Excavating Heart Berries

I have spent a lot of the last 36 hours submerged in the memoir Excavation by Wendy Ortiz. 

I anticipated reading this book for a long time. I read an essay by Ortiz and most recently someone discussing how she does something miraculous with this memoir - Ortiz talks about having an affair with a teacher in his late twenties while she was a teenager, without casting him as a perpetrator or herself as a victim. 

I was intrigued. At first, this was a personal memoir study/feminist theory kind of intrigued. Then the end of June, and the beginning of the Shambhala blowout happened, and I got even more intrigued. So I finally put it on hold and got it from the library. Still, I sat on my loaned copy for three weeks, and finally, up against the due date, I started to read it.

The Possibility of Repair

It's been a hell of a few weeks. There have been incredibly difficult times in the Shambhala community (read all about it here), and just recently, someone posted an article I found related more for me to memoir than to our current situation in Shambhala.

It's here.

In the article, memoirist Wendy C. Ortiz discusses her own memoir, Excavation, as well as numerous novels and her own experience as a psychotherapist. A lot of what she says resonates with my own process of telling about my childhood sexual abuse, and with the complexity of books I have discussed here, such as Zoe Zolbrod's The Telling as well as Claire Dederer's memoir and my discussion of it here in On Victimhood.

Because things are so difficult and full at my end, I am not going to say more than this for now. I am giving myself permission to simply post things I find interesting, without much commentary, and link them to other writing I have done at depth. I look forward to what reading Ortiz's memoir will do in terms of affecting my own telling about abuse, as well as conversations I have with clients I work with in terms of how to tell about their own experiences of abuse.