Away from home for a week, gently (re)placed in the Pacific Northwest, again.

As I told my workshop participants, I had said yes to facilitating a nonfiction workshop before my mother died. What I didn’t say is that there were moments later when I wondered how I would do, if I might pull out, even as I read through the workshop submissions.

I knew I wanted to see a friend I’ve known since we were fifteen. Her own mother had passed away a couple of years ago. She was the first person I sat and talked with the day I landed in Portland. A crow landed near us as we talked. We stayed on the outdoor patio of the restaurant until they were cleaning up and closing for the day. From there I went back to campus—Reed College—and from that point on, negotiated and maneuvered and dealt with something amorphous, something overwhelming, but kept in check by the power of my lifelong compartmentalization skills. It wasn’t until a few days after I got home that I recognized it as bottled-up anxiety.

I let it loose back in Los Angeles.

While bottling my anxieties that week, though, I did also have beautiful moments. Having brunch with a friend whose father passed—it keeps me moored, talking to these fellow creatures who’ve experienced this kind of loss. Walking into the coolness of a friend’s home, sitting with her, petting her animals, crying with her.

My workshop—I don’t know, man—somehow everything was easy, dynamic, collaborative, joyful, and harmonious. Everyone was writing about grief of all different varieties and strains. We met outside most days, under the trees. The workshop was where I had the least of my anxieties.

On the night of my reading, it was 86 degrees and humid. I wondered if I should scrap what I brought to read—some pages from the transcription project, from my journals when I was 20 years old, lightly edited—and just get one of my books from the bookstore and read from it. I’m glad I didn’t do that. I’m going to try and embody this 20-year-old, I said to the audience, and took off reading. Evergreen refers to a non-traditional college in Olympia, Washington. When I say what sounds like cinematic, know it’s spelled S-I-N-A-M-A-T-I-C.

The beauty of the after-reading, when people come up and tell you what they thought. I had heard laughter in all the right places. Several people mentioned the ending, one calling it “the volta.” Okay. Speaking with one person for a significant amount of time and not caring that others were waiting, because the one I was talking with had also been to the Cobalt Cafe, and she was about two years behind the times I was there. Another person who screamed when we talked, then noted, I’m screaming! We just had too many good connections worth screaming over. One of my workshop participants, who later told me that when they saw me, often, their heart pinged with the knowledge of my grief, who said, I love you, and I easily said, I love you, too.

There were the moments we laughed at how many minutes the readers went over, and the times we bemoaned how treacherous the amphitheater felt for aging bodies with less reliable mobility. There was my secret platonic writer crush, someone who I let into the dorms about three or four times because key cards were lost. My walk over the pedestrian bridge several times a day, learning that I can actually walk two, three, four miles a day, without excruciating pain like before, as long as I take care with speed, and aftercare. Good to know.

There’s a lot more I want to say about the specific anxieties I experienced, but I’m still processing. Some of it, now, is laughable, but that’s only because I’ve been home for a week.

The person in the amazing dress who told me I looked cool, who saw me again the next day and said, I can’t believe I didn’t realize who you were—I told Wendy Ortiz she looked cool! and me, thinking, At my most uncool, she told me I looked cool, and I’m not letting her feel embarrassed about it, she cannot take it back!

There were numerous gifts throughout the week, both subtle and not.

When Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, who I adore, who I got to spend lots of time with during the week (another gift), quoted me in her lecture, of course I had to consider the quote.

I’d been talking about this feeling of not writing. Not a block, but a blank.

The same person who came up to me and said she’d been at the Cobalt, said, after several minutes of us chatting, that she had noticed that in my lecture—and here, I could feel her noticing any subtle shifts because what she was about to say was important, true, and maybe close to critical—that I had been a little hard on myself for not having a ready book after six years of working on one. She used different language, but the note was there. I took the note. She was correct.

Me and the blank. Blankety-blank-blank. Bla. Blanket. Blank.

This week, once I understood that I’d been holding my anxieties in the previous week in order to get through, I released them.

In another startling conversation, this time at home, my partner suggested that I just needed to write another book. Or maybe we would start a press. Lol. Both of us understand the tremendous amount of energy either/both would take. But the words are in the air.

And I’m writing again. Processing the fuck out of the week, and my tired brain, and the grief that is right here with me, always in me, or next to me, for the time being. Maybe always. That’s what I learned about my father’s death twelve years ago.

Right before I left for the workshop, the latest issue of The Missouri Review came out. In it, Erin Vachon wrote a review of all three of my books titled “The Alchemy of Wendy C. Ortiz.” I cried reading it. I’m honored to have been read so closely, with such care.

In other news: those of you who are paid subscribers (yay! thank you!) will notice that I have lowered the cost of the subscription to $5 a month/$50 a year (down from $7/$70). When I started Mommy’s El Camino in the spring of 2023, I wondered if I could make a little bit of side income with my writing. MEC has evolved into a public notebook of sorts, and three years later, I’m not dependent on the side income I was looking for in 2023 to feel less financially precarious. So I decided to lower the price. Meanwhile I’ve been able to continue and expand on my monthly donation of ~$150 a month toward local mutual aid efforts, now with less anxiety.

If you’ve gotten to the bottom of this newsletter, thanks for reading. The two weeks away from the newsletter reminded me, too, of why I continue to write here. Your comments are read and appreciated. If you have any questions, or specific topics you’d like me to write about—let me know. I realize this newsletter has also been a container for grief—the assorted variety—and I hope that if you’re grieving, you feel my presence-warm, inviting— when you find my email in your inbox. ❤️‍🩹

Buy Excavation, Hollywood Notebook, and Bruja from Bookshop.org for a discount, plus support your local independent bookstore at the same time.