White Magic, Elissa Washuta
White Magic, Elissa Washuta
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White Magic
Essays

Author: Elissa Washuta

Narrator: Kyla García

Unabridged: 11 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/18/2021


Synopsis

Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning. In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life—Twin Peaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

About Elissa Washuta

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is coeditor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jenna

Five (or 10) things about White Magic by Elissa Washuta 2/5⭐️ 1. I read this as recommended by a local librarian in response to my love of The Witch of Eye by Kathryn Nuernberger. 2. I didn’t like this and that was confusing. On paper, this book is my perfect match. I spent my whole time reading it t......more

Goodreads review by Rennie

Oh my GOD what did I just read? I actually had to stop reading this and put it aside for a few days because it was so good I didn’t want it to be over too quickly.......more

Goodreads review by Ross

Wow, what a wild ride this book was! It's not what I was expecting, and my opinion of it changed (and improved) over time. I picked up White Magic expecting an itemized appraisal of white cultural appropriation of indigenous practices within the world of magic and spiritualism, which the description......more

Goodreads review by Laura

I wrote about this book in my newsletter: [URL not allowed] I don't think I've ever read an essay collection with this kind of momentum, structural ingenuity, internal force. It's definitely an essay collection. Each piece is brilliant, whole, a gorgeously woven piece of art an......more