231. Recovering and Reclaiming the Teenage Version of Ourselves in Memoir featuring Wendy C. Ortiz

231. Recovering and Reclaiming the Teenage Version of Ourselves in Memoir featuring Wendy C. Ortiz

Wendy C. Ortiz joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the English teacher who preyed on her when she was thirteen, writing about the person we are now when writing about our past, placing the reader in the physical and psychological experience of character-you, how important the opening pages are in setting the stakes, feeling fear and shame, taking care of yourself when writing about traumatic events, reminding ourselves who we were before abuse, growing up feeling comfortable keeping secrets, art as means to recovery, when your press goes out of business, when a predator asks you not to write about them but you do, and her new memoir Excavation.

Also in this episode:

-interstitial chapters

-university presses vs. small presses

-taking care of ourselves when writing about trauma

Books mentioned in this episode:

-Firebird by Mark Doty

-Truth Serum by Bernard Cooper

-The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook: Essays, and Bruja: A Dreamoir, all of which were reissued in Spring 2025 by Northwestern University Press. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine online, The New York Times’ “Modern Love,” Joyland, FENCE, DIAGRAM, and Pleiades, among others. She was awarded a Tin House residency to continue working on her next book. Her current project is Mommy’s El Camino, a weekly online newsletter. Wendy is a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles.

Connect with Wendy:

Website: https://www.wendyortiz.com

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wendyortiz.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wendy.c.ortiz

Book purchase via Bookshop:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/excavation-a-memoir-wendy-c-ortiz/21982167?ean=9780810148604&next=t

Ronit’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts’ 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.

She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.

More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com

Subscribe to Ronit’s Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank

Follow Ronit:

https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/

https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank

https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

Avsnitt(242)

221. Writing and Processing Old, Longstanding Anger featuring Steve Eichenblatt

221. Writing and Processing Old, Longstanding Anger featuring Steve Eichenblatt

Steve Eichenblatt joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about losing a father through abandonment, the abuse he endured from his adoptive father, living in a household of trauma, feeling emotiona...

13 Jan 36min

220. How to Be Unmothered: Escaping Enmeshment, Going No Contact, and Cocooning Ourselves featuring Camille U. Adams

220. How to Be Unmothered: Escaping Enmeshment, Going No Contact, and Cocooning Ourselves featuring Camille U. Adams

Dr. Camille U. Adams joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about generations of mothers choosing to unmother their children, colonial violence in Trinidad and Tobago, stifling relationships, cogn...

6 Jan 58min

219. Revealing More Than We Intended featuring Lora Arbrador

219. Revealing More Than We Intended featuring Lora Arbrador

Lora Abrador joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation weaving together three themes in her memoir, writing about the ancient technique of egg tempura paint, incorporating 300 images in her book, gai...

30 Dec 202549min

218. Honoring Our Own Momentum featuring Gretchen McGowan

218. Honoring Our Own Momentum featuring Gretchen McGowan

Gretchen McGowan joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about the grit and glam of the 90s in New York, her career producing independent films, the thrill of creating something from nothing, honor...

23 Dec 202529min

217. Writing Real Sex in Memoir featuring Sarah Gallucci

217. Writing Real Sex in Memoir featuring Sarah Gallucci

Sarah Gallucci joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about being the child of a teen mom and early influences on ideas of love and relationships, pivoting from journalism to reporting on her own ...

16 Dec 202536min

216. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memoir and Consuming Art in All Its Forms featuring Elizabeth Rynecki and Tony Kaplan

216. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memoir and Consuming Art in All Its Forms featuring Elizabeth Rynecki and Tony Kaplan

Elizabeth Rynecki and Tony Kaplan join Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about multi-disciplinary approaches to memoir, the different skills we need for storytelling modalities, their new podcast T...

9 Dec 202534min

215. Getting to the Heart of Spiritual and Awakened Memoir featuring Sarah Chauncey

215. Getting to the Heart of Spiritual and Awakened Memoir featuring Sarah Chauncey

Sarah Chauncey joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about her many careers in writing, working on a memoir and deciding not to publish, framing the story we want to tell, experiencing ourselves ...

4 Dec 202530min

214. Dismantling Tropes and the Feeling of Being Other featuring Kaila Yu

214. Dismantling Tropes and the Feeling of Being Other featuring Kaila Yu

Kaila Yu joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about how she hated writing at first and has had an accidental career in it, how she had no intention of writing a memoir, selling a book on proposa...

2 Dec 202526min

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