By Paul Massignani
You’re a fidgeting junior high student, a talented only child who doesn’t know much of the world outside your classroom. A new teacher steps in front of your class, claps his hands, and makes a few jokes. He’s got energy, he’s got something. He makes eye contact, and there’s an intent beyond education in that gaze. He’s flirting. He’s fifteen years older, an adult. What do you do? Where does this go?
Decades after the student-teacher affair ended, Wendy C. Ortiz penned her memoir Excavation (Future Tense Books). Relying on her journals and memories, Ortiz reconstructed those confusing years and, ultimately, faced the experience’s aftermath.
Reading it, something Flaubert said comes to mind: “A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Amy Silverberg agrees, “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. Instead, she lays out the bare facts without judgment.”
Wendy and I sat down to examine the real-life experiences that birthed Excavation, and talked about Hollywood Notebook, her prose poetry book that’s due out in spring 2015 with Writ Large Press.
PM: Okay, so what do you think about when you’re hiking the canyon at the Griffith Observatory? It seems like a regular thing for you, like Murakami’s thing with running.
WO: Yeah. You know, it really varies what I think about. I try not to think about anything. I try. But, actually, what’s been happening lately is I’m using imagery in my mind to just get up to the Observatory, and feel strong and good about my pace. Inevitably other things pop up in my head, and there are creative things that happen, but they’re totally unexpected. I never go there with the intention that I’m going to try to work out this idea. I start first with imagery of “I’m a train going up this mountain” or “I’m a gazelle running down this mountain,” but everything else is just going to happen.
I’m thinking about the landscape and the people that I see, because I see the same people a lot. There’s one person in particular that I’ve seen for twelve years. I don’t see him every single time, so when I do, it shifts the whole dynamic. I think his name is John. I’m sure he doesn’t remember my name, but seeing him makes me think of other things. He is probably just old enough to be my father, but I always think of him as a grandfather, so I start thinking of my father. He passed earlier this year. I see crows, I think about my father. I see lots of crows up there, which is awesome. I’m going up there to not really think, but then a bunch of things inevitably come up.
PM: How’s the book tour going? You just got back from Chicago, right?
WO: Yeah, that was so fun. I love Chicago. I have friends there, and got to meet Curbside Splendor people, so that was really awesome. I feel like I’ve learned something about book touring, because my initial tour was right after the book came out, and now I feel like, “Oh, next time, wait a few weeks and let people get excited about it, and then go on the book tour.”
I had lots of people come out for it in July, but it was mostly people who already knew me. Now that a few months have passed, there are all these people who have read the book and who are like “Oh, I just read the book” or “I just started the book, and I can’t wait to talk to you.”
In a couple weeks, I’m going to Sacramento, Cal State Chico, and then UC Santa Barbara and doing some Universities, which is cool. Lot of traveling coming up, so, you know, it’s good. People are approaching me when I do a reading, and they’ve already read the book, which is super exciting. I’m not just showing up and nobody knows who I am or cares about it. People are showing me that they care about the book and have read it, and that’s amazing.
PM: One of the first things I noticed about your prose is how sensory it is. Sounds, textures, smells, how Mr. Ivers breathes on the phone, rug burns on your knees, rushing hormones. You seem to love physical sensations, and to be constantly trying to interpret them. Can you talk about that?
WO: I am just a really sensate person. I feel that that’s how I go about life, and have always gone about it that way. Everything is always like “Ooooh,” you know, I just want to touch and smell. One of my favorite things is going to the Sunday Hollywood Farmers’ Market on Ivar, and going to the soap booth. I mean, the whole thing is this big sensory experience. Going to get the tamales, eating the tamales for breakfast, going over to the soap booth, smelling all the soaps and lotions there, I feel like I get high. I’m always seeking those things out. What can I smell and touch? It feels really natural to me, to try and write about that experience, because it’s informative. I feel like I’m always learning from this stuff. It’s a powerful part of my existence, so I’m going to try to write about it. I think that that’s how it ends up on the page, and what people always respond to.
