The Writer Next Door: Celia Reissig

Celia Reissig is pleased that Stanza Books in Beacon stocks her 2020 collection of poems and a one-act play, Huella/Traces . Celia Reissig at Stanza Books in Beacon Where to shelve it might prove challenging because the paperback has Reissig’s poems in Spanish, English and Spanglish, with no translations. They reflect her voyages from country to country, language to language, form to form. (Also on hand is a 2016 anthology, Home: An Imagined Landscape , which includes a creative nonfiction piece by Reissig, “Where Oblivion Shall Not Dwell”). Reissig describes herself as a “cultural smuggler” who explores links between cultures and languages, and the personal and the social. Her parents moved often. She should have been born in Argentina, where her father taught molecular biology. But a dictatorship in place at the time impeded his work, and the couple left. Her parents had been married in Edinburgh, where her father began his career as a scientist. “He moved on to another scientific lab in Denmark, then zigzagged throughout the world,” she says. “When I was 3, we went to Paris for a few months, then returned to Argentina, where I spent my childhood. Spanish was my first language.” A few years later, the family immigrated to the U.S. after navigating a snafu. “My father was offered a position in Long Island, but he didn’t realize it was extended just to him,” Reissig says. “They let him in, not us, and we went to Montreal for a few months.” She says that being refused entry has resonated deeply with her ever since. “The border situation now is so very different — there was no river migration — but it was traumatic in different ways. How you get here is part of the story. Canada offered no assistance, just asylum. It’s so important to understand that there are different migration patterns and causes.” Once settled on Long Island, Reissig experienced bullying, much of it directed at her accent. To counter this, she danced, played violin and wrote. “Writing has been my constant companion,” she says. “I found refuge in art.” A […]

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