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Bruja

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Behold the “dreamoir”–the details from the most malleable and revelatory portions of one’s dreams, catalogued in bold detail. Ortiz has created a new literary form, a parallel plane where the cast of characters are the people that occupied one’s waking life; Bruja is a narrative that’s equal parts delicate and bold, a literary adventure through the boundaries of memoir, where the self is viewed from a position anchored into the deepest recesses of the mind.

"The book collects Ortiz's dreams over a period of four years, in spare and at times mesmerizing prose...It is a literary work in its own right...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." -The 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." -NBCNews.com

"Bruja is a personal history and a travel journal, a book of emotional heft and bizarre incantations, a revelatory experiment and a literary scar produced by life...This is a smart, strange, wonderfully expressive combination of fact and everything that hovers in the periphery of fact." -Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"In Wendy Ortiz's dreamoir, Bruja, she finds an utterly fascinating middle ground between the two perspectives. Except that even "middle ground" is insufficient; rather, she presents an inclusive, paradigm-shifting theory in narrative form, one that embraces the interconnectedness of stories, focalization, the unconscious, and how we construct reality." -Angel City Review

"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 An Untamed State and the New York Times bestselling book of essays, 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 When the Sick Rule the World, The TV Sutras, and Cunt-Ups

"Wendy C. Ortiz has invented her own genre, in her sleep, no less. Bruja is at once lush and spare, funny and weird, disturbing and sometimes even beautiful in the way that dreams can be. She's crafted an absurdly real and compelling story here, one dream at a time." --Elizabeth Crane, author of The History of Great Things

"A memoir of the dreaming soul and reportage from the frontline of a writer's consciousness, Bruja is surreal, mesmerizing, and beautiful. I completely fell under its spell." --Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' Bridles and managing editor of The Scofield

234 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2016

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About the author

Wendy C. Ortiz

9 books375 followers

Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir (Future Tense Books, 2014), Hollywood Notebook (Writ Large Press, 2015), and the dreamoir Bruja (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). In 2016 Bustle named her one of “9 Women Writers Who Are Breaking New Nonfiction Territory.” Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog. Her writing has appeared in such venues as The New York Times, Joyland, StoryQuarterly, and a year-long series appeared at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Most recently her “Urban Liminal” series of texts appear alongside signature graphic representations of the projects of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects in the book Amplified Urbanism (2017). Wendy is a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles.



Visit Wendy at wendycortiz.tumblr.com or at her website, wendyortiz.com.

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5 stars
68 (38%)
4 stars
58 (33%)
3 stars
30 (17%)
2 stars
12 (6%)
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7 (4%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
Profile Image for Megan O'Hara.
198 reviews62 followers
July 21, 2019
My favorite part of this is the index of all the things she dreamed about, I want to keep a dream journal for this sole purpose but??? I'm lazy and I won't. Very weird and surreal to read a book written basically subconsciously.
Profile Image for Lauren.
Author 6 books42 followers
November 14, 2016
In Excavation, Wendy Ortiz gave us an amazing memoir of sexual awakening, becoming, and reclaiming power. In Hollywood Notebook, she gave us the "behind the scenes" journal entries and ephemera of her conscious mind from the era in which she wrote Excavation. Now with Bruja, we dive even further behind the scenes with a captain's log of her unconscious during that same time. It's a beautiful sequence for her three memoirs. I loved Bruja and I will follow Ortiz's writing anywhere. She is our best ambassador of the underworld.
Profile Image for jenni.
271 reviews39 followers
January 16, 2018
a memoir in formatted vignettes recounting the dreams of womanhood in the western united states: the northwest, the southwest, fabled lovers, real & imagined trysts, marriages, illnesses, murders, births; the sudden apparitions of those from the past and future, the anxieties of the body, the phantasmagoric hallucinations of daily life occurring in the dreamscape. this experiment in fantasy-diary-memoir, its themes and images and characters forever recurring and disappearing, portrays the absolute inaccessibility and magical realism of our dreams.
Profile Image for Kevin Catalano.
Author 12 books89 followers
September 14, 2016
This fantastic "dreamoir" put me into Ortiz's subconscious where I experienced what it was like to bear witness to four years' worth of her dreams. What strange wonders there were to behold; what beautiful truths.
Profile Image for Melissa Grunow.
Author 4 books46 followers
November 28, 2016
Originally published at Coal Hill Review: http://www.coalhillreview.com/book-re...

