Sleeping and waking
Today: Myriam Gurba, founding editor of Tasteful Rude, and author of Creep, Mean, and the forthcoming Poppy State.
Issue No. 415
The Full Scope of Consciousness: An interview with Wendy C. Ortiz
Myriam Gurba
The Full Scope of Consciousness
by Myriam Gurba
Adventurous readers are in luck. This April, Northwestern University Press reissued three titles by the Los Angeles-based author and psychotherapist Wendy C. Ortiz: Excavation, Hollywood Notebook, and Bruja.
Portland’s Future Tense Press first published Wendy’s debut, the elegant, harrowing, and iconoclastic Excavation, in 2014. It proved to be instructive, a book I needed to read and a beacon for my future work.
Excavation tells the story of 14-year-old Wendy, an intellectually gifted Mexican American girl growing up in the San Fernando Valley. Told from her adolescent point of view, it’s the story of the painful and dangerous relationship initiated by Wendy’s eighth-grade English teacher, “Jeff Ivers,” a serial perpetrator of child sexual abuse. While some readers have described the book as sounding like a love story, it is the opposite of one. It is a horror story swaddled in the trappings of romance.
Excavation models how to break rules that restrain storytellers who address gender-based violence. It whispered to me that I could follow its literary example, and while I’m grateful to have met Wendy on the page, I’m even more grateful that we’ve been able to cultivate a flesh and blood friendship that has now spanned more than a decade. Last week, as we strolled Descanso Gardens in La Cañada, Wendy and I discussed her books, fascism’s impact on dreams, hexing elected officials, the electorate’s misguided fascination with the Epstein files, and the fickleness of the human heart. Our conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Keep us breathing fire!
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