Features | July 08, 2026

The Alchemy of Wendy C. Ortiz 

Excavation: A Memoir by Wendy C. Ortiz, Northwestern University Press, 2025, 288 pp., $24.00 (paperback). Originally published by Future Tense Books, 2014.  

Hollywood Notebook: Essays by Wendy C. Ortiz, Northwestern University Press, 2025, 204 pp., $22.00 (paperback). Originally published by Writ Large Press, 2015.  

Bruja: A Dreamoir by Wendy C. Ortiz, Northwestern University Press, 2025, 227 pp., $22.00 (paperback). Originally published by Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016. 

In Bruja: A Dreamoir, Los Angeles writer and psychotherapist Wendy C. Ortiz requires a camera to document the strange world above her. She writes, “Something was happening in the sky. Ten moons in a pattern like a rainbow, curved, each moon in a different phase of moon-ness, unphotographable, laced the darkness . . . fish, fire, deer leapt from one moon onto the next until the jumble of colorful fauna finally jumped onto the last moon, extinguishing it.” Her image of photographer as archivist and activist foretells the US in 2026, as citizens document the violence of ICE in real-time on their cellphone cameras. In Bruja, the world turns topsy-turvy. A building flips on its side. No doorway is safe. The ground shakes open. Unlike in our current world, no one is harmed in Ortiz’s dreamscape.  

In 2025, Northwestern University Press rereleased Ortiz’s stunning three-book oeuvre—Excavation: A Memoir, Hollywood Notebook: Essays, and Bruja. Though Ortiz’s three books are not a trilogy, they demand reading as a collection. A triple rerelease is a rarity, especially through an independent or institutional press. What is the purpose of rereleasing Ortiz’s oeuvre? In 2025, the US government defunded the National Endowment for the Arts, dealing a savage blow to many independent presses, where Ortiz originally published all three of her memoirs. As the current US administration rolls back funding for the arts and attempts to erase evidence of the contributions of queer people and people of color, conversations about representation in publishing are all the more pressing. Northwestern University Press’s rerelease of Ortiz’s books is an overdue celebration and an opportunity to retrace our footsteps as a literary community. As Ortiz genre-bends from memoir to memoir, she excavates herself from her past while dreaming of potential futures. Her project is a reinscription of the self that “wear[s] out the subject,” patterning herself like a ten-moon sky, exhausting all light.