PM: Throughout the book, you effortlessly move the reader between a young girl’s and an adult’s point of view, sometimes within one sentence. It’s like hearing different perceptions of the same events from two people simultaneously, and it’s really compelling. What was the writing process like, finding that tone?
WO: I love that you said “effortlessly” because every time I see somebody call someone’s writing “effortless,” you know that a ton of effort went into it. I don’t think it started out that way, being able to move between those voices as easily as it looks on the page.
I have to imagine that in the fourteen years since the first draft, to the end, where the book is out and other people are looking at it, just in my maturing and aging, I got to a place where I could more easily volley between those voices. The older voice, the more mature voice, was also growing. I don’t think I could have written it the same way when I was 28 years old, because that voice wasn’t totally solid yet. I still have access to younger voices in me. I still feel like I talk to them all the time, you know? There’s a 14-year-old, a 21-year-old, and a 28-year-old. The 35-year-old hasn’t shown up yet. I’m 40, 41, I’m always forgetting how old I am. I don’t know where that 35-year-old is, but I have conversations with the 14, 21, and 28-year-old in me constantly. It makes it easy to have them show up on the page in different ways. But doing it in a way that people will be able to take in, that just feels like it’s been a time thing. I’ve needed to mature as a writer and as a person to be able to go back and forth between them.
PM: Thus, the excavation.
WO: Yes.
PM: We’re the same age, and there’s a lot of experiences in my past life that I couldn’t write about either, until now. It’s like memories get distilled down to the core of their meaning and worth.
WO: Right, and I’m only just now realizing that, in the last year, where I’m like, “Oh, this wasn’t possible, getting to this space in my head wasn’t even available to me yet.” It’s making me excited about aging, because it’s like I am really gaining wisdom here. I can feel it.
PM: One of the parts of the book that’s so haunting and telling about the nature of your relationship with Mr. Ivers is how you have to ask permission to come see him. He seems to be totally in control, dangling affection, attention, and sex like a carrot on a stick. How has your perception of that dynamic changed over the years?
WO: It’s interesting because I think that, when I was in it, I definitely felt like he was doing all those things, but as I got older I was like, “Oh, here’s where I was trying to manipulate.” My attempts at gaining power were here when I did this or when I did that. Things that weren’t totally apparent to me at the time. So again, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to look back and go, “Okay. On the surface here’s what it looks like,” but what I want to try and show, through the writing, is how I actually manipulated to try to establish some sort of power in this weird dynamic.
The perception has changed, and now I sort of look back at myself at that time and I’m like, “Alright, well, you were a girl trying to obtain power in a way that many young girls do, and then you learned how to access it in a different way, but it took a while.” You know, I don’t feel badly about any of the actions that I took, or even didn’t take. I feel like that was just where I was at, and how I was responding to a situation and circumstances. The perception maybe has turned into compassion for who I was in those circumstances.
PM: You mentioned power. Power differentials are a big theme in Excavation, and other interviews of yours that I’ve read. One of my favorite examples is this line on page 140: “My mother was yet another adult with whom I was wrestling for power. As the adult, she had power but she relinquished it with the vodka pour and ice clink.” What is it about power gaps that fascinates you?
WO: You know, for me it sort of comes down to the basic idea that we’re always writing about sex and death somehow (laughs). At least I’m willing to say that’s what it always comes down to for me. A big part of sex and death is power. We grow powerless as we get closer to death. That’s a huge one that in your twenties you’re not really focused on or thinking about, and it just starts to become more solidified as you get older. I mean, there are people that, in the face of that, feel the powerlessness but are afraid of it. I’m always interested in trying to do the more uncomfortable work, which would be like moving towards it. Understanding I’m powerless here, in this situation. I’m going to die, and yet, how can I get more comfortable with that idea, and really sit with it, not back away from it.
The same is true for sex. In every sexual relationship there’s some power differential happening, and it can shift and change, but it’s there, and I don’t want to back away from that. I want to get in closer. It’s super uncomfortable. If I had to go back and look at every relationship that I’ve had, it’s uncomfortable, but I find it to be this really rich place. Let’s go in there and see what we can get out of it. You know, how do you describe this? It’s an experience that I imagine most people have, and yet it’s not like we’re having conversations about it. Same with death, you know?