Wendy C. Ortiz’s Bruja is a collection of dream vignettes that pull us into a moment of life that is often unseen, and even more so, unspoken.

Each dream scene is written in language that is sharp, but not simple, as it shakes us awake to consider the implications of our own dreams. Is there more to life that what we know? What are the possibilities beyond our immediate awareness? Is there potential for hope, even in the darkest moments? When we can stave off the fears of the real world, we can journey to new places within ourselves in the dream world, awakening desire, valiance, and certainty of self.

The word “bruja” means “witch” in Spanish, and this new “dreamoir” is certainly bewitching as it delves into the darkest corners of the mind to investigate what lurks there. People are mostly unnamed and given first initials only to make room for Ortiz’s self to emerge from her unconscious as unaffected archetypes: the sexualized lover, the caring mother, the old crone, and—of course—the bruja who can shapeshift into all of them.

The book ultimately explores who or what is in control and presents a number of dream sequences in which Ortiz’s character is in a position of subordination to another. She’s trapped in a house with grating hosts. She’s escaping dynamite tossed onto the rooftop of her apartment. She’s wishing, longing, for a different place or people who fill in the spaces in her mind.

“After the car went down the side of a short cliff, I said with extra calm in my voice, Do you want me to drive?” … “On the side of the road in the dust, we switched positions. I became the driver.”

There are other moments like this one in which Ortiz maintains a centered and calm persona while confronted with risk and uncertainty. Repeatedly, she is the hero of her own dreams, rescuing children and animals and jumping into the metaphorical driver’s seat to steer the dream, and ultimately one’s life, toward resolution.

Symbols are ever-present in Ortiz’s dreams, some subtle and others obvious. She writes, “The enormous ‘lucky 13’ tattoo on my left forearm was exquisitely detailed. The black was rich, and there were subtle flames and careful shading that made it jump off my skin. Still, I wasn’t certain I wanted to have that on me for life.”

Like all of us, Ortiz’s dream persona questions and doubts decisions and is full of wonderment at what desire and the self will be in the future. The story reads as though it is on loop: there is no beginning and no ending, only a series of isolated moments of existence that simultaneously trap us and shape us into who we will be in our waking lives.
Profile Image for L..
28 reviews
March 26, 2020
Major mixed feelings about this book.

I loved the concept (a "dreamoir", which blurs the line between a dream journal and a memoir) and was there for it 100%.

That said... I did not enjoy reading it at all. I expected to, based on the glowing reviews and endorsements, but I didn't - not even for a minute.

The prose is clipped and objective, and there's no coherent narrative to speak of; either of those things on their own might be compelling, but the product of their blending was boring to the point of being sleep-inducing. It had the vacant appeal of scrolling through a feed of nothing but stock photos, where the scenes are represented accurately enough that you know what's happening and how you're supposed to interpret it, but its impact on you is so brief and devoid of feeling that you just... keep scrolling, because what else is there to do? I flipped the pages; I read them; I finished the book. But I wasn't moved by it or intrigued by it or interested in it beyond the act of finishing it.

"Bruja" is a confusing/misleading title; I feel the same way about the cover art (even though it's awesome). I don't understand their relationship to what I read. This is not intended to be any sort of value judgment about the author's experience (I hate when people write reviews like that about memoirs), but the novelty of this book's concept was failed by its execution and didn't stand up to the hype that compelled me to buy/read it.

As you can see, I'm in the minority with my opinion; I would not discourage you from reading the book. But it wasn't for me. YMMV
Profile Image for Sara Habein.
Author 1 book72 followers
November 1, 2016
How appropriate to finish this book on Halloween (and also its official release date).

This book easily disproves the commonly heard refrain that hearing about other people's dreams is boring. BRUJA is certainly not boring, and is instead a surreal trip through art, anxiety, motherhood, California, and more. I loved it.

Particularly amusing to me were dreams involving cats... My cat dreams are usually hella weird.

