Celia Reissig is pleased that Stanza Books in Beacon stocks her 2020 collection of poems and a one-act play, Huella/Traces.
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 horrific car accident caused her to jettison her burgeoning dance career as a young woman and prompted an abrupt professional shift. “I switched to French, studied at the Sorbonne for a junior year abroad, then transferred to New York University to study Spanish and French language and literature,” she says. “That’s where I discovered my passion: languages. I’m driven to bringing together linguistic communities.”
After graduating, Reissig moved to Port Chester, in Westchester County, and stayed for 25 years. “There was a wonderful bookstore there, Panacea, which started using my work at readings,” she says. “I formed a Spanish-language book club with other Latina women, and there was a multicultural arts center offering dance, music, visual arts and writing. I was able to use art to heal and to become part of the community.”
Reissig taught Spanish and French at two high schools before earning a master’s degree in Latin American Studies, another in comparative literature, and a doctorate from Fordham that took 14 years while she worked full-time and raised two children.
For the past 30 years, Reissig has been an associate professor of English and Spanish and chair of the Department of Literature and Language at Mercy University [formerly Mercy College]. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Talking to Myself (1977) and Reflections/Reflexiones (2000).
In addition, she has led creative-writing classes for Spanish speakers at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow and worked on writing with Ecuadorean migrants whose first language was Quechua, while their children attended a Head Start outreach program. “We wrote everything from poetry to journal entries to creative nonfiction,” Reissig recalls.
Ten years ago, with her children grown, Reissig’s “second or third or fourth journey” ended in Cold Spring (she has since moved to Beacon). Upon the move Reissig participated in a Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production of Rip Van Winkle, part of its Radically Participatory Theater series. “I had a tiny part, four lines plus lifting stuff and being in a make-believe boat,” she says. “I met a whole bunch of people who worked together quite feverishly rehearsing.”
She later submitted a short play to HVSF’s annual Bake-Off competition and was named one of seven winners. That play, A Dog Named Wolf, was modeled on her immigrant experience as a young girl and her relationship with her father.
Recently she collaborated with visual artists at the BAU Gallery in Beacon, doing improv with a musician. “I read poems of mine and he came in with his guitar — a back and forth. We all crave not just living inside ourselves.”
