Wendy C. Ortiz

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Wendy C. Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher—now a registered sex offender—continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship. This conflicted relationship with her teacher may have been just five years long, but would imprint itself on her and her later relationships, queer and straight, for the rest of her life. In EXCAVATION: A MEMOIR, the black and white of the standard victim/perpetrator stereotype gives way to unsettling grays. The present- day narrator reflects on the girl she once was, as well as the teacher and parent she has become. It's a beautifully written and powerful story of a woman reclaiming her whole heart.

A Memoir

Excavation

"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

"Young woman moves to the big city to "make it" as an artist -- it's a classic bildungsroman. Hollywood Notebook's narrator worries, in these frantic, disparate journal entries, about rent, overdue library books, joblessness, and the lack of cold running tap water...You can hear the growl of the Metro bus on every page, feel the squeak of the Naugahyde chair, and smell the cigarette smoke. Each tenderly wrought detail evokes the crackling sense of wonder we feel as young adults when the world appears pregnant with possibility and dread." --Lauren Eggert-Crowe, Los Angeles Review of Books

Hollywood Notebook

Hollywood Notebook is a prose poem-ish memoir of fragments. Ortiz takes us through the streets of Los Angeles and the internal maps she's charting as she moves from her twenties to her thirties in a studio apartment in Hollywood. A cartography of love, loss, and transformation, Hollywood Notebook is a portrait of the author's psyche overlaid on a map of the city she makes her home.

Patrick O'Neil

Steve Heller

Yuvi Zalkow

Daniel José Older

Susan Southard

Elizabeth Earley

Andromeda Romano-Lax

Bernadette Murphy

Laraine Herring

Jillian Lauren

Naomi Benaron

Joan Dempsey

Tara Ison

Noriko Nakada

Alistair McCartney

Gayle Brandeis

Michael Passafiume

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda

Dawna Kemper

Wendy Hudson

Rochelle Newman

Gordon Lee Johnson

F. Douglas Brown

Anna Scotti

Antoinette Brim

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Valentina Gnup

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Steve De Jarnatt

Lauren Schmidt

Topper Lilien

Lisbeth Andriessen

Deborah Bauer

Antonia Crane

Tammy Delatorre

Jacqueline Heinze

LaToya Jordan

Hazel Kight Witham

David Bumpus

Raymond Gaston

Katelyn Keating

Lise Quintana

Arielle Silver

Wendy Dutwin

Seth Fischer

Michael Leal García

Khadija Anderson

Angela Brommel

M. L. Brown

Joe Jiménez

Tanya Ko Hong

Shelly Krehbiel

Gina Loring

Allie Marini

Maiana Minahal

Jim Natal

Daniel G. Reinhold

Chrys Tobey

Reyan Grande

2017 marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. We commemorated this occasion with a special edition of our journal. Lunch Ticket Special: Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch¿s MFA in Creative Writing features new and previously published works by Antioch MFA alumni.

Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch's MFA in Creative Writing

Lunch Ticket Special

Wendy C. Ortiz

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