want to read. You say: “Before self-mesmerism, trauma was something that exiled me from the present, causing me to revisit horrific events. It eroded my perception until I came to believe that long-gone dangers were extant in the middle of my peaceful everyday.” So these rituals that you've cultivated for yourself—like self-mesmerism— have been really effective for you. They’ve helped you to mitigate the impacts that PTSD and trauma can have on your creative process.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Yes. And I think that the intentional creation of a new space—teaching my body to occupy space and time in a different way through rituals like self-mesmerism—these are ways for me to win back territory and be more grounded. And then, if my PTSD returns, I have an easier time differentiating between past events and old feelings and where I am in the present moment.

DeepDive: You wear a specific color—ultramarine blue—every time you write, as part of this self-mesmerism process. It helps you to cue yourself for your creative work.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Yes. And it could be anything. One of my friends is the novelist R.O. Kwon, and she adapted this process for herself by getting “a writing shawl.” She places it over her shoulders when she's working.

DeepDive: Kind of like a cape. A superhero cape.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Exactly. And if she has to do something that's not writing, she'll take it off and do the thing. And then she puts it back on when she's ready to get back to work. She told me that this ritual been very effective for her too, in terms of helping her stay focused and avoid unnecessary distractions.

Ingrid is a remarkable writer, and we’re lucky to have her as an instructor. In addition to being talented and industrious, she has also done a brilliant job of cultivating rituals that enable her to do her best work.

You’ll be able to learn all about her approach in How to Write a Novel, and we hope it will inspire you to create effective systems of your own.

Thanks for reading! Remember to follow DeepDive on Instagram and BlueSky. And if you have thoughts or questions, you can always email us here.

All the best,
Brad

Brad Listi
Founder | DeepDive
www.deepdive.audio

Quote of the day:

Toni Morrison. (Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.)

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game. This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.’

—Toni Morrison