Fuller review to come (she says with optimism because I've been slow about review writing this year).
Profile Image for Julene.
Author 14 books60 followers
October 26, 2021
As someone who has recorded my dreams daily at different points in my life, I loved the rich inner landscape Wendy Ortiz shares in "Burja." The title means witch or sorceress. We get an inside journey of a woman's many interconnections, confusions, fears, and that topsy turvy world only dreams provide to us.

There is much here that could be processed, but this is not a book to process, it is a recording, an inside glimpse that is private, yet on display to read. It is brave to air one's dream world publicly with it's many infidelities and terrors.

I would love to see it in context of her life, which would be a much different book and perhaps more satisfying to have some processing and connection to a timeline of waking life. Having just read her memoir "Evacuation" I did find some bleed through. This book is indexed, except for a few of the initials that occur. Like in a memoir, where certain names are changed here she uses initials for that privacy. It's a brave and innovative book.
Profile Image for Loretta.
111 reviews
Read
February 17, 2021
I am often unsatisfied or disappointed with memoirs. This is because I usually can't help but notice, then fixate, on what is missing or left out of the narrative. I find myself constantly trying to peek around the edges of the narrative for what is not there.

Perhaps this is why I enjoyed Bruja so much. In this dreamoir, Ortiz seems to begin by pulling back the edges of "veracity" and "narrative" and gives the reader all that is so frequently left out of memoir. As if in a dream, I was transported and drifted into the passages - deeply moved even as I was simultaneously and paradoxically disoriented. The internal logic then, for me, came from the juxtaposition of the vignettes and what I started calling dream-Wendy's reoccurring interactions with objects, animals, and people.
Profile Image for Ben.
Author 39 books261 followers
Read
March 9, 2021
Ortiz is in the midst of not just inviting us into whatever is evolving about her, but creating a uniquely separate body of work from much of what has preceded it.
Profile Image for Israel Perez.
213 reviews
August 29, 2017
Este libro no lo leí, lo seleccione ya que tengo una meta de lectura en esta pagina. El libro que leí proviene de un autor que todavía no lo a publicado, por favor hacer caso omiso a esta critica u opinión ya que me refiero a otro libro. El libro ODETH El despertar de la bruja, es un libro que es agradable de leer, cargada de aventura, fantasía , misticismo y personajes interesantes. El trama del libro en mi humilde opinión aunque te hace recordar obras previas, ciertas partes están cargadas de originalidad de parte del autor, los personajes secundarios te encariñas y te identificas con ellos, están cargados de personalidad, Mi critica es que la trama la primera mitad esta llena de fuerza personajes y la historia se desarrolla junto con cada personaje que la compone pero luego a la segunda mitad se siente que tiende un poco a perder fuerza y sientes que todo gira alrededor de los protagonistas y por ultimo, ya mencione a los personajes secundarios están cargados de personalidad, mi problema es con el personaje protagonico Odeth ya que me pareció un personaje muy cliché que posee demasiados atributos y perfecciones que hacen de un personaje poco llamativo, carece de imperfecciones que generalmente las imperfecciones le dan cierto sabor a los personajes, tiene las características general de la damisela en apuros tipo Disney pero en un ambiente e historia mas oscura. espero que el Autor logre publicar esta obra y le deseo exitos y agradecido de permitirme leer tu obra y espero que mi opinión te sea útil.
Profile Image for Kandace.
568 reviews7 followers
November 14, 2021
Ortiz's method of writing brings such great questions to the reader, ultimately asking us to consider what is "real" in presenting snippets of dreams in a chronology the reader is left wondering what exactly is the point of all of this, which then points the question back to us. The "Dreamoir" Ortiz describes as "a narrative derived from the most malleable and revelatory details of one's dreams, catalogued in bold detail. A literary adventure through the boundaries of memoir, where the self is viewed from a position anchored into the deepest recesses of the mind" is a dazzling, confusing, surreal space to analyze the self. Which makes for an intriguing read. In sharing what her dreams are she reveals what she's working out in her slumber, sharks, ocean swimming, and killing her mother emerge over and over. A dreamscape I'm glad she shared with us but one I wouldn't want to be experiencing instead of her. Ultimately, I'm fascinated and enthralled with this book. For those looking for a coherent narrative arc, this isn't for you.
Profile Image for Douglas.
633 reviews30 followers
Read
October 9, 2017
Don't judge this book by the cover. Parenthetically, the cover is an excellent piece of art work. The cover hints at a journey into the darkest corners of the dream world, while the book itself is not terrifying in any way.

