The title essay offers an unflinching critique into how whiteness has plundered witchcraft from its Indigenous roots. This is a fiercely intelligent collection of essays on topics of witchcraft, addiction, trauma, and popular culture. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. 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.Ībout the Author: Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. 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. 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. 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.

White Magic is a bracingly original work that enthralled me in a hypnosis on the other side of which I was changed for the better, more likely to trust my own strange intelligence.” -Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood “Elissa Washuta is exactly the writer we need right now: as funny as she is formidable a thinker, as thoughtful as she is inventive-her scrutiny is a fearless tool, every subject whittled to its truest form.

One of The Rumpus’s Most Anticipated Books of 2021

White magic book elissa washuta