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Bruja

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

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 234
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781536878547
  • Genres
  • memoir, poetry, lgbt, feminism, womens, contemporary
  • Release date
  • 2016