Home › Books › White Magic: Essays
White Magic: Essays
by
89/99
Critics' Rating Index
11/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
66/99
Volume of Reviews
44/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists. 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. White witchery, an introduction -- Act I. Ace of cups. The devil. Death. Little lies -- The spirit corridor -- Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death -- Act II. Four of cups. Ten of swords. The tower. White city -- Oregon Trail II for Windows 95/98/ME & Macintosh: challenge the unpredictable frontier -- Centerless universe -- Act III. The magician. The empress. The world. My heartbreak workbook -- The spirit cabinet -- In him we have redemption through his blood
Reviews
"White Magic is divine, incantatory, a riddle, an illusion."
"The book breaks from traditional memoir in intriguing ways, including footnotes that speak directly to readers and an essay that begins by focusing on Twin Peaks and then slowly begins to emulate it ..."
"Washuta's essays refuse the mandate of a tidy resolution ..."
"The most eloquent section highlights her grief moving through a world built on violence toward Native peoples ..."
"Washuta is capable of something more powerful: making sense of hard realities through deep rumination — a sort of magic ..."
"The second book is a biography in which Washuta openly discusses the abusive men in her life, how a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder lead to years on useless pills that didn't help, her identity and heritage as a Cowlitz ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!