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.
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!