In Conversation with Wendy C. Ortiz

Author Wendy C. Ortiz joins us to present her newly reissued books, Excavation, Bruja, and Hollywood Notebook. A darkly vibrant and daring memoir, Ortiz’s Excavation (Northwestern University Press) challenged the standard telling of abuse narratives when first published in 2014; over a decade later, it remains deeply prescient. Set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in the late 1980s, the narrative follows the spiraling entanglement between Ortiz and her eighth-grade English teacher as she becomes both victim to and participant in a simultaneously predatorial and impassioned relationship. Dubbed a “dreamoir,” Bruja (Northwestern) is a bold and harrowing journey through the dream worlds of Ortiz. Sister memoir to Hollywood Notebook, it catalogs the happenings of the night: strange visions of the past warped by present-day inklings; animals running loose, never where they should be; familiar nature and architecture made malleable and new. A daylight traipse through early-aughts Los Angeles, Hollywood Notebook (Northwestern) encapsulates the powerful feelings and hopeful futures of twentysomething Ortiz. In this boundary-defying sister memoir to Bruja, Ortiz navigates internal maps as she traverses external palm-treed streets, moving through her youthful twenties and into the pensiveness of her thirties. Ortiz will be joined in conversation by Emilly Prado, author of Funeral for Flaca.