I liked this a lot. The relaxed telling of somewhat disjointed dreams is quite refreshing and compelling. I've been inspired to start trying to record my own dreams, no matter how banal. And I find I'm stealing her approach and candor.

That said, I don't know how many stars to give it. It's a slim book, without plot. Not sure who would enjoy it, but I certainly did.
Profile Image for Michelle.
76 reviews3 followers
September 15, 2019
I love the way this book moves. The prose carried me along for the first 60 pages (astonishing, considering that I a dreadfully impatient reader for the most part) and then the details began to accumulate stunning emotional significance through repetition - the people, the themes, they resonate deeply even as the essays elide into one another, fold, collapse, jump in a non-linear fashion.

I absolutely love this book.
Profile Image for Joseph Delgado.
Author 3 books4 followers
October 7, 2018
Wendy is my spirit guide after reading this beautiful, astonishing dreamoir hybrid poetry documenta. Fantastic.
Profile Image for Steph.
1,266 reviews19 followers
January 10, 2021
Dream noir brings in animals, old lovers, mothers, attempted murder, drunk fathers, mayhem, dolphins, theater, birthdays, and swimming pools into a meandering and psychedelic structure.
Profile Image for Jane.
Author 5 books11 followers
March 7, 2017
Reading this book put me in a dream state, as though anything weird could happen then disappear.
Profile Image for Emilie.
100 reviews2 followers
August 28, 2023
This is such a cool concept and a really fun read. I love the idea of playing with different forms of memoir. This is one I’d love to try myself, since I keep notes on my more memorable dreams. I would’ve liked a little something more, like notes on what parts were “real”, or a maybe little analysis. For example’s I loved how many vignettes involved cats, but wondered, does the author just have cats, love cats, or is there a deeper symbolism or meaning with the cats? And all the sea creatures coming out of water ~ would love to know more about where that comes from in the (her) subconscious mind. Of course, she doesn’t owe us any further explanation about any of it, and maybe that’s the idea ~ what’s in the dream is just one reality, or a parallel reality, equally real in the realm it takes place in, as the life lived during waking hours. In any event, Bruja is an innovative form of storytelling and I highly recommend it!

Edited to add that I went on to read some other reviews and learned that Wendy C. Ortiz has written two other memoir-inspired books, and am thinking I’ll have to read them too (both got excellent reviews) as it sounds like that’s how I’ll find a cohesive picture. I love this idea even more, a series of books looking at life from different angles, different themes and yes, different realities!
Profile Image for Susan Eubank.
382 reviews15 followers
January 20, 2021
Here are the questions and a little more that we discussed during the Reading the Western Landscape Book Club done through email for the Arboretum Library of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden on Wednesday, April 29, 2019:
2 reviews1 follower
October 16, 2016
This dreamoir is the parallel universe missing from the conscious daytime state found in most memoirs. Here is a place where bears whisper to each other, you can kill your mother as often as you like, and marrying Arnold Schwarzenegger is a possibility. Wendy C. Ortiz’ subconscious bypasses the pain and fear of suppression and seeps into her dreams revealing the truths that drive her. There’s nowhere to hide and the result is required reading.
Profile Image for David.
67 reviews5 followers
December 10, 2016
Behold the dream memoir! An autobiography of the subconscious! A surrealist self-portrait! A diaphanous narrative of sex and love and magick and family! Violent and vulnerable! Beguiling and brave! As beautiful as its cover (by a different Wendy Ortiz!) and twice as enchanting!
Profile Image for Jan Stinchcomb.
Author 22 books33 followers
February 6, 2017
I am grateful to Wendy for developing a new form at a time when we all need to dream and to trust the unconscious. There is so much I could say, but know this: all of life is in this little book.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews

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