Sometimes I wonder, maybe if I had a sibling growing up, it would have been another sort of powerless person next to me. We could feel like we had power together, over our parents. Maybe it’s the experience of being an only child, feeling super powerless amongst a bunch of adults, always trying to do things to gain power. Sometimes that’s being precocious, sometimes it’s acting like you’re less smart so you can get more attention. It shows up in a lot of ways, but it’s always about power.
PM: You wrote a chapter in Excavation about teaching young kids when you were the same age as Mr. Ivers was when your relationship began. You talked about not having even the slightest sexual impulse around them. What is it that drives people to crave that, and justify acting on it?
WO: Oh gosh, there’s a big, deep well of stuff that it could be. I think it’s going to be different from person to person, and yet there may be similarities across the board. There’s certainly going to be people who are looking for all sorts of things, as basic as love, affection, or feeling power over another person who is younger. It could be any number of things.
I hate to use this word, because it gets really tricky when you’re talking about legal definitions of things, but if a person is a pedophile, then there is some research to indicate it could even be biological. There could be a chemical imbalance. It’s very tricky talking about it, because we all have different definitions of what it means to be a pedophile. There’s also a legal definition of what it means, and a DSM definition of what it means.
I can’t help but believe that there’s some basic drive towards love, power, feeling accepted, wanted. That’s a huge one: feeling wanted. It shows up in so many different ways, in the culture at large, how we all go about getting what we need. The feeling that people want us and need us. It can get super destructive and weird. I know this, too, just from working as a therapist intern, the ways we go about getting our needs met are largely determined, initially, by how we’re brought up. Our families are the first model of relationship. So, let’s hope you had good models, and if you didn’t, you’re going to have some extra work to do in this life. Hopefully you don’t harm anyone else trying to satisfy those unmet needs. It gets played out in so many wonderful and horrible ways over a lifetime.
PM: You’ve mentioned starting therapy when you were twenty-three. What was happening in your life the years between the last scene in the book where you and Mr. Ivers are at the beach and that first therapy session?
WO: Between 18-20, I was still living in LA, didn’t feel any desire to go to a big college, and didn’t know what I wanted to do. I stayed in LA, lived with my mother, and went to community college for two years. After that, I moved to Olympia, Washington. I wasn’t really looking for a relationship, but I ended up in one, with a man. He ended up moving to Olympia less than a year after I did. I moved up there because I was ready for a different situation from Los Angeles. The idea of living near a forest seemed really romantic. My community college had a population of 30,000 people and the town that I moved to had a total population of 20-30,000, so it was a huge cultural shift.
I didn’t know anyone in Olympia. I actually knew one person, but she left after two weeks, so I was on my own, a thousand miles away from home. I was just trying to figure out who I was, doing all the stuff you should be doing at those ages. I believe people don’t become adults, really, until they’re in their late twenties. I think you’re gestating to become an adult between 18 and 28. At least, that’s how it was for me.
I entered therapy at 23 thinking it was because I was having a hard time in my relationship, and I wasn’t feeling totally settled in Olympia. It was a huge culture shift. I was often the only woman of color, and that was a new experience. I didn’t have anybody to talk to about that until a few years later. I was doing a program for the first couple of quarters called Political Economy and Social Change. It was activating a part of myself and my identity, who I see myself as. I’ve always been a political person. It may not show up in the ways that people imagine it should show up, but it’s shown up in different ways over the course of my life. It’s very important to me. I was starting to deal with all these identities and trying to figure out my stuff. That’s what got me into therapy. That, and initially thinking something was wrong in my relationship, and not knowing what to do about it. There also happened to be this whole history that I had of this relationship with a teacher, something I’d never really processed or talked through before.
Suddenly, of course, you know, my therapist hears about that and is like “Oooo-kay, let’s talk about this some more.” Also, and this is something I’ve been trying to write about for a really long time, I was still flirting with relationships that were similar to the one I had with Mr. Ivers. I was trying to correct what had happened. In a way, I did. I still had to make mistakes, and fumble through some relationships that were similar to that one, to get things right down the road. That’s what I was doing from 18-23, trying to figure it out. Who am I, where do I go, what’s the point here, what do I do, how do I feel good?
