#CopingWith is CCM’s interview series run by managing editor Joanna C. Valente
Wendy C. Ortiz’s book, “Bruja,” came out on October 31, 2016 from CCM. Of the book, Roxane Gay has said, “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.”
As such, we interviewed her about her book, although instead of asking her boring lit questions, our managing editor Joanna C. Valente asked her about everything else instead, like what her favorite meal and apocalypse plans are.
Here’s what she said:
Describe your favorite meal.
Vegetable samosas, chicken or lamb vindaloo (v. spicy), saag paneer (med. spicy), basmati rice, garlic naan, kheer with a little cinnamon on top.
What music do often you write to, if at all?
It depends on what I’m writing–I’ll listen to whatever music was important to me at the time of the events I’m writing about. Writing about adolescence I rely a lot on 80s music: The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, Love & Rockets, David Bowie, Depeche Mode. Writing about when I first moved back to Los Angeles: Kid A on repeat, X, Neko Case.
How would you describe your gender?
Mildly feral tomboy/femme who cleans up and domesticates well enough.
What are three books that you’ve always identified with?
May I have the rest of my life to think about this, please?
Choose one painting that describes who you are. What is it?
It’s ink and color on paper. Naruto Whirlpool, Awa Province by Utagawa Hiroshige.
Utagawa Hiroshige
Choose a gif that encompasses mornings for you.
What do you imagine the apocalypse is like? How would you want to die?
We’re in it, it’s just moving like the arctic ice melt. If I must succumb to the worst of it, I want to die by my own hand. Cyanide.
If you could only watch three films for the rest of your life, what would they be?
Cabaret
Apocalypse Now<
The Shining
How would you describe your social media persona/role?
Facebook: most outer layer
Twitter: second layer
Instagram: third layer
Tumblr: fourth layer
Snapchat: occasional deepest layer
What’s your favorite animal and why?
Cats for all the cliché reasons: they’re self-sufficient, they don’t give a shit about you, they expect worship, they’re smart, they’re beautiful…but also they are amenable to living with me.
What do you carry with you at all times?
Glow.
Wendy C. Ortiz is a Los Angeles native. She is the author of Excavation: A Memoir (Future Tense Books, 2014), Hollywood Notebook (Writ Large Press, 2015), and the forthcoming dreamoir Bruja (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Oct. 31, 2016).
Her work has been profiled or featured in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Hazlitt, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, Fanzine, and a year-long series appeared at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (ELJ Publications, 2016), & Xenos (2016, Agape Editions). She received her MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM. Some of her writing has appeared in Prelude, The Atlas Review, The Feminist Wire, BUST, Pouch, and elsewhere. She also teaches workshops at Brooklyn Poets.
Janice Lee is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and most recently, The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She is Editor of the #RECURRENT Novel Series at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, Executive Editor of Entropy, and CEO/Founder of POTG Design. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
Tobias Carroll is the author of the short story collection Transitory (
Henry Hoke was a child in the South and an adult in New York and California. He authored The Book of Endless Sleepovers (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and Genevieves(winner of the Subito Press prose contest, forthcoming 2017). Some of his stories appear in The Collagist, PANK, Gigantic and Carve. He co-created and directs Enter>text, a living literary journal.
“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.”
“It’s the skull-fucking you didn’t know you needed.”
“The stories Matthew Simmons tells in The In-Betweens are strange delights. I love the way he writes, between the unexpected and inevitable, the very narrow place where comedy and tragedy both live, and I love the weird little worlds that first appear alien but later open up to reveal the actual ache and joy inside. The In-Betweens is a really fun and meaningful book and I am happy I was alive to read it.”
Lauren Hilger’s debut is a masterful expose of filmic proportions. In each poem is a film beckoning to be viewed, emotional resonance pulling you in for a full embrace. Lady Be Good is a delight and declares Hilger as an important voice in contemporary poetry.
“This is the short story collection as playful dance party among serious things—a remix of pop culture, gay sex and celebrity, ranging from the confectionary to the visionary. A collection of sparks for various fires, from a bold young talent finding his way forward.”
“Espinoza’s debut is a searing interrogation of the world and the self at once. Here, the body is a fixation–as if to look away from it, even briefly, is to risk having it erased. As such, this is a book of unblinking human preservation, and how we trespass ourselves seeking safer spaces. “There is nothing I love more than an honest storm,” Espinoza writes. There Should Be Flowers is a storm to ravage and rearrange us from our crushing certainties. This book doesn’t need a blurb. It simply needs to be read.”
