There is a large goldmining colony near the top of the Peruvian Andes named La Rinconada. Over fifty-thousand people have made a home here, and my composite novel, Clouds of Dirt and Glass, follows the lives of a select few. Diana struggles with coming of age in a permanent place she thought would only be temporary; Antay battles his own and his sister’s demons; and fathers struggle earnestly to understand their children while working more hours than their kids spend awake. Every day is surrounded with a haze of ice and snow and low-flying clouds and mists—and the knowledge that one day, soon, the mines will run dry, and this town will be abandoned, and eventually forgotten outside stories and tellings of a place and a people.Each story exists in its own microcosm, but the setting is a static backdrop that threads each together. Protagonists of some stories appear as supporting or even background characters in others. Themes dealing with power struggle, class conflict, gender roles, and family echo through these stories not unlike the sledgehammers that reverberate out of mineshafts and into the streets of La Rinconada