I didn’t feel good about myself during that time. It was a constant ebb and flow of “I feel good about myself, I feel like shit. How do I stabilize?”
PM: So, overtly, it wasn’t about Mr. Ivers at all, at first.
WO: No, not at first, and then it became a place to process all of that.
PM: So the damage of that relationship didn’t even occur to you at the time.
WO: No, it didn’t. I understood that it was kind of a big deal, but it wasn’t something that I talked about, or even thought about all the time. I definitely had moments where I would think I saw him. Always on airplanes, I would think I saw him. That told me this was something important, that it obviously keeps showing up. I kept thinking “You should pay attention to this.” I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was. At 20, I was like “Well, I guess that was a big deal,” but I didn’t understand the depth of it yet.
I ran into him once. That’s a whole other story. I ran into him when I was twenty, and that was kind of an experience where I went “Oh, this did have a big impact,” because of my response to it. When I looked back, I was like “Yeah, this is a big deal, there’s something to process here.”
PM: It’s probably a taboo thing to ask, but does any of your work as a marriage and family therapist intern make its way into your writing material, even in the most general way?
WO: No, you can ask that, I feel like that’s totally safe, actually. I definitely feel like therapy is a back-and-forth process. I don’t feel like I’m doing all this stuff. I’m maybe facilitating, asking certain questions. I try to never suggest things; I don’t have an agenda.
In that process, though, I learn a shit ton about myself, and my responses, that I don’t necessarily share. There are reactions I might have that I want to come back to later with myself. In general, I learn about the human condition. There’s nothing specific that I take from therapy work that goes into the writing, just the overall sense of learning about people. Learning what people’s motivations are, always expanding my ideas of why people do the things they do, how they operate. It’s not limited anymore to how I operate and move about in the world. Now there are all these people that I learn from, just by the nature of them sitting with me and telling their stories. We’re talking about them and interpreting them. It’s never something that feels so direct that it would show up in my writing.
PM: So you’re obviously not stealing stories from them.
WO: No. Somebody asked me that once, if I ever use any details or any overall story. Absolutely not. I would never, ever do that. It’s not like Law and Order, where they take something from the headlines and put it in a story, but they maybe change a few details. No. I could never even come close to doing that. The idea though, that I’m learning more about people in general, comes into the writing. It’s just diffused, not totally direct.
PM: You mentioned (in another interview) having issues with some of the political groups you used to be a part of, and groups in general. Public opinion of everything today seems to move as a group: hashtagged, reposted, and reinterpreted in threads and think-pieces. What’s your perception of the hive-mind that the internet has become?
WO: So, I think that in my whole life, I’ve naturally gravitated away from group thought. There’s a lot of time when you feel alone, and you’re like, “Where are my people?” or “Where do I fit in here?”
What’s fascinating to me about the sort of hive-mind internet experience is that if somebody doesn’t say something, if somebody doesn’t jump in, there are people who will interpret that as “You’re being silent on this issue, and now I won’t trust you.” I feel like that’s really dangerous territory to get into. I don’t believe that, at all times, everybody’s opinion should be thrown in. For me, personally, I prefer to have certain conversations, on certain topics, and it’s not always going to be this public discussion on the internet. For me. I mean, I understand the value in that happening out there, but it’s not how I feel. Maybe sometimes I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe just throwing out my opinions everywhere. I want to protect my psyche on some level. I feel very strongly about the opinions that I do have, and I can feel strongly about them and still not throw them out to thousands of people.
I never feel compelled to join in the hive mind. There are a ton of bandwagons out there, and I don’t ever want to jump on them, really. There’s a select few of bandwagons I jump on, and that’s who I am as a person, and I don’t feel compelled to jump on many more. In fact, when too many people jump on a bandwagon, I start to back away, because I’m like “I don’t trust this anymore.” And that’s just who I’ve always been.