“Ingenious and mysterious, the stories of Tobias Carroll are spun with quiet loneliness and wild surprise. Transitory is that rare kind of collection where each story stands shining alone and, in the end, forms a beautifully melancholic whole. Tobias Carroll is an original and deeply exciting talent.”
“This is a gorgeous slippery novel in the mode of Georges Perec or Magdalena Tulli or Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi or . . . Harold Abramowitz! I read it with a tumbling sort of pleasure by a small body of water as a hummingbird with a purple throat came and went. It, the bird, seemed, in its hovering, to be trying to read Blind Spot over my shoulder. Is that why it kept coming back? One impossibly exquisite thing seeking another?”
“A tale of elusive revelations is rendered through interruptions and undercuts in Ctch’s Able To/Always Will. Like the thin lines of this snakelike text, meaning bares itself undeniably and a breath later, twists and coils back into the basket of the charmer. Every assertion is cast in excruciating doubt. Is it 4 am? Am I able to? What is sacred? What is an act? Whether we know for sure or not, we always will. Knowing while not knowing, that’s the paradox that drives this meditation on dialogue in the digital age.”
“Justin Sirois has some really important things to say, and we need to listen. The Last Book of Baghdad is raw, riveting and revealing. Sirois is a master storyteller with the rare ability to highlight the perspectives of both the oppressed and oppressors. I guarantee that soldiers, policy makers and people who love literature alike will benefit, appreciate and learn from The Last Book of Baghdad.”
“Sara June Woods poems turn love letters into investigations. By treating her subjects with sincere admiration and wonder, she seeks out answers within a transitory world that may never answer: handholding becomes a flood, a burning field becomes a home, a girl stuck on a ferris wheel becomes a thing for birds to fly through. Careful Mountain regards the slivers of the world as not only parts of a whole, but the whole thing itself.”
“And what is the measure of self inside grief? Jordan Okumura’s novel Gaijin is a body song. By weaving stories of loss and myth, Okumura brings an identity to life, half real, half imagined. I was mesmerized from start to finish.”
“Remember to Never Get Better is Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers but on the page, written by an Emily Dickinson if she had been locked out of her house for her whole life instead of locking herself inside of it. I am in love, and I am finally starting to say the word poetry again.”
“Equal parts vulnerable, logical, affirming, and schematic, In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse is a frothing workbook with ‘Floating fractals everywhere.’ Like a vending machine stocked with formal innovation, fabulist imagery, and rigorous self-examination, Zaikowski drops goodies all the way through. This is a must for anyone invested in how a self processes the world–and how the world processes a self.”
“Andrew Miller’s If Only the Names Were Changed is the immensity of self turned into sharp, dangerous literature. The world/mirror inside the author has been dissected and is being offered for consumption, but not without a warning: this is brutal, sad writing that’s been touched by death, drugs, booze, heartache, and enough uncertainty and self doubt to make it as venomous as it is necessary, powerful, and true.”
Gaijin
“Love letters. Love poetry. […] Johannes Göransson’s letters to an ex-lover Ra — as well as the letters in this book to the radiator, history, Susan Sontag, America, poetry itself–come from a poet whose ‘heart [and poetics] belongs to a drive-by shooting.’ Reading them is to be invited into the theater of utterly mixed metaphors where nothing follows.’”
“In the spirit of Donald Barthelme, Dolan Morgan queers the every day and leaves a sinister domestic scene behind.”
“Told almost entirely through lyrical fragments and beautifully-observed scenes, Alexandra Naughton’s American Mary is the latest incarnation of the Great American Novella, at once unsettling and moving.”
“Reading Ashley Farmer’s The Women is like reading a cubist painting. […] Even as she unapologetically documents the power that systemic oppression has over our daily lives, her women emerge as brave, hungry, and resilient. The Women simultaneously made my blood boil and made me feel less alone.”
“Gary Shipley’s conception of reality is more like our actual present reality than our literary culture’s usual inbred narrative realism can afford. […] Literature almost doesn’t deserve this maniac, and thank hell he’s here.
“With pop pastiche, lyrical pirouettes, and sage insights parading as ‘confessions,’ these poems position—like a ballet class at its bar pivoting towards the mirror—the young against the old, the native against the new, and the innocent against the cynical to show them how, together, they more beautifully out of sync.”
