Hollywood Notebook is a prose poem-ish memoir of fragments. Ortiz takes us through the streets of Los Angeles and the internal maps she's charting as she moves from her twenties to her thirties in a studio apartment in Hollywood. A cartography of love, loss, and transformation, Hollywood Notebook is a portrait of the author's psyche overlaid on a map of the city she makes her home.

Hollywood Notebook

Biographies & Memoirs

Ortiz, Wendy C.

Memoirs

Writ Large Press

Wendy C. Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher - now a registered sex offender - continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship. This conflicted relationship with her teacher may have been just five years long, but would imprint itself on her and her later relationships, queer and straight, for the rest of her life. In Excavation: A Memoir, the black and white of the standard victim/perpetrator stereotype gives way to unsettling grays. The present-day narrator reflects on the girl she once was, as well as the teacher and parent she has become. It's a beautifully written and powerful story of a woman reclaiming her whole heart.

Excavation: A Memoir

Parenting & Relationships

Family Relationships

Future Tense Books

CCM is pleased to announce Bruja by Wendy C. Ortiz, the author of the critically acclaimed Excavation: A Memoir and Hollywood Notebook. With Bruja, Ortiz continues to upend and reinvent the memoir in inventive and deeply emotional ways to better fit the terms and trajectory of her exploration. Behold the "dreamoir"-the details from the most malleable and revelatory portions of one's dreams, catalogued in bold detail. The end result is perhaps one of the most candid expressions of personal history, the subconscious bared in full, revealing the part of oneself that is often the most difficult to see. Ortiz has created a new literary form, a parallel plane where the cast of characters are the people that occupied one's waking life; a narrative that's equal parts delicate and bold, a literary adventure through the boundaries of memoir, where the self is viewed from a position anchored into the deepest recesses of the mind.

Bruja

Religion & Spirituality

Civil Coping Mechanisms

"Young woman moves to the big city to "make it" as an artist -- it's a classic bildungsroman. Hollywood Notebook's narrator worries, in these frantic, disparate journal entries, about rent, overdue library books, joblessness, and the lack of cold running tap water...You can hear the growl of the Metro bus on every page, feel the squeak of the Naugahyde chair, and smell the cigarette smoke. Each tenderly wrought detail evokes the crackling sense of wonder we feel as young adults when the world appears pregnant with possibility and dread."
--Lauren Eggert-Crowe, Los Angeles Review of Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ortiz, Wendy C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ortiz, Wendy C.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ortiz, Wendy C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Hollywood Notebook

Excavation: A Memoir

Bruja

Hollywood Notebook