I don’t think I was ever so interested in groups. I’ve tried, because I have to be in them from time to time. I do try, and I think that sometimes I’m successful. Probably as I get older, it’s better. There are a lot of things that can happen in those situations, though. I’ve witnessed it.
I was in a psychology class where the class was divided into two groups. We would observe a group having a therapy session, and then we would be the group having the therapy session, and that was totally traumatizing to me. It sounds crazy, but it was a really traumatic experience, because I became a scapegoat.
PM: Scapegoat, as in the role of a blame-taker for a family’s problems, in the language of therapy?
WO: Yes. I don’t really have a ton of experience being a scapegoat, directly, and in that role-playing experience I got to really play one. I was like “Wow, this can be a really unsafe experience, being in a group,” if the facilitation isn’t there to make everybody feel safe, and stop things from happening. The experience also left me thinking “Okay, right, remember, groups are not necessarily your thing,” and that’s okay. I actually feel more comfortable, like I’m honoring who I am, when I’m not part of groups. I want to value that, and cultivate that, as opposed to jumping into whatever group comes along. It wouldn’t feel authentic to me.
On a side note, I’m personally always fascinated by cults, anything that feels cultish. It’s funny, because as much as I’m opposed to groups, I’m still super fascinated by cults, but I think that my fascination lies mostly with the leaders of the cults, why they’re doing what they’re doing, what’s happening there. I have an interest in what happens to you when you’re involved in something like that, as a believer, or whatever the person wants to call themselves, but the leaders are the ones I’m always super fascinated by.
PM: What can you tell us about Hollywood Notebook? It’s coming out in 2015 with Writ Large Press. Can you talk about it?
WO: It’s a totally different kind of book. I’ve been calling it a prose poem-ish memoir. We need to come up with a better descriptor than that, but I call it that because it’s very fragmented. Somebody who’s looking for an arc and a plot, this might not be the book for them. There’s a very poetic voice. I feel like this is the voice of the 28-year-old who left Olympia after eight years and moved back to LA. I grew up in the valley, and when I moved back, I moved to Hollywood. That was a different experience immediately, another culture shift. I wasn’t living with my parents or seeing them much.
It’s about coming back and being an adult, in the place that I grew up, and figuring it out. Being single again, and living in Hollywood by myself, I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to be single for. I would walk the streets, and I would look at people and be like “How do people choose each other?” It’s like I lost all my ability to understand how relationships happened.
“Is this person the one?” How do you know who’s the one? How do you figure this out? I was living in this studio in Hollywood and I was keeping a blog. This was in 2002. I was keeping this blog, and it was a lot of rumination. Rumination, and a lot of sensory stuff about what my life was like here. That’s what the book covers, years 28-33. What I was struggling with, doing some dating and having some blowouts, but then also getting into a relationship that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in, and having to figure that out.
It definitely leads into the next book, down the road. I don’t know if you’ve read the essay of mine in the New York Times, the Modern Love essay, it’s the story of how I got married, and then a few months later I started cheating on my husband with my co-worker, who was a woman. I fell in love with her, and ended up leaving my husband. The essay itself is about how my husband was amazing throughout that experience. They titled it “Newly Wed and Quickly Unraveling.”
Hollywood Notebook ends when I’m on the verge of getting married, so there’s no spoiler there. If you read that essay, you know what happens. Everything leading up to that is trying to find my place in LA as an adult, working, living alone, dating, and all the struggles with the past kind of pop in from time-to-time. The chapters are never more than three pages long. Some chapters are a just a list. It’s a pretty different voice.
Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir (Future Tense Books) and the forthcoming Hollywood Notebook (Writ Large Press, spring 2015). She wrote the year-long, monthly column “On the Trail of Mary Jane” about Southern California medical marijuana dispensary culture for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her work appears in the recent anthology California Prose Directory; New Writing From the Golden State (2014) as well as in the New York Times, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Rumpus, among others. Visit Wendy here.
Photo of Wendy C. Ortiz courtesy of Jasmine Fox.
Paul Massignani is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in F Magazine and Hair Trigger.