![]() "I want to work with things that are uncomfortable and scary."Īs Ortiz worked to transform her experience with "Jeff" into a book, she was inspired by two memoirs that tackle themes of sexual identity, she said: "The Chronology of Water" by Lidia Yuknavitch and "Firebird" by Mark Doty. "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. 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 home she shares with her girlfriend, Sandy Lee, and their 3-year-old daughter. ![]()
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