These interludes are short, but serve to reassure the reader that Ortiz will somehow or another get out of the affair and move on to the position from which the book is written. Later, she reads news articles about students caught in similar situations by their teachers. Through the skillful use of these interludes, Ortiz is able to satisfy the reader’s most pressing concerns while at the same time heighten the overwhelming tension created by her past.Īs an adult in her late twenties she leads writing workshops for troubled youths, and reflects on the fact that she would never start an affair with any of them. Ortiz the author does not simply abandon her readers to the situation she keeps us by the hand, offering us a mooring in her modern outlook, which is revealed through “Notes” sections set in the mid-2000’s. For an adult reader, Ivers’ actions are sickening, even as we sympathize with teenage Wendy and her need for stability, love, and belonging. What follows it is an affair that lasts into her late teens and that haunts her into adulthood.

“He said he wondered what it would be like to have his face between my legs,” Ortiz writes, “and I crossed my legs hard, trying to imagine what this must mean, flipping mental pages of Cosmopolitan in my head to remember what I had read of oral sex, what it might feel like, and I found myself enjoying the way he growled these desires in my ear.”Īt the time of this conversation, 1986, Ortiz was thirteen and her teacher was twenty-eight. And they do talk about the book, at first, and many other things, related to the reader in a series of blasé paragraphs that only heighten the shock of Ivers’ real aim: sex. After he reads the explicit romance novel Wendy has been drafting, he gives her his phone number and asks her to call him to talk about the book. Ivers, sees her passion for writing and urges her to pursue it. The story begins harmlessly enough Ortiz is a detached teenager from a dysfunctional home whose new English teacher, Mr. This may be the aim of all memoir, but Ortiz’s story and use of craft are both compelling enough to set her work apart. This is the exact task she is about as well, working the fingers of her direct, artful prose into one of the most painful periods of her past in an attempt to understand how it has shaped and impacted her present self. Wendy Ortiz’s memoir Excavation (Future Tense Books, July 2014) is titled after a process not just of digging, but of exposing, laying bare artifacts in a way that allows researchers to study and learn from them.

Wendy c ortiz excavation