“I think it takes me at least 10 years to digest an experience before writing about it,” she said. She’s 12,000 words into a memoir based on her “Modern Love” essay and her failed 2007 marriage and confesses to being stuck. Her own writing is often witty and self-effacing, as with her column on the marijuana dispensary culture for McSweeney’s.
During its first decade, it’s hosted an all-star cast of Los Angeles writers, including Chris Abani, Bernard Cooper, Dana Johnson and Nina Revoyr. “It’s been a constant process of trying to understand the arc of my life, and what it all means,” she said.Īt the same time, Ortiz is curating the Rhapsodomancy reading series she started in 2004.
The work she does in private sessions with her clients mirrors her own journey. In addition to a growing resume as a writer, she has a master’s degree in clinical psychology and is working at a Los Angeles clinic, finishing the final intern hours she needs to get her license. The affair that inevitably followed ended her marriage but forced Ortiz to sort out who she really was. In a 2012 essay for the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, Ortiz described an episode that unfolded some years earlier - falling in love with another woman as she prepared to marry her husband. “I want to work with things that are uncomfortable and scary.” “I want to be really committed to going to some of the darkest places and taking that and making it art,” she said. Sitting at a long table in her living room, with her daughter’s toys and chalkboard nearby, Ortiz summed up what drives her to write. “When I read her work I feel exposed, aired-out, and satisfied.”
“Ortiz writes with a raw, wrenching, vulnerable truth that is refreshing, grounding, and full of life-sustaining filaments,” Jessica Dewberry wrote in a critical essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books in April. As a poet and essayist, she has mined her own life again and again. “I didn’t want to be average,” Ortiz writes in a chapter titled “Why I Didn’t Tell.” “I didn’t want it to end. The book covers the four years Wendy spent seeing Jeff, a relationship that ended before she turned 18 and that she kept secret from the adults who might have stopped it. In “Excavation,” Ortiz shares passages from her teenage journals. “I’m writing about something that people prefer to see as black and white,” Ortiz says in the West Adams home she shares with her girlfriend, Sandy Lee, and their 3-year-old daughter.
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