coming in April 2025
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.
It’s that time. That time when I ask you, sweet readers, to consider pre-ordering my books, forthcoming in spring 2025. Why not give a gift to future-you?
I offer, here, what I hope are various antidotes to despair.
Excavation for the younger person inside you who suffered painful power dynamics;
Bruja as a reminder to write in your dream journal;
Hollywood Notebook for all the writers, and the ones going through their first or second Saturn return.
Small Press Distribution’s Nonfiction Bestsellers List (2014 - 2015)
11 Groundbreaking Books about Women Making History with Their Thinking, Activism, and Courage, Bustle
70 Best Biographies and Memoirs, as picked by Powell’s Bookstore
Best Queer Books Set in Every State (California), Autostraddle
“Ortiz’s story of lost innocence is unmuddied by drippy sentimentality or self-pity. Her sentences are muscular, without the fatty tissue of over-explanation or justification. She never undercuts the power of her prose with an adult sensibility of right and wrong.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Honesty is a hallmark of Ortiz's work. As a poet and essayist, she has mined her own life again and again.”—Los Angeles Times
“[A] beautifully wrought unearthing of…complicated power dynamics.”—The Brooklyn Rail
"In Bruja, Wendy C. Ortiz deftly navigates the land of dreams in what she calls a dreamoir. By telling us her dreams, by revealing her most unguarded and vulnerable self, Ortiz is, truly, offering readers the most intimate parts of herself-how she loves, how she wants, how she lives, who she is. Bruja is not just a book-it is an enigma and a wonder and utterly entrancing." —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
"Bruja calls into question not only what is a memoir, but what is a life. Politics, books, mass media, random encounters, work, relationships tumble into the depths of consciousness, and the self spirals open, huge and passionate. Ortiz's dreamoir is a multidimensional love story with the whole mess of existence. I loved it."—Dodie Bellamy, author of The TV Sutras
“It’s testament to Ortiz’s courage as a memoirist that she’s willing to live for a while on this submarine plane, among the elements that dictate her fate—and to invite her readers along for the show.” —Los Angeles Times
"LA-based writer Ortiz continues her innovative soul-search by weaving dream with memory in order to piece together a poignant story from the elusive symbolism of the subconscious.... A few entries into this stunning dreamoir, it's evident that Ortiz is making bold statements about love, desire and womanhood as she defiantly navigates the absurdities and strangeness of everyday reality and taps into the comforting properties of fantasy and daydream."-NBC News online
Top 10 Books About Hollywood, The Guardian
10 Essential Books that Capture Los Angeles in All Its Sublime, Beautiful Darkness, Lit Hub
“[S]uffused with the heritage of the city as a place for writers…Ortiz quietly observes the day-to-day life of the writer, the smell of food in the diners, the heat, the locales where writers hang out. An optimistic book that also reveals the hinterland and grain of a writing culture that goes back 100 years.” —The Guardian
“The entire project becomes nearly reminiscent of the self-musings of Maggie Nelson, if Nelson were consulting astrological charts rather than philosophy…. Hollywood Notebook, then, is a sui generis gem, and one to take advantage of immediately. How often can we read a stranger’s journals so guiltlessly, and with such satisfaction? Ortiz inspires it — she’s laid herself bare, and in doing so dug deep in a way that so few memoirs can actually achieve.”—Electric Literature
“Hollywood Notebook transforms pain and joy directly into an amazing new language, one that brilliantly transcends the limits of genre and style. A warm and writhing vision of those days we all spend listening to music in the dark, of evenings outside on a roof in the warmth of another, of loss and learning to turn that loss into words. Simply put: This is an exceptional book that will resonate with you.”—David Connerley Nahm, author of Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky
Love to you for being here and getting to the end of this post. If you want to help with getting the word out about the books next spring, get in touch. I have ideas.
Take care